A Media Out of Control

Investigators combed through the scene of one of the blast sites on Wednesday morning. (Source: Boston Globe)

If you followed the news reporting on Monday after the bombing on Boylston Street, you would have noticed some very sloppy journalism and wild speculation. While some leeway can be given in times of crisis, the false reports coming out of places like the New York Post and cables news figures's Twitter feeds went well beyond that leeway.

A lot of the reaction was "Oh, well, everyone knows the Post is trash" or "Oh, well most of cable news is garbage anyway." I don't necessarily disagree with either of those sentiments, but at the same time they are news outlets and are looked to in times of information demand (the latter certainly more than the former.)

Today's "reporting" has shown why outlets like the New York Times and the major networks are still the king of clean and polished reports for breaking news. While outlets like CNN and AP and Boston.com were reporting that a suspect was in custody and heading to the courthouse, the Times and the major networks held off on reporting this.

Just for contrast, I'll write what was confirmed, and then in bold what was extracted from that by some irresponsible media outlets:

There is a major breakthrough in the marathon bombing case, as investigators have used Lord & Taylor CCTV to identify a suspect's face in the bombing. Investigators have a face and a name for the marathon bombing suspect and an arrest is imminent. The suspect is in custody and is heading to the Moakley Courthouse in South Boston.

Of course, this led to everyone scrambling to get to the courthouse, amassing outside. Then a bomb threat was relayed to the courthouse, causing a massive evacuation made much more logistically complicated thanks to all of the reporters who were there on false reports of a suspect in custody. It was a microcosm of shoddy journalism complicating legitimate law enforcement activities. A shameful one, at that.

I lump in all of the cable news networks together. If you're a right winger, you watch Fox News. A leftie? MSNBC is where you head. Stuck in an airport? CNN. The one thing all channels have in common is that they are driven by ratings over journalism and are not legitimate sources of good, hard information.

I will take this time to call out the Twitter account @BuzzFeedNews. Tweets like "Police SUV with dark tinted windows just pulled around to the back." or "WCVB: Van back into U.S. Fed. courthouse." are just asinine. Yes, law enforcement vehicles (including tinted SUVs and vans) can be found outside of a federal courthouse, sometimes moving, on any day of the year. To report this as some kind of significant news event is borderline predatory for pageviews and retweets. One thing it cannot be categorized as is news.

A friend of mine made a good point today. Assume that CNN or some other outlet was first in getting the scoop of an arrest. Next week, most people would forget who had it first. But everyone will certainly remember when CNN blasted "SUSPECT ARRESTED" on their website. They'll remember CNN anchors excitedly saying that an arrest has been made in the case. People don't forget that kind of misstep.

So what do we know? Well, for one, CNN learned absolutely nothing from their healthcare misreporting less than a year ago. We learned that for some reason, executives still view CNN as an industry-leader in the breaking news category. We learned that Wolf Blitzer and Jon King should not be on air during breaking news events. Unless you're interested in the relatively mundane traffic patterns outside of the Moakley Courthouse, @BuzzFeedNews probably isn't a good feed to follow. And when someone cites "a source," wait until clearer reports come out, preferable with a named official, before taking something and running with it.

Failed Christmas Day Bombing Prompts Criticism, Calls for Reform

Given the recent failed airline bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Detroit on Christmas Day, a lot of folks have taken the opportunity to politicize this event and attack the Obama administration. Certainly criticism is due to the administration for this incident, but ad hominem attacks on Obama won't solve any problems. Let's get some pesky facts out of the way.

Representative Peter King (R-NY), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, believes that the Obama administration is not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough. He thinks that because Obama wants to try terrorists in criminal courts - as opposed to military tribunals - that he is putting our nation at risk. He thinks that Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano's framing the incident as a "criminal matter" and not an "act of terrorism" is worrying. Yet the response from the Obama administration is on par with that of the Bush administration's response to Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" who tried to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes (hence why you have to go barefoot through security at airports now) on December 22, 2001. This, of course, does not faze King, who adds that Obama "seems almost awkward when he's talking about terrorism."

Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) would like the U.S. to send Abdulmutallab to Guantanamo and treat him as an enemy combatant. King seems to be in line with this thinking, requesting that Abdulmutallab be tried in a military tribunal rather than a criminal court. It's clear why they would want to do this, as the term "enemy combatant," which the Obama administration has stated will no longer be used, is a term that is outside the scope of the Geneva Conventions, which outlines the rights of prisoners of war. Add to this the fact that the term "enemy combatant" is based on skewed Supreme Court decisions (read the ABA's report on the treatment of enemy combatants, which contains a little ditty about Ex Parte Quirin), and you have a recipe for legal disaster.

But it's not just misguided politicians trying to gain political advantage via this failed terrorist act (Hoekstra, after all, invoked the incident in a recent fundraising letter). Take the New York Post. The paper took time off from covering all things Tiger Woods and had a front-page editorial slamming President Obama for not speaking out more forcefully and sooner about the attempted attack while mentioning in passing that he inherited the notoriously lackluster TSA (which is another matter, as the flight did not originate in the States), that it was actually George W. Bush who released two Yemenis from Gitmo suspected of leading the Al-Qaeda offshoot that allegedly sponsored Abdulmutallab, and that the intelligence databases created by the previous administration are of "unwieldy proportions." But other than that, Obama 100% dropped the ball.

Is the Obama administration guilty of mishandling the intelligence gathered on Abdulmutallab? Absolutely. It seems that a lack of communication between intelligence agencies or departments is to blame, and it is dismaying that over eight years after 9/11 this problem still has not been fixed. As far as Obama waiting a few days to speak, media outlets report that he received the information on Tuesday, the day he spoke out on it. I don't mind the president waiting a few days to verify the information (intelligence agencies were still trying to figure out if this was, in fact, sponsored by an Al-Qaeda offshoot) before speaking to the nation. Patience, combined with fact checking, would have prevented the War in Iraq.

And as far as the paranoia surrounding airline security and terrorism in general goes, just remember that the last two attempts to attack this country on our own soil via airliner failed miserably. Reid succeeded in only ruining his shoe and Abdulmutallab now has cajun-style testicles. Should we grow complacent? Absolutely not; the fact remains that there are people out there who want to do harm to this country and will kill innocents to get their message across. However, rules like no bathroom breaks an hour before landing, no iPods throughout the flight, no access to personal belongings during flight time, etc. seems a little overboard. If you want to improve airline security, make sure people don't bring explosives onto planes rather than assume that people can bring them on and adjust the rules accordingly. In any event, Obama has his work cut out for him; multiple problems (airline security, intelligence department communications, intelligence databases) have been identified, now fix them.

Photo - Obama speaks to the nation on Monday about the Christmas Day bombing attempt (Reuters)