The murder of an innocent protester — or perhaps the wrangling of a domestic terrorist. It depends on who you ask.
Following the shooting of Alex Pretti, Trump administration officials claimed that Pretti was an “armed suspect [who] violently resisted” ICE’s attempts to disarm him. The gun, it turns out, was just a phone — a fact only revealed as a result of a widely-shared bystander video.
We live in a time when our access to information has reached unprecedented levels. Yet at the same time, political rhetoric and its ability to misconstrue the truth can blind us from making our own objective judgments.
It’s often only through bystander videos that the truth gets out. In the past decade, nearly every major protest movement has been fueled by videos filmed by normal citizens, often with shaky hands and without professional equipment. In 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier was walking to a nearby grocery store when she witnessed police officers restraining George Floyd. Frazier started recording, and later that day uploaded the video to social media.
Had it not been for that video, the uproar in the wake of Floyd’s killing — and the conviction of Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s murderer — may never have occurred: the initial police report by the Minneapolis Police Department simply described the death as a “medical incident.” As Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota later said “that video, I think many folks know, is maybe the only reason that Derek Chauvin will go to prison.”
As PHS students, we have two important duties when it comes to primary sources.
First, we must acknowledge our own power to act as sources. It might feel as though we, as students, do not have the capacity to catalyze a national protest movement. But for Frazier, it likely seemed that way too. In reality, all it takes is the awareness and courage to press record and share.
Second, when consuming media, it’s imperative that we evaluate sources with a critical lens. In order to combat this rhetoric, we must trust the primary sources that we see — even when everything we hear from politicians flies in the face of what our own eyes tell us. It means staying true to our eyes, allowing interpretations to enhance understanding, not rewrite them. In the age of AI, this obligation has an extra step: sources purporting to be authentic have the potential to be doctored or completely AI-generated. Before wholly believing details from one post or video, we must cross-verify information.
George Orwell’s warning in 1984 — “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” — thus rings true today. The second we stop filming, and stop trusting, primary sources, we become complicit in this command.