When something like this happens, news channels go into overdrive and everyone wants to break new information first. So the media becomes even more susceptible to poorly-screened or outright false information, and the internet gives every piece of information a trip through the spin machine. Give it a day or two for law enforcement to sort things out, and however much longer before they can safely reveal information that might otherwise hurt their efforts to find those responsible.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
