On May 23rd, a now all-too-familiar narrative played out in the United States. Elliot Rodger, the “virgin killer,” engaged in a spree shooting at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He took seven lives including his own, and injured a number of others, as part of a self-declared “day of retribution.”

What differentiates Rodger from other school shooters is a matter of information: a 140 page manifesto describing Rodger’s complex sense of social alienation and bewildering misogyny was placed online, as well as a series of YouTube videos encapsulating his feelings. In addition, Rodger left a digital footprint encompassing a number of web communities, where he had repeatedly blamed feelings of inadequacy on his inability to find a sexual partner. He summarised his feelings in the manifesto: “It was society’s fault for rejecting me. It was women’s fault for refusing to have sex with me.”

In a world where people are desperate for information in the wake of a tragedy — when questions of who and why abound — Rodger posting a manifesto online is almost a welcome break. Unlike Sandy Hook, where the media and assorted armchair psychologists could only speculate based on second hand accounts, Rodger had provided reporters with a veritable treasure trove of information about him that encompassed everything from his birth to the shootings themselves.

However, perhaps because the information landscape is so open in this case, journalists have doubled down on seeking world exclusives, investigating new — and increasingly dubious — avenues. One such reporter was freelancer Emma Foster.

Foster’s work spans The Sun and other media properties, and her (now blank) Twitter profile previously described her as a freelance reporter. It was Foster’s nose for a scoop which lead to her contacting a man by the name of Chris Akin, otherwise known by his online moniker “ghettocandyman.”

What follows is perhaps best described by Akin himself:

“okay so im sitting here wackin it nd i get a message from some freelancer reporter bisch asking questions about elliot, as i have/had a few friends who were troll accounts that were pretending to be him.”

It is unknown if she contacted others connected to those troll accounts, but whether she did or not, Akin responded with an elaborate story about how Elliot Rodger was a bodybuilder addicted to herbal supplements (unproven), how he and Rodger had long Skype conversations (untrue), and how a mutual friend of his had recently died in a freak bodybuilding accident where he lifted a 350kg weight that then crushed his head (catastrophically untrue).

In Foster’s defence, it is easy to see how she might have been fooled. Rodger did indeed have an account on Bodybuilding.com, and it was unpopular, with many of his posts receiving poor marks from the site’s other patrons. Moreover, it’s easy to get carried away in an environment as intimate as Facebook — where you just might have a world exclusive — and Akin even provided some false chatlogs in an effort to make his story more convincing:

But it would be naïve to describe her as a victim. Akin’s story increasingly strayed into the absurd, involving a trip to Russia which Rodger had paid for; the name of Rodger’s deceased friend, Hugh Woatmeigh, is, as others have noted, a homophone of “U WOT MATE” (a tribute page on Facebook exists, but is part of a larger, pre-existing elaborate in-joke); and even if a Facebook R.I.P page is enough to provide evidence of a tragedy, surely a ‘freak’ bodybuilding accident would attract some news coverage — if only an obituary in a local paper?

Equally, 350kg is a massive amount to squat. It’s not world class, by any means, but it is quite far beyond the norm; the realm of YouTube stars and competition powerlifters. More pertinently, Rodger’s manifesto made no mention of bodybuilding, of a trip to Russia, and of a friend’s tragic accident. If this event was as life defining as it was made out to be, why was it absent from his manifesto? Perhaps the 4chan-derived memes such as forever alone could be excused as part of internet discourse — but viewed in aggregate, it is doubtful even junior reporters would consider this a serious lead.

This would simply be a humorous story if Foster did her job correctly and attempted to corroborate her source’s story — the Rodger troll account had other friends, after all, and at least one of Akin’s friends might have been able to confirm him visiting Russia. What differentiates this from a humorous story is that the Mirror instead printed an early right hand page piece based on Akin’s information:

Foster described herself as a reporter for The Mirror in her message to Akin, but as a freelancer, strictly speaking, that’s not true. It would appear that she sold the tip, with the story going to print under the byline of Chris Bucktin, the paper’s U.S. editor and former head of content. Perhaps Foster distilled Akin’s story into something more believable; it’s improbable we’ll ever find out, but The Mirror have since removed the post from their website without fanfare, and Akin confirmed that Foster blocked him on Facebook once word began to spread that this version of Elliot was a total falsification.

Journalism is a strange business, and when emotions run high, reporting on hearsay happens. It’s much more likely when the target of hearsay has passed on, and few are willing to associate themselves with a spree shooter, much less defend them. Discourse surrounding journalism practice today focuses on numerous problems within the field, particularly “churnalism,” where reporters will simply rehash editorial from secondary sources without credit.

So it is, then, that a deluge of similar articles followed The Mirror’s line once word began to spread:

The MailOnline and other sources chipped in with headlines such as “Friend tells how ‘virgin killer’ turned angry after getting addicted to body-building supplement creatine in his quest to attract women.” Interestingly, either whoever wrote or sub-edited the MailOnline piece seems to have noted the absurdity of somebody lifting a 350kg weight, revising the figure down to 250kg. It is also worth noting that Creatine is not exclusively a bodybuilding supplement, although it is a component of many — Creatine occurs naturally in beef and other protein-heavy foods, and is completely harmless.

It would not take a long time for anybody to work out that the story was falsification if they gave it enough thought. But the trouble is that few seemed to, with Akin’s version of events appearing on Wikipedia soon afterwards (citing — you guessed it — the Mirror post that got this all started).

Most websites reporting on this as fact have since removed it, including The Mirror. The newspaper has yet to print a retraction, and it would seem that no other print publication had approached the story from this angle in the time when others were reporting Akin’s allegations online (additionally, the broadsheets have been largely disinterested in the story since it faded as breaking news). Gawker initially ran a story debunking the creatine angle, with writer Hamilton Nolan pointing to the wealth of information surrounding the substance:

Creatine is probably the single most widely used weightlifting supplement, and it is well-studied and considered very safe […] Literally any other drug of choice that Elliot Rodger could have chosen would be a more likely candidate for making him crazy, because creatine does not make you crazy. It does not make you anything, except more physiologically prepared to lift weights should you choose to do so.

Gawker later posted an update confirming Akin was a troll (and were apparently the first news organisation to find out and act on this information in a transparent way), noting how easy it was to turn a lie into worldwide news.

Despite the innate humour in the situation — if only through the lens of the absurdity of all — the entire affair speaks to a few very human realities. As previously stated, spree shootings and wilful killings of any sort evoke an immediate and potent curiosity; as a society, we are driven to know why somebody would do such a thing. This is why the media tries (often preemptively) to turn inanimate objects into folk demons, such as video games, Marilyn Manson CDs, and violent films. One wonders what would have happened if Akin was not a troll, but simply somebody who lacked understanding of what Creatine was; media organisations are much less likely to retract misunderstandings than they are fabrications.

The Mirror and Mail Online — despite the latter’s derision by those on the left — are both fantastic sources of information, and typically serve their audiences exceptionally well. But time constraints on reporting and the rewards that follow giving the public closure to a tragedy mean that accidents happen. It is certainly macabre that anybody would feed a reporter nonsense following a tragedy for little beyond the humour, because there are families and friends of victims who will have received increasingly confused information, but from Akin’s response to the affair, I get the sense that even he didn’t expect the subsequent events to come off quite the way they did.

Anonymous 4chan users, in a thread on /fit/, were calling for Foster to be fired — as a freelancer, it isn’t really possible to lose your job, though one wonders if commissioning editors will view her pitches as highly in future. Remember, this is a woman who wrote multiple front page stories for The Sun. This is likely to be embarrassing for anybody, but to have such negligence revealed at such a point in your career is potentially crippling.

Still, there are lessons to be learned here, for those who aspire to be hacks or who already are. First off, for goodness sake, corroborate your sources. If it stinks, then it’s probably rotten, so use your nose before you pass on information to a publication. Don’t message random people on Facebook when trying to understand a spree shooter, and if you do, don’t ignore the 140 page autobiography sat in your bookmarks folder. A simple ctrl+f would’ve told you that neither Hugh Woatmeigh nor Bodybuilding were really that important to Elliot Rodger, and that no trip to Russia had ever taken place. If you’re not willing to expend the energy hitting a keyboard shortcut, how can you hope to explain the motives behind a spree killing?