Yesterday’s events here in New York City certainly provided a few salutary lessons. Mainly: don’t rely on what you hear in the media during an emergency. First, a plane had hit the building. Then, it was “confirmed” as a helicopter. Then, it was back to being a plane again. There were four people dead — two in the plane and two in the building. Then, all four had been in the plane. Then, just two dead — one in the plane, one in the building. The plane belonged to Cory Lidle (this was almost the one fact that never required correction). He was flying it alone — definitely the only person in the plane (the local TV station who provided this information cited the FBI as confirming this). Finally, the plane had two people in it — one flight instructor and Cory Lidle as student. They’d made a distress call. They hadn’t.

One forgets — or at least I do — how much misinformation there was on 9/11, because the ultimate events so vastly outweighed any notion of criticizing how the media reported them. It didn’t matter what piece of misinformation may have been provided at 10 a.m. on such and such a TV network — we all knew well enough what had happened that day, and confusion was to be expected.

The degree to which the media, in the interests of being first with some piece of information, can mess up a far simpler and more self-contained story is instructive, and it’s likewise easy to see how conspiracy theorists can come up with inconsistencies after the fact and piece together a pleasing quilt.

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