When we were writing our textbook, Raising Hell: How the Center for Investigative Reporting Gets the Story, my colleague Dan Noyes and I described the hypothesis-driven method of journalism that we and many others practiced.
It's a tricky business, this hypothesis methodology. You've got to have some basic evidence that indicates some sort of pattern plus a suspicion, an instinct, a guess about what you'll find as you keep searching.
But a hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory, which may frustrate true believers who wish reporters would try to substantiate their theories. An example is the JFK assassination. Perhaps no other event inspired more complex yet largely unfounded theories.
How could something like this have happened without a conspiracy? As years passed, even though no credible evidence emerged to substantiate any of the wilder theories, enough provocative details became public to stoke the conspiracy fires and keep them burning.
Oliver Stone exploited this more skillfully than most, imagining how the conspiracy might have unfolded in his movie, “JFK”, which has shaped subsequent generations' views about the event. That he patched in real footage, including the Zapruder footage that is the only known visual evidence of the shooting, made his docudrama feel more realistic than it actually was.
As a result, if you ask people, say, in their 50s or younger today about the assassination, they probably believe it was seen on television as it happened. But that is incorrect: There was no live coverage at all. In fact we never saw any video at all until a decade later, when the Zapruder film of Kennedy's head exploding was finally released to the public.
All of this only complicated the effort of journalists to investigate the assassination. Maintaining the rigor of sticking to the facts for journalists is similar to that for a lawyer, a homicide inspector, or a scientist. All we can do is stay alert and adjust our hypothesis in light of the new evidence as it emerges. We can't afford to get wedded to any one hypothesis until and unless the preponderance of evidence becomes overwhelming.
Otherwise all you end up with are conspiracy theories.
To this day, whether someone besides the gunman was behind the Kennedy murder remains unknown.
I first published this essay a year ago.
LINKS:
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