Video is not enough anymore. Objectivity is gone. There is only storytelling, and the storytellers rarely work with what’s in front of them. They care more about what’s inside them.
We do whatever is necessary to keep our own beliefs intact.
Two people can watch the same video and pick different villains. It doesn’t matter who is holding the weapon and who is falling down. There is always something to interpret. The slightest shift of an elbow, the corner of the mouth, the twist of a head.
And if nothing in the video will suffice, then something outside the video will certainly do the trick, even something no one else has seen, something that happened weeks before, or something that should have happened right after but didn’t.
And when we can’t find a story line to underscore our own truth-beliefs, well, then we just throw out the video.
There’s no winning this game with evidence. It’s not the videos that are going to change our minds. (We’ll always side with the same actor.)
It’s knowing the heart of someone who could have played the other role.