Shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve, between 3,000 and 5,000 red-winged blackbirds and European starlings were found dead near the town of Beebe, Ark.
The story catapulted Beebe into the national spotlight as reports of more animal die-offs surfaced, including nearly 100,000 black drum fish in Arkansas and about 500 more red-winged blackbirds near Pointe Coupee Paris in Louisiana.
A slow news week saw dozens of reports of dead animals dropping from the sky or going belly up around the world. A user on the website aggregator Digg created an interactive map documenting the die-offs and invited people to draw their own conclusions about why so many animals were dying.
Theories abounded, from toxic gases seeping from the New Madrid Fault Line to climate change to signs of the coming apocalypse.
While the map provided links to major news sources reporting each event, only a handful of the reports could be characterized as massive die-offs. These reports included “dozens of blackbirds” in Kentucky, “dozens of fish” in Texas and “several manatees” in Florida. Several!
People talk about political bias in the media, but bias toward laziness is often much more damaging.
Reporters are more likely to accidentally slant a story because of their own laziness than they are from their political leanings.
Within hours of a story breaking, storylines are formed, and they grow to dominate the discourse. But political bias usually isn’t the culprit. The underlying cause is confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is basically an individual’s tendency to seek out or interpret new information that reinforces previously held beliefs. We see this phenomenon every day when people on opposing sides of a debate like global warming only seek out information affirming their beliefs.
Confirmation bias is a major problem in our political discourse, but it even extends to apolitical subjects.
In a 24-hour news cycle, journalists are under pressure to find the most attention-grabbing news stories and publish them as quickly as possible. The easiest way to fill space right before a deadline is rehashing a story from another news source or actively searching out a similar one.
The result is a rash of poorly researched conspiracy fodder rushed out to grab people’s attention before the next big story comes along.
Most journalists probably didn’t realize how common these kinds of animal die-offs are. The U.S. Geological Survey actually keeps track of animal die-offs, with nearly 100 occurring in 2010, ranging from less than 10 geese in Kansas to about 10,000 eared grebe birds in Utah.
By nature, people seek connections in everything. We tend to have problems accepting random events like these die-offs as coincidences, especially when the media portray them as so out of the ordinary.
There is no reason to believe the same thing killed the blackbirds and the black fish, but because they happened around the same time nearby, we instantly connect them. In fact, the mystery of the event behind this whole craze was solved two weeks ago, but no one seemed to notice.
According to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, the birds died as a result of a man firing several industrial-grade fireworks near a sleeping flock of blackbirds and starlings, which startled the birds into flight. Local residents reported hearing the birds crash into houses, trees and even the ground in their blind panic.
Personally, I didn’t hear anything about the AGFC’s findings on any major news networks even though they were released just a few days after the event. I guess a logical and mundane explanation just doesn’t draw the same ratings as signs of the apocalypse.
Andrew Shockey is a 20-year-old biological engineering sophomore from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Ashockey.
 
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Contact Andrew Shockey at [email protected]