There may be legitimate reasons why police are not forthcoming with further information on the fatal “explosion” that killed a man in a car in front of the Kitchener-Waterloo courthouse on Friday, August 14th, 2020. In an article posted to the Gorski Consulting website on August 15th we questioned the reports that the resulting damage to the vehicle was as a result of a bombing, as per an IED. We noted that the physical evidence did not match what was being reported.
Now various official news agencies are reporting that police have changed their reports and are now indicating that the damage was caused by a fire but that it was deliberately set by the deceased.
This is the unfortunate circumstance that there is no independent investigative agency that can inform the public on this matter outside of what police say. Changes have occurred in the news media such that news organizations are centralized and a vast number of small independent agencies no longer exist. At the same time those few news agencies that exist have limited field personnel whose historical job has been to investigate and report, via news articles, to the public. In many instances news media simply report, word-for-word, from police press releases without conducting further inquiries as to the accuracy of those releases. Thus with respect to the present case, there is no information on the identity of the deceased, why his/her actions led to his/her death, or if indeed the person died via other means than what has been reported. The democratic checks and balances that allow information to come from various sources and prevent the manipulation of reported information is being challenged. Social media cannot replace proper, professional, investigative journalism.