Last night was one of the wildest nights of news I can ever recall.
With Boston already on edge in the wake of the bombing of the Boston Marathon, the two suspects fingered by the FBI on Thursday set off on a rampage.
First, news came of the murder of an MIT police officer, which looked like a possible signal that the suspects had been on campus. Not long afterward, it emerged that there had been a 7-Eleven robbery nearby shortly before the shooting. And then reports of dozens of speeding cop cars, gunfire, and explosions in Cambridge and Watertown. The two suspected terrorists had carjacked a Mercedes SUV, kidnapped its driver (letting the victim go, unharmed, after thirty minutes), and led cops on a chase through the Boston suburbs, tossing bombs out the windows—as if in a video game—and shooting at police. At least one officer was hit.
Suspect No. 1, who reportedly had an IED strapped to his chest, is dead. Suspect No. 2 is on the loose, and much of Boston is effectively shut down. There’s what is effectively a daytime curfew in six suburbs, including Watertown and Cambridge, with residents told to not leave their homes and for businesses to remain and the entire Boston mass transit system has been shuttered.
It was and still is a fluid, fast-moving, murky, and deadly news situation.
From everything I saw all night from the West Coast, the press performed admirably. The Boston Globe had reporters on the scene and set up a liveblog to collect their tweets and pictures. It scooped that the suspects being pursued were indeed the marathon bombing suspects.
The local TV news that I watched was measured and responsible, but broke news. WHDH was first to report, well before anyone else, that one of the suspects was dead.
NBC’s Pete Williams led the national reporting with solid, authoritative reports, and the AP got a couple of big scoops, including the name of the suspect at large. The journalist Seth Mnookin, who teaches at MIT, provided vivid reportage from the scene on Twitter. Andrew Kitzenberg, a citizen, had terrific eyewitness reports and photos from his window, where he saw the two suspects, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, exchange gunfire with police and throw an unwieldy bomb at them, with Dzhokhar escaping after driving toward police.
And then there were the keyboard crimefighters at Reddit. At one point a police dispatcher, apparently incorrectly, said that the suspects’ names were Sunil Tripathi, a Brown student who disappeared last month, and Mike Mulugeta. Reddit, still smarting from the backlash to their amateur sleuthing, took a very premature victory lap, as you can see here:
Here’s a sample:
Reddit will soon replace the FBI…
Dang, put the old media to shame!…
This is historic Internet sleuthing. I Facebook linked his page hours before and someone took it off my profile…
Good job Reddit, we caught him!
Maybe next time, guys.
Speaking of getting it wrong, the Wall Street Journal, in the early 1990s, reported it was a a "done deal" that Apple was sold to Sun Microsystems, on the front page. This "breaking news" has never been retracted. In the intervening 20 years, there are very few articles about technology companies reported in the WSJ that aren't rife with obvious and basic fallacies.
It's not just technology either, when it comes to economics you see the same problems-- reporters generally don't know what they are talking about, and report as unimpeachable fact, the opinions of their source, who usually has an axe to grind.
Something tells me you've got an axe to grind here against reddit.
At the end of the day, Reddit is a discussion site, while the FBI pretends is supposed to be an investigative wing....yet when was the last time they actually closed major a case? (I mean one where the person inciting the crime wasn't an FBI agent?) Famous But Incompetent.
Reddit gets some slack, WSJ and FBI, not so much.
#1 Posted by Engineer, CJR on Fri 19 Apr 2013 at 11:23 AM
some of the tv coverage clearly sucked, if I might use that word. when I stumbled across the tv coverage around 2 a.m. friday, there were repeated reports of one suspect being dead and the other being on the run. so who the f was the motionless guy lying in the street, reportedly still alive, with a bunch of cops pointing their guns at him? reruns of the tape showed him over and over and over and over, with virtually no explanation of who he is. i'm STILL trying to figure out that one.
#2 Posted by JTFloore, CJR on Fri 19 Apr 2013 at 12:07 PM
There needs to be a precise federal commission of inquiry into the potential for long-term soft target terror in the United States. At Harvard, for example, a prime potential target.
The commission should run in tandem with intensive testing of practical measures.
Anyone who thinks that Harvard and Columbia could not become targets is delusional.
Mild comments by Bruce Hoffman downplaying the potential should be ignored.
One thing that I find to be infuriating is the incompetence of American education. Harvard and Columbia should lead American universities in getting rid of the SAT and all such tests, instead teaching live curricula for admissions.
Students should be doing honors summer courses in History, Political Science, English, and Cognitive Sciences so they could get admissions credit for them.
But these would not be the traditional shuffling fare. Over four summer schools online or onsite, eight weeks per summer, at the ends of grades 9-12, students would learn from Yale, Columbia, and Georgetown exactly how to build latency. Every day students would pore over The New York Times until they had learned how to remember and how to spot patterns.
No routine shuffling stupidity. That would be quite a shock for some.
There are great books such as "The Black Banners," but they are not being taught intensively over a period of years to younger students so that they will develop powerful orientation to the material.
Therefore, we have the CIA apparently not grasping the potential of its reckless overseas practices. Arbitrary and abusive habits will mean that we will be dealing with blowback for decades, if not centuries. The formula will be soft targets of high symbolic value, terror in the US emerging from inside the US.
The CIA does not take responsibility because of deficiencies in outlook attributable to bad education right up to the level of its own wretched programs for its prospects.
#3 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Fri 19 Apr 2013 at 12:37 PM
If you've ever worked in a real newsroom, you would know you never go with raw scanner traffic; you call the police broadcasting that traffic to confirm what you heard at the assignment desk.
Basic reporting, friends.
Read and learn.
#4 Posted by dirigo, CJR on Mon 22 Apr 2013 at 09:41 AM