Imagine you watch a video. Multiple angles, timestamped, from bystanders with phones. You see what happens. A confrontation. A shooting. The sequence of events is clear.

Then you read the official statement, and it describes something else entirely. Not a different interpretation of ambiguous footage. A different set of facts. The victim attacked officers, the statement says. The officer was hospitalized with serious injuries. Except you just watched that officer walk away unharmed, holster his weapon, and disappear around a corner.

That evening, the news frames this as “officials and witnesses disagree about what occurred.”

You sit with that for a moment. The video is still on your phone. You can watch it again. You know what you saw.

The Laundering

Modern journalism was built on reasonable assumptions. Sources may be biased, but they operate in good faith. Factual disputes can be resolved through investigation. Presenting multiple perspectives serves the truth.

These norms evolved for a world where disagreements were genuinely ambiguous. Two witnesses with different vantage points. Competing interpretations of complex data. Honest uncertainty about cause and effect. When one party abandons factual constraints entirely, those norms become something else. A vehicle.

When video shows X and an official says Y, responsible journalism should note that the official statement contradicts video evidence. That’s descriptive, not editorial. But the safer path frames it as “perspectives differ” or “accounts conflict,” treating observable reality as one opinion among several. The lie gets washed through the machinery of journalistic balance and comes out the other side looking like a legitimate perspective.

Produce coverage that both sides find acceptable. Pro-administration viewers see what they want. Critics see what they want. Everyone satisfied. That’s product design for a polarized market.

The institutions aren’t built for this. Journalism norms assume sources might spin but aren’t systematically fabricating. Legal frameworks assume officials maintain some relationship to facts. The entire infrastructure of accountability assumes that getting caught in a lie carries costs. When those assumptions break, the institutions keep running the old playbook, because that’s what training and legal counsel and professional norms require.

People inside often see the problem clearly. They know the framing falls short. But changing it means legal exposure, accusations of bias, revoked access, career consequences. Individual incentives point toward the safe path, even when the safe path does the work of the lie.

There’s another standard worth remembering: truthful, not neutral. When one side is lying and the other is pointing at video evidence, treating them as equivalent perspectives doesn’t serve the reader. It serves the liar.

Three Ways to Learn the Same Story

Some people watched the video. Multiple angles, start to finish. They know what happened.

Some people skimmed the coverage. A headline, a cable news summary, maybe a clip. They know something happened.

Some people overheard. A fragment of conversation, a post in a feed, a homepage headline glimpsed while checking email. They know people are arguing.

The distance between the first group and the third is where normalization lives. Not through conspiracy. Through framing choices, word selection, the difference between active and passive voice. The first group saw footage that keeps them up at night. The third group registered another controversy, another thing people are upset about online, and moved on with their day. They experienced different versions of the same event without knowing it.

The people who watched wonder why no one seems to care. The people who overheard wonder why everyone’s so worked up. And the people who skimmed, the largest group, absorbed the message that this is complicated, that there are two sides, that reasonable people disagree. The framing becomes the story. The footage becomes secondary.

The Procedure Game

When something morally indefensible happens on camera, defenders rarely argue that it was good. They change the subject to whether it was allowed.

Was the person fully compliant with commands? Did they have a legal right to be in that exact location? Were the proper warnings issued in the proper sequence? What does subsection 4.3.1 of the use-of-force policy actually say?

The goal is to drag you off moral ground, where the situation is clear, onto procedural ground, where everything becomes technical interpretation. Once you’re arguing about whether some protocol was followed correctly, you’ve already conceded the frame. There’s always a technicality. Always some ambiguity in the footage. Always some reason the victim wasn’t perfectly innocent or perfectly compliant.

You end up debating hand positions, reaction times, whether the seventeenth warning was audible. The basic fact that a person is dead recedes into the background. Mentioning it starts to feel almost impolite.

Watch how officials handle these moments. They rarely defend outcomes. They defend process. Officers “followed their training.” “Internal reviews” are announced. “Ongoing investigations” are referenced. It sounds sober and responsible while saying nothing about whether what happened should have happened.

The honest framing would be simple: a person died, here’s what the video shows, was this justified? But that framing has an obvious answer, which makes it dangerous. So instead: a complex situation unfolded, protocols were in place, perspectives differ, we’re looking into it.

Legal and moral aren’t synonyms. Plenty of monstrous things have been legal. Plenty of decent things have been crimes. When the conversation collapses entirely into “was this permitted,” we abandon the question most people watching the footage actually have: should this have happened?

Everyone Has a Camera Now

There’s a moment in almost every confrontation now. Someone holds up their phone and shouts “I’m recording” or “the whole world is watching.” A warning. A promise of consequences.

We grew up believing cameras changed things. The Rodney King video. Abu Ghraib. Civil rights photographers who documented what couldn’t be denied. Capture it on film and eventually the truth wins out. So we built a world full of cameras. Phones in every pocket. Dashcams. Bodycams. Ring doorbells. Livestreams. You can’t lie about what happened if a hundred people filmed it from different angles.

You can, though.

You can look at footage showing one thing and describe another. You can claim the officer was hospitalized while the video shows him walking away. You can say someone lunged while the video shows them running. You can insist on your version loudly enough, and a significant portion of the country will believe you, or decide the whole thing is too messy to have an opinion about.

Deniability, it turns out, never required an absence of evidence. Only a willingness to deny.

A bystander at one of these scenes shouted “what did you just do?” at the officers. It wasn’t really a question. Everyone there knew what had happened. Everyone saw. The words were aimed at something else. The gap between the act and any possible justification. The impossibility of what had just occurred in broad daylight, on camera, in front of witnesses.

That question hangs over all of this. Not “what happened”—the footage answers that. “What did you just do” in the deeper sense. How did we arrive at a place where this happens, documented from every angle, and the official response is to describe a different event?

We See You

There’s a phrase that keeps appearing in footage from these confrontations. Bystanders shouting “we see you” at officials who’ve done something indefensible. A warning. A reminder that accountability is coming.

But lately it sounds different. Less like a threat. More like a lament.

We see you. We’re recording. We can prove what happened.

When official statements and observable evidence contradict each other often enough, something shifts. People stop concluding “I trust my eyes” and start concluding “who knows what really happened.” Everything becomes contested. Engaging with any of it feels exhausting, and disengagement starts to feel like the only sane response.

A population that can’t agree on what happened yesterday can’t coordinate action about what should happen tomorrow. Shared reality is a prerequisite for collective response. Dissolve the former, and you’ve disabled the latter.

The cameras are everywhere. The evidence is unambiguous. The question we haven’t answered—the one that determines what kind of society we’re becoming—is whether “we see you” still means anything. Whether documentation leads to accountability. Or whether it just means we’ll have a clearer record of what we allowed to happen.