Survival Media Agency via AP Fourth Estate I Know the Truth About the Covington Catholic Controversy Tell me how you voted, and I’ll tell you what you think you saw.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

During my long service on the jury of public opinion, the high judges have constantly reminded me that eyewitness testimony can't be trusted. Memory lies, they say. Eyewitnesses are captive to their emotions. Passionate arguments lead them to false conclusions. And so on.

If only we had video of disputed incidents from which to judge impartially, our presurveillance era peers said. Their faith in cinematographic evidence would have been shattered by the brouhaha that followed the uploading to the web of videos of the National Mall incident of Jan. 18. Here we are, four days after the intersection on social media of the Covington Catholic High School students, Native American veteran Nathan Phillips and several Black Hebrew Israelites and there's still no consensus of what happened and who—if anyone—was at fault.


Sides have been picked, of course. Robby Soave of Reason has dug in with the students. “The boys are undoubtedly owed an apology from the numerous people who joined this social media pile-on,” Soave wrote. Meanwhile, Laura Wagner of Deadspin, citing the same documentary evidence, tilted hard against the “shithead MAGA teens” in a piece titled “Don't Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes.” Soave's and Wagner's detailed opinions are representative of the range of hundreds or maybe thousands of divergent takes that have clogged the internet, swamped cable news, and overwhelmed daily newspapers since the incident.

I'm less interested in ascribing fault to any of the brouhaha’s participants than I am in predicting that such furors can be expected in a time when the bounty of info-glut regularly serves up T-bones to feed our newly discovered infinite capacity for dispute. Instead of one Abraham Zapruder returning from Dealey Plaza with a film of John F. Kennedy's assassination and his reel eventually leaking into public view, the new normal for public events will be multiple angles of views from scores or hundreds of smartphones. And instead of reading the opinions of a limited number of writers, we now feast on an uncountable number of interpretations on electronic platforms.

The endless arguments powered by the new info-glut isn't limited to “important” topics like confrontations on the Mall. Two days after the NFL’s NFC championship game between the New Orleans Saints and the Los Angeles Rams, Saints partisans are still rewinding the tape and bellowing that the referees gave their Super Bowl berth to the Rams by not calling pass interference in a late-game collision between Nickell Robey-Coleman and TommyLee Lewis. The play has now been shown hundreds of times on TV and will endure forever on the web. Rams fans countered with "whatabout" charges of their own, shouting that the officiating crew also missed the blatant face mask grab of Rams quarterback Jared Goff by Saints linebacker A.J. Klein. Right now, fans on the web are still quarreling over which team the refs screwed harder, and they’ll be quarreling decades from now, I reckon. Two Saints fans have sued the NFL in state court over the call, demanding that it restart the game or negate the Rams’ victory.

The best predictor of who might defend the Covington Catholic students and who might attack them has a lot in common with who automatically sided with the Saints and who stood up for Rams. It’s human nature to defend your own faction. Like NFL helmets, the MAGA hats worn by many of the Covington Catholic students marked them as villains in some people’s eyes and countrymen to others. This shouldn't be so, of course, but it is. As Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman noted in a Tuesday tweet: “What a MAGA hat means to you or me may not be what it means to them. I don't like Che Guevara t-shirts but I don't assume they tell me everything I know about the wearer.” Likewise, the tendency to identify with an elderly Native American and to think him unimpeachable should be suppressed until the complete evidence is in, but not everybody has the time or the patience for that.

This universal rush to find confirmation of pre-existing views reminds me of the Jon Ronson joke: “Ever since I first learned about confirmation bias I've been seeing it everywhere.”

That such a minor disturbance (go ahead and @ me!) commandeered the news cycle for days, even prompting a David Brooks column in the New York Times, suggests that the controversy is really a proxy for the arguments we have been having since Hillary Clinton faced off against Donald Trump two and half years ago. Rather than extracting political joy from fighting one another directly, today’s factions seem to delight in fighting each other through their stand-ins.

Pick your side, pick a video and come out fighting.

******

There should be a booth review by NFL officials in New York to settle all video-recorded disputes. Send your dispute resolution ideas to [email protected]. My email alerts have sued my Twitter feed over the results of the Chief-Patriots game. My RSS feed wants to do its Microsoft Surface what Bill Belichick did to his.