The NBC tweet, saying Williams "confirmed" the shooting as a "domestic situation" a mere 48 minutes after the act, sparked and then drove what became in essence an echo chamber of false confirmation.



Social media aggregators like @breakingnews quickly propelled it further into the mediasphere by retweeting it around the world.



And by the time you got to Patti's tweet with its specificity and lack of any qualification, it seemed like the shooting had been confirmed as a "domestic situation" by two mainstream news operations — one national, one local. And it was reported that way on scores of news sites from New York to London, often citing NBC and WBAL.



Four days after the shooting, an NBC News spokeswoman told me that Williams had moved on to other stories, and she seemed puzzled as to why I wanted to talk to him about that tweet and another from "NBC Nightly News" later in the day of the shooting that said, "Latest: Shooting at mall in Columbia, Maryland was a domestic situation, federal law enforcement official tells NBC News — @PeteWilliamsNBC."



One reason I wanted to talk to Williams is that his name carries considerable authority in such situations, given that he was a star reporter on the Boston bombings for getting several key details right when other reporters like CNN's John King were getting things wrong.



I wanted to talk to him because an NBC News spokeswoman sent me an email the week after the shooting saying, "Pete Williams never publicly reported the Maryland shooting was a domestic situation."



I was interested in how NBC News was parsing "never publicly reported" to make that claim in light of those two tweets with his name in them.