UPDATE:

I’m still trying to imagine a plausible explanation for the video. I’m no ballistics expert, so I’m firmly in the land of conjecture. But I wonder whether, if the bullet hit the pavement close to Merabet’s head, it might have been possible for bullet fragments to hit him, possibly killing him.

This possibility (assuming it is one) does not invalidate the point of my post. If it was indeed the case, certainly no media outlet has suggested that the guman missed Merabet and that he died from the exploding fragments.

This isn’t meant to raise technical, or gruesome, details of the case. It is to suggest that western journalists do not report fearlessly and independently when they examine events being narrated by official sources. They mostly regurgitate information on trust, because they trust the authorities to be telling the truth. They do the same when the acts of official enemies are being examined – they again turn to official sources on their side. In short, most journalists have no critical distance from the events they are reporting on our behalf.

What interests me about this video is this: As journalists we’re too often loath to examine the available evidence, especially if it questions official sources. We repeat what we are told by the authorities. From the viewing figures, it seems millions of ordinary people are watching this clip and wondering what it shows. If history is any guide, their need for a plausible explanation (and there may, of course, be one) will be ignored. We are treated simply as consumers – passive ones – of news. In that sense, journalism is not accountable to the people it is supposed to serve. It is deferential to power.

That leaves us, ordinary news consumers, in a position of either blindly trusting our own officials too or trying to work things out for ourselves. You would hope that the issues raised by this video get aired by journalists as part of establishing greater trust in our profession and proof of our independence. Instead, I expect it will simply be consigned to the “conspiracy theory” bin.

UPDATE 2:

When I post an update, it is always a sign that I have failed to make my argument clear enough. So a second update is a sign of a double failure.

As I warned from the outset, I knew there would be some readers who would try to silence the issues I’m raising by crying “conspiracy theorist”. This, even though I am not actually positing a conspiracy, or even a theory (well, at least not one about the events shown in the video).

I am not actually suggesting that I know anything positive about what took place outside Charlie Hebdo. Rather, I am suggesting that no one else who has watched the unedited video, apart presumably from a few ballistics experts, does either. That includes the journalists.

The journalists have taken the authorities’ word for it that Merabet was shot in the head, and we in turn are taking the journalists’ word for it. It’s all an act of faith. And it’s the basis of how most news is created and disseminated most of the time. We have to trust that the officials haven’t lied to the journalists, and that the journalists haven’t misled us.

And yet there are no grounds for that trust apart from blind faith that our officials are honest and not self-interested, and that our journalists are competent and independent-minded.

Among the millions of people who watch this video, a significant proportion will be suddenly stripped of that trust. The official narrative does not look right, though, as I concede, it may be. People want answers. And now that the video is going viral, the journalists even have an excuse to raise these questions and possibly find plausible answers by interviewing experts like those trained in ballistics.

And yet what invariably happens in such cases is the authorities and the journalists close ranks. The incident is sealed away, like a body in a morgue, and anyone who tries to open it up again for public inspection is immediately dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.

This refusal to be accountable to the public in even a most basic sense contributes to distrust in official sources (which is healthy) but it also means, denied a convincing official narrative, we become all too ready to accept any analysis (which is unhealthy). If there are lots of explanations of the seemingly inexplicable, we are left clueless about what is true and what is false, what happened and what didn’t. We are without a compass.

The reason I raise this is because as social media makes it faster and easier than ever before to raise questions about news events, one would expect “professional” journalism to respond by engaging with these concerns. Or one would if it was really a public service dedicated to fearlessly examining what really happens. But it precisely isn’t. It is there to create and uphold official narratives for us whether they are true or not. And the choices available to us as news consumers – unless we choose to become critical thinkers – is to remain passive and subdued or cynical and directionless. Both approaches work in the interests of the powerful.

Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism http://www.jonathan-cook.net