The Death of Andreas Probst and the Conservative Outrage Machine

How to turn human tragedy into grist for the culture wars.

On August 14th, a retired police chief named Andreas Probst was cycling in Las Vegas when he was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver. He appeared to be another casualty of the post-pandemic epidemic of joyriding teenage carjackers, who were arrested shortly afterwards.

The early reporting on the tragedy evolved in step with the police investigation. Initial reporting in the local paper of record, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, started with the fact of the accident, which was updated the next day to note that Probst had been announced as the victim and had been pronounced dead at the hospital. A few days after Probst’s death, the local reporter spoke with Probst’s family and put out a memorial to the man that was initially titled, “Retired police chief killed in bike crash remembered for laugh, love of coffee.” Remember that headline, it will become relevant again.

Seventeen days after the accident, the Las Vegas police announced that the hit-and-run / accidental manslaughter charges had been upgraded to a homicide because they’d found evidence that the crash had been intentional. They did not share with the public the evidence which had led them to do so, merely mentioning “a video of the crash posted on social media.”

Then, on the evening of Friday, September 15th, someone appears to have leaked the damning video to an anonymous Twitter shitposter. It was then quickly posted on Reddit and was picked up by manosphere influencers on Instagram and Twitter on the morning of the 16th. By Saturday evening, right-wing news outlets like the NY Post had picked up the story.

However, wider virality on Twitter late on Saturday night and into Sunday morning only came after the story was reframed. Previous posts had adopted a generic law and order bent, as in “how much longer is this [wanton crime] going to be tolerated?” But the newer framing claimed that the failure of the news media to report on this story was a product of a sinister albeit inchoate mainstream media conspiracy to keep the truth from the public. In particular, conservative Twitter posters were suspicious that the fact that the joyriding teenagers were black and Probst was white was the reason the media had downplayed the severity of the crime.

Now, this was a ludicrous reframing. Remember, the video showing that the teens had targeted Probst was only leaked late on Friday night, a month after Probst’s death. Prior to that video coming out, Probst’s death simply wasn’t a national news story. In a typical year, there are nearly three quarter of a million hit-and-run accidents causing ~2,000 deaths, or about three per day. Only a handful will ever attract more than local news coverage.

Thus, accusing the media of covering up that story sans video is simply ludicrous. Of course, that changes with the release of the video, but it doesn’t take more than a glancing familiarity with how the news cycle works to know that an unsourced, leaked video dropping late on a Friday night is probably not going to result in national news reporting until Monday, at the absolute earliest.

But various Very Online conservative grifters saw the chance to extract political utility from the story. Telling conservative audiences that the “lamestream” media is lying to them has become a sacrament of the New Right. The fact that the video’s release was as much news to journalists as it was to anyone else was admittedly inconvenient but nothing that a little selective screenshotting couldn’t fix.

And so within less than 24 hours of the video leak, various conservative Twitter accounts — I haven’t yet been able to find grifter zero — latched onto a particular news story that they believed demonstrated mainstream media neglect. Yep, it was the Los Angeles Review-Journal’s human interest piece from three days after Probst’s death, “Retired police chief killed in bike crash remembered for laugh, love of coffee.” Below, I’ve highlighted the phrase that many of these accounts circled or otherwise noted.

There are two signs indicating mendacity by whichever account originated the screenshot. (Note: it’s unlikely either Rugg and Emmons are the originators given that neither shared the original uncircled/unhighlighted screenshot.)

• First, there’s the fact that the date of the article was omitted. Remember, when this article was published four days after Probst’s death, the police hadn’t even found — let alone leaked — the damning video. At the time, his death was still being investigated as accidental manslaughter. Calling it a “bike crash” was perfectly reasonable knowing only what the reporter then knew. Heck, in the article, Probst’s family members also appear to have initially thought it was a matter of “reckless drivers” who drive up insurance rates. But by making it appear that the article was more recent, it made the reporting seem grossly callous. It’s not a “bike crash”; it’s MURDER!!!

• Second, there’s the particular way the screenshot cuts off the date. The author’s byline and the date are carried just below the image of Probst. (Indeed, in some displays, the date is above the photo, though those versions didn’t proliferate like the undated version.) There’s no particular reason to clip the screenshot at that point, and it would’ve been normal to include this kind of identifying information. It was apparently done on a computer since the resulting image is too short to be a phone screen capture, which meant that the person drawing the clipping box chose to omit information that could’ve easily been added.

While the Las Vegas Review-Journal updated the headline of the month-old article on Sunday morning — it now reads, “Retired police chief killed in hit-and-run remembered for laugh, love of coffee” — it was too late.

By that time, Elon Musk had already noticed one of the screenshotted tweets, retweeting it with the anti-media framing. “An innocent man was murdered in cold blood while riding his bicycle. The killers joked about it on social media Yet, where is the media outrage? Now you begin to understand the lie.” The screenshot that Musk had retweeted had already been given a community note which succinctly reveals the misleading nature of the screenshot. But that’s spitting in a Twitter tempest when fifty-four million people and counting have seen Musk’s tweet.

It’s worth thinking briefly about how the result of this outrage cycle — a bunch of conservatives convinced of and angry about the mainstream media (yet again) — is a disservice to the family of Andreas Probst. Justice means convicting his killer and preventing similar deaths from happening to others. It means identifying ways that cops can more effectively address the surge of teenage carjackings, since ignoring the problem until they’ve committed a more serious crime is clearly not right. But none of that is good enough for the outrage mongers. They want to divert public anger away from its proper target towards their preferred, more useful villain: the media. They turn Probst into a prop for their culture war.

What can we learn from this incident?

First, it’s another example of how the conservative hot take pipeline operates. It starts with poorly sourced leaks or rumors from obscure online accounts, which are then laundered by lesser right-wing outlets / accounts, before finally being amplified by national outlets / accounts. That’s what happened in 2017 with the death of Democratic National Staffer Seth Rich, which began with poorly sourced internet rumors, was laundered by online right-wing content mills, and then picked up by Fox News (which eventually settled with the family for defamation). It’s similar to what happened with conspiracy theories last year about Paul Pelosi having a sordid love affair with his hammer-wielding attacker.

At this point, smart conservative consumers should take any poorly-sourced, salacious story reported solely by right-wing accounts / outlets with at least as large a grain of salt as they do reporting from the mainstream media. Mood affiliation and confirmation bias are universal problems.

Second, it’s a reminder of how far Twitter has fallen in the last year. Its pre-Musk utility as a site for journalists to exchange and discuss current events has curdled. Musk opened the content moderation jails allowed previously banned white supremacists, anti-semites, and various bad faith grifters to swamp our FYPs. That has created a perfect storm for misinformation like that which erupted this weekend around the tragic death of Andreas Probst.

Indeed, while Twitter was once merely a middleman in the conservative outrage pipeline, with most of the rumors/conspiracy theories starting on reddit / 8kun / etc, today misinformation is as likely to start on Twitter itself. Why lurk in the skuzzy periphery of the internet when Musk has welcomed you back into Twitter’s “public square” (and might even retweet your take himself)?