A communications professor in Florida is suggesting that the Dec. 14 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., might not have happened as reported by the news media reported — if even at all.
James Tracy, a tenured associate professor of media history at Florida Atlantic University, alleges on his blog and in interviews that "crisis actors" were likely employed by the administration of President Barack Obama to shape a scenario that would redirect policy debate to gun control.
Tracy is known for inciting controversy. He has written theories about alternate events surrounding the Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 terror attacks, and the movie theater shootings in Aurora, Colo.
"As documents relating to the Sandy Hook shooting continue to be assessed and interpreted by independent researchers, there is a growing awareness that the media coverage of the massacre of 26 children and adults was intended primarily for public consumption to further larger political ends," Tracy wrote on his blog, memoryholeblog.com.
“James Tracy does not speak for the university. The website on which his post appeared is not affiliated with FAU in any way," the university’s media director, Lisa Metcalf, told the Florida Sun-Sentinel. The school is part of the state sysem.
Tracy has been employed at FAU for 10 years and teaches a course called "Culture of Conspiracy." Though the school is distancing itself from his conspiratorial comments, Tracy welcomes the skepticism.
"While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place — at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described," the 47-year-old Tracy writes on his website.
In his most recent posts, Tracy has been writing a timeline of events at Sandy Hook and the media coverage surrounding them, insinuating there is missing information.
Tracy says the narrative presented “became an established reality through the news media's pronounced repetition of the lone gunman narrative and meme. This proposed scenario significantly obscured the fact that police encountered and apprehended two additional shooting suspects on the school's grounds within minutes of the crime."