If you tuned into the news on Wednesday afternoon, you were greeted by a melange of reports, tacit confirmations and total confusion over the police investigation into the Boston bombing. The cacophony started with the always apologizing cable news networks and echoed through the blogosphere leaving social media readers with ringing ears. It was exciting! It was confusing! It was misleading! It was a real clusterfuck.This isn't the first time something like this has happened. In fact, it's happened several times since the bombing itself on Monday, not to mention in countless breaking news stories before it. It'll probably happen again, too, before this story's put to rest. "That's the reality of the media in the age of Twitter," some might say. They might be right, too. But that doesn't mean that we should be content with a future of flimsy facts and careless corrections.As we charge deeper into the jungle of instant news, we realize that this pattern isn't going to change. Fast-moving news events aren't going to slow down, and people aren't going to stop believing too much of what they read on Twitter. With the number of channels ballooning as it gets easier and easier to publish, the mad dash to the scoop isn't going to calm down. And again, people will be wrong. It's up to us to take that for granted.Back to Wednesday afternoon. In case you weren't tuned in to cable news, here's how it went down: First, CNN announced that police had made a "clear identification" of a suspect in the so-far mysterious investigation into the bombing. The Associated Press followed soon thereafter reporting that an arrest was "imminent." (Get those pitchforks ready.) Then Fox News upped the ante the ante and confirmed an "arrest made," and the AP followed suit. (Heck yes, handcuffs.) Boston's finest Scattered reports followed indicating that said arrested suspect might appear in court by the end of the day. (Justice can't be far away!)Then, things started to fall apart. NBC News took a stand amidst the madness and reported half-abashedly that "NO ARREST" had been made. MSNBC reported the same. At this point, it's important to stress the fact that this all panned out in the span of an hour or so. If you were watching Twitter between two and three o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, there's a good chance your eyeballs melted trying to keep up with the contradicting reports. The whole time, the cable news networks—well, Fox News and CNN—stood by their claims that an arrest had been made. At least, they did until Boston Police announced very clearly that no arrest had been made.Let me be very clear: It's really hard to report on a story as fast-moving as big as this. Everybody wants the latest morsel of information, and reporters are fighting for exclusives like piranha on a cow carcass. Meanwhile, law enforcement is necessarily cagey about updating the public, because they want to be triple sure they're releasing correct information and not too much of it, especially in an on-going investigation. So when one reporter gets a tip, it's very tempting to turn it into a fact. This is where things get dicey.I am not an ombudsman or a press critic of any kind, so I don't want to wade too deep into WHAT DOES IT MEAN territory. We've seen this sort of misreporting happen in similar circumstances before, though. Perhaps most disturbing was the time that CNN and NPR reported that Gabrielle Giffords had died after being shot in the head. Not long thereafter, that report was debunked because Giffords had not died, but not before several members of the Giffords family, including her heroic husband Mark Kelly, had been told she had been killed. It was a bad moment for the press.(Let's not even get into the time that both CNN and Fox News reported that the Supreme Court struck down Obamacare when the justices did quite the opposite.)This time around the consequences of misreporting on the investigation are arguably more severe. One hypothetical that's been floating around the web is the idea that the false report could've given the actual bomber some information that could've helped him flee the country or further evade authorities. I'm not sure how realistic that possibility is—it sounds pretty iffy—but few would say that there were positive consequences of half the media getting the story wrong.Here's the thing. Media organizations rush to scoops because scoops win respect and readers (or viewers). Big stories like the hunt for the Boston bombing doesn't have scoops so much as it has scooplets that push the story further a little. But those last for just a little while, because eventually the police make an announcement and everybody's on the same page.This is all to say that the little bit of prestige that an outlet can win by being first to one of these updates doesn't add much value. Being wrong, however, sure does take a lot of value away. How many people are going to rush to CNN and Fox News for the latest, most accurate reporting now that they've been wrong? The little things add up.When it was all over after CNN and friends had issued their corrections, Wolf Blitzer really drove that point home. Standing on a Boston street corner where he'd been reporting all day—sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly—Blitzer said in a monotone, "I'm Wolf Blitzer, in Washington."
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