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Last Thursday evening a young, troubled bicyclist from Glenview was hit and killed by a small pickup in the southbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive north of Belmont. The Sun-Times and Tribune posted tentative and frequently revised first reports online, though those are now lost to us, and their ultimate news stories took up only a few lines. But the process by which an online community critiqued those first reports while inundating itself with rumors, conjecture, and first impressions was prodigious and awesome. I thank reader Patty Cronin for pointing me to it.
Beyond the hivelike energy devoted to getting at the truth, I was struck by a number of things, such as by how wildly inaccurate first reports can be and how unwilling most people with views to assert are to let shaky facts stop them, by how scornful people (granted, at a Tribune site) were of early Sun-Times reports that turned out be be about as accurate as anything else, by how determined so many people were to get to the bottom of what happened, and by how heartless and loutish some people will be when they can be heartless and loutish anonymously.
