• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, 9 hours ago

For decades, video has changed how we understand critical moments in public life. From Rodney King to George Floyd, from dashboard cameras to bystander phones, recorded images have often brought clarity where official accounts were murky or missing.

But video on its own does not tell a complete story. It can show the moment when an officer fires, or when a car moves, but it cannot show intent, fear, miscommunication, or context. Courts and investigators have always had to fill those gaps. The camera shows what happened. It does not explain why.

The fatal shooting of Renée Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis is the latest case where video became a starting point rather than a verdict. There are clips from multiple angles. Footage shows Good in her SUV as federal agents approach, conflicting commands from law enforcement, and the seconds leading up to the gunfire. The footage does not show her trying to run over ICE officers, despite federal claims to the contrary. There are still unresolved questions about context and motive, but the basic visual record contradicts key political assertions.

That did not stop political leaders in Washington from declaring what happened and why. Within hours of the shooting, before any independent timeline had been released, President Trump posted on Truth Social that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” and that the agent “seems to have shot her in self defense.”

The videos available to the public do not show an ICE agent being run over. News organizations that reviewed the footage reported no evidence of a collision. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem then described Good’s actions as “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President J. D. Vance went further, saying Good was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation, and calling her death “a tragedy of her own making” and “a tragedy of the far left.”

This reaction did more than frame an event. It tried to define reality before reality could be independently established. Investigators did not have time to release findings. Journalists did not have time to review footage and compare it to the administration's claims. Yet millions of people heard a finished story, wrapped in moral language, and delivered with absolute certainty.

This is the first structural point we need to understand: Video no longer anchors reality on its own. It shows a piece of the world, but the meaning of that piece has become the real battlefield.

The second point is that political power moves faster than journalism or law. In the modern media ecosystem, speed is not simply a communications tactic. It is a way to seize narrative territory. The first story that reaches the public is often the one that sticks, especially when it comes from someone with a loyal following and no obligation to revise or correct.

This creates a third problem. We now have parallel information systems that interpret the same images differently. In one system, newsrooms slow down to verify. They compare videos, interview witnesses, wait for documents, and assemble a record.

In the other system, political figures and partisan outlets rush to present video clips through the lens of ideology and demand that followers treat those interpretations as truth. 

These two systems no longer intersect. They barely acknowledge each other. They are not arguing over facts. They are building incompatible realities.

The fourth point follows directly from that structure. Public perception hardens before facts exist. By the time independent investigators release a timeline, it will not matter. For many people, the case will already be closed. They saw a clip, heard a politician tell them what it meant, and absorbed a version of the story that feels moral and final. This is how belief outruns evidence. This is how shared reality dissolves.

All of this has a cost. It breeds exhaustion. After the Minneapolis shooting, sportscaster Jon Alba wrote that it was impossible to focus on work and described a “constant, lingering sense of dread.” Writer Garrett Graff called it “the physical weight of Trumpism,” a phrase aimed at the psychological toll of trying to make sense of events that move faster than any institution can explain them.

Some viewers of this era find it exhilarating. Many others find it destabilizing.

The difference between those reactions is not just emotional. It points to the fifth and final point: We are no longer just dealing with media literacy problems. We are dealing with psychological operations that treat information as a weapon.

This is where Brian Stelter’s recent commentary becomes useful. On CNN, Stelter has argued that we have crossed a threshold where the question is not what the video shows, but how belief shapes the interpretation of video.

The old saying that seeing is believing does not describe the current moment. Stelter puts it in reverse. Today, what you believe is what you will see. If followers have already been told who the heroes are and who the villains are, the footage becomes evidence for whatever story they already carry in their heads.

News was once described as the first draft of history. That implied a shared baseline of reality that could be revised and corrected as facts emerged. If the Minneapolis shooting is any indication, that idea is slipping away.

When we cannot agree on what happened in daylight, with multiple cameras recording, then we are not writing the first draft of history anymore. We are living inside competing stories.