"Only the moon is watching us."
Like the balloons in February, the mysterious plane over Northern Virginia captivated the D.C. area on Sunday.
This week’s soundtrack: Holy Fawn - “Glóandi”
On Sunday, the D.C. area saw the real-time confusion that a scary thing can produce and the lack of information that can come with it. This is usually fairly evident in major unplanned news events; the Jan. 6 insurrection ended up being misreported throughout that day. Sunday’s noise and plane situation, however, was slightly different in that it was not a slow-moving, all-day event and that social media truly filled the void when traditional media did not.
It all started around 3:00 pm on Sunday when a very loud sound was heard in D.C., Northern Virginia and Maryland, with some saying they felt the vibrations of it. Twitter, Nextdoor and other realtime social media networks were full of people asking “what was that?” with speculation ranging from an earthquake to aliens to a sonic boom from a plane.
Last night, the story was actually reported out. A small Cessna plane had gone off-course, it flew too close to the restricted air space around D.C. and a military aircraft was authorized to fly at supersonic speeds (hence the sonic boom). The Cessna, tragically, crashed into a mountain soon thereafter, leaving four dead. The NTSB is investigating.
But in the immediate time after the sonic boom was heard, the citizen journalists of message boards, Twitter and similar online environments filled in the spaces that the legacy media was not able to fill. This, of course, is the promise of the Internet: Anyone with actual expertise can bring forward information. It is also the danger of the Internet: Anyone with fake expertise can tell you the “real story” by bringing their own (wrong) information. In this case, it seems to have worked out, but it always reminds us why people need to be careful in who and what they trust when they get information in these situations.
On Sunday, it was the airspace-obsessed Twitter people (a lot of the information they use is publicly available) who were on the story first. They had more reliable information that legacy media like the Daily Mail, which posted a story that consisted of five sentences, mostly aggregated from Twitter. The headline gave more information than the story did (the story has since been updated with all the news that has been released around the situation).
To get a little inside baseball here, I’ll go out on a limb and try and suggest that the Daily Mail did this for two reasons: to be first and to get traffic. The first is sorta journalistic, but it feeds into the second in that being first is both a competitive advantage in journalism (it’s also kinda bragging rights-y). But, the second is the unfortunate reality of the news business that begets clickbait headlines, stirring anger and reporting on things reporters don’t always understand. In this case, there was no information to be given, but sometimes editors are tasked with looking at a topic trending on Twitter or Google Trends and let that particular tail wag the dog. I think – with no inside knowledge of the Daily Mail’s editorial process – that’s what happened here.
Lulu Update
A note on the sonic boom: It did not affect Lulu – who barks at rain hitting the window and goes crazy at fireworks – and I was wearing noise-canceling headphones at the time of the boom, so we did not hear it. Needless to say, my own experience with it “huh” when I started getting group text messages about it rather than freaking out.
A Recommendation: Ted Lasso. But Not Really.
A lot of the unemployment experience – a lot of life, actually – involves waiting for people to get back to you. The past week gave me a minor opportunity to catch up on some television shows that people had recommended to me, including the treacly Ted Lasso. I like the show fine, as it was the perfect pandemic show during the early lockdowns, though I have a general annoyance with overly sunny comedies about nice people who are nice to one another or whatever. I respect the want to tell a story in a fairly short timespan and not – like too many American comedies – go on forever and keep making money. And more than anything, I wanted something that I turn my brain off and watch. Ted Lasso is many things, but complicated… it is not.
I’m glad I finished the show, most of the characters remain fairly charming and the cheap tricks – music cues, mostly – definitely got me, but this was not the best TV I’ve ever seen. This season was lousy with West Wing-esque sincere speechifying, cheesey telegraphed plot devices and a resolution that felt somewhat cobbled together. Like with Scrubs, I’m glad I went the distance, but I think my life has just progressed past Ted Lasso.