A report thrown together Tuesday for the Fox 10 O'clock News in New York, for instance, angled toward Goths, the black-clad subculture that the attackers apparently emulated. It called the Goth scene "a cult on the Web." Charitably -- in a city that has survived numerous Anne Rice book signings without notable mayhem -- the reporter did note that "not all of them are violent toward others." Signing off from the newsroom, the reporter posed in front of a computer monitor showing an actual Goth Web page, glowing blue and lurid on the dimmed set. The NBC affiliate, meanwhile, was parsing over the contents of -- brace yourself -- a Web page reportedly maintained by one of the suspects: a drawing of a "demonic figure" and a man mowing down people with a gun. (This after actually admitting that it had asked the NYPD, "Is there any evidence of this gang -- this 'Trench Coat Mafia' -- at New York City schools?")

Was the Web page image a telling detail? Sure it was -- precisely as telling as it would have been had it been drawn on, say, a piece of notebook paper (in fact, it looked like just that, scanned into an image file). Which is to say, sort of, after the fact, and not particularly at all, before the fact. The tone of these pieces made the familiar message clear: not just the drawings but the medium that delivered them were evidence of sickness, and -- of course! of course! -- it only made sense that these killers hung out on the Internet, where crazy people come from.

There are all sorts of Net dangers worth checking out here, not for unsuspecting youth, but for doe-eyed, credulous journalists. Tuesday, cable news and the networks (as well as Matt Drudge) were repeating as gospel a report that the shooters had posted warnings on America Online (where a suspect had had a Web site). By the next morning, AOL confirmed that the various messages were hoaxes, noting with dry understatement that "such hoaxes are not uncommon after a big news event." Naturally, this sort of incident gets spun against the Internet, Den of Falsehood, but in fact it shows the inherent prejudice, increasingly silly as time wears on, that anyone not using the Internet to buy sweaters or make millions with a harebrained e-commerce strategy is a potential nut job.

Of course, on Tuesday this was arguably just another part of an overheated news rush. (There were three suspects, or maybe two. The shooters were targeting jocks and minorities, or maybe they weren't.) But the insinuations were just getting started. "They designed Web pages," accused a Denver Post columnist on MSNBC Wednesday morning. On CNN, a social scientist warned against letting "boys on the Internet at any time" because of their natural aggression; an anchor pressed a Columbine student, "Did they have their own Web site?"

By Wednesday afternoon, Columbine students were futilely asking reporters to stop overblowing the "Trench Coat Mafia" connection, which irresponsibly tarred a group of students who, with two exceptions, had evidently not killed anyone. Meanwhile, criminologist Casey Jordan told MSNBC anchor David Gregory, "The key to this case is the Internet ... They were in chat rooms; they had Web pages. And on the Internet," she warned, "the possibility for recruiting is just unknown."

Next page | The trench coat: Dread symbol of universal evil