Journalists are Creating MH17 Conspiracies Because Conspiracy Theorists are Too Slow

The Russian Times proposed MH17 was shot down by someone trying to destroy the plane of Russian President Vladimir Putin. They then refuted that theory.

If you try hard enough, you can imagine a time when news was something people pondered, something they took their time with. It might cause you to think of a breakfast table and a newspaper, and a wife and her husband debating an international dilemma. Or perhaps you picture journalists huddled in the newsroom, heatedly debating the best way to convey a story to their readers.

Did such a time ever exist? Probably not. Regardless, where we are now is the polar opposite of that.

These days it can feel like the news cycle has outpaced thought. Debate happens between editors and journalists in rapid-fire IM exchanges. And each news team is racing to be heard over the international cacophony generated by other news teams—they tweet new angles about breaking stories as fast as optical fibre can carry them. And connections are made that perhaps wouldn’t have gained traction if there had been more time to contemplate.

Earlier this year a plane, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, disappeared. It was strange and disturbing, and the lack of evidence led many to speculate. Conspiracy theories were enticing (they always are in such circumstances) because they offered reasons for the disaster. It takes the fear out of a mystery and replaces it with thrills if we can make ourselves believe that someone, somewhere, knows the truth.

Many news sites covered the conspiracy theory angle of MH370, and most had a tone of scepticism and playfulness. Yesterday, another plane, MH17—also a Malaysian Airlines aircraft—crashed in the conflict zone of the Donbass insurgency in Ukraine. It’s not surprising that several news sites would look for a similar angle, and adopt a similar tone.

At least one Australian news-site made the connection explicit. “Horrible coincidence or something more…” the article begins. This hint at a conspiracy was as fast as the conspiracy theorists themselves. Ukrainian air traffic control reported losing contact with the flight less than a day before this article went online. At that point many popular conspiracy theory sites were still processing the news. At around the same time the article went up a contributor at abovetopsecret.com said, “Let the speculations begin.”

Hinting at conspiracy is one thing. Elsewhere journalists have beaten conspiracy theorists to the punch entirely; they’ve started to thread eerie coincidences together. “There are so many 17s and 7s: Flight MH17, a Boeing 777, first flew on 7-17-97 and crashed 17 years later, on 7-17-14.” We are told that this “will no doubt attract the attention of numerologists and conspiracy theorists”. In case you missed it, that’s an article that’s so quick it’s reporting on theories that haven’t been theorised.

The Russian Times went so far as to propose the theory that MH17 was mistakenly shot down by someone trying to destroy the plane of Russian President Vladimir Putin. They then very quickly refuted that same theory.

Rather than making theories, a different news-site went to conspiracy webpages and scoured the comment sections looking for content. The comments section, the same place trolls go to accuse each other of being Nazis. They also scolded those commenters. "It seems no tragedy or act of mass violence can go without a litany of Internet tinfoil-types flapping their yaps".

These are the times we live in, a heavily populated period of human history with absurdly speedy communication systems. There are so many news outlets in competition with each other that in the wake of a tragedy every single angle of the tragedy is explored. This isn’t a condemnation of our era, just a statement of wonder. This very article is an attempt to find yet another angle—this is an angle on the angles. If someone does an article about this article then that’s just the way things are now.

At the heart of this pattern, and all of words being cranked out on laptops around the world, is a feeling of loss and fragility. Something awful and unexpected, something overwhelming has happened. MH17 and the 298 people it had on board are all gone. Suddenly life feels precarious.

In moments like these it’s human to look for answers; it’s also human to look for distractions. With a news cycle as quick as ours there are a very great many attempts at both, and we receive them constantly.

Follow Girard on Twitter: @GirardDorney