It’s Friday night. I’m trying to bang out a couple of stories; one about a stalled train, another about a crack bust at a local motel. Easy stuff. I could write it in my sleep.
Except that at the same time, things were getting wild in Boston. The TV news people were telling me that shots had been fired and that a suspect was believed to be cornered. In a boat, maybe. But maybe not in a boat. The news people were being verrrry careful with their reporting, almost as if they had made a good number of blunders since the crap hit the fan at the Boston Marathon finish line.
Remember that? Seems like a month ago, but it was just last Monday. Other bombs were found along the marathon route! No, wait. No other bombs were found. But there’s a suspect in custody! Whoops! Our bad. No suspect in custody, unless there is, in which case you heard it here first.
Believe me, people. I know all about that bright, burning desire to get news before anyone else. It’s what makes us run like hunted monkeys. It’s what keeps us up all night with our ulcers and our drinking problems. News reporting is a like a Tolkienian quest to get the nuggets that no one else has. Get them first or you can kiss your Bilbo Baggins goodbye.
It’s always been that way and it’s mostly a good thing. Competition makes a journalist dig deeper, try harder, keeping working even when the day is done. Newspaper reporters compete with the local TV news. The big guys compete with other big guys in one giant cage fight with weapons fashioned out of tips and leads and secret sources. It’s CNN versus Fox versus MSNBC and all the big papers thrown into the mix.
And if that isn’t enough to give a newsman migraines, some new players have been thrown into the mix; mainly people like me and you and our brothers and friends. You get the sense that more people followed the Boston bombings through Twitter and sites like Reddit than ever before. You can bet your ass that people like John King and Jenna Lee and Anderson Cooper (who doesn’t look anything like me, so stop saying that) were very much aware of this encroaching news source treading on their turf.
So they worked their sources a little harder, drank a few extra cups of coffee and flung information into the news stream as soon as it came their way. And oh, yes. The result was some reported facts that turned out to be entirely incorrect. There were no additional bombs. There were no suspects in custody.
By Wednesday afternoon, CNN — for so long the world leader in breaking news — had fallen out of favor.
“CNN driving me crazy,” one woman, a career reporter herself, posted on Facebook. “An arrest has been made. Well, maybe not. A suspect has been identified and police might need your help finding him. He might be long gone. A suspect is in custody. There has been no arrest. A suspect has not been identified by name. I don’t believe anything CNN says until it stops using anonymous sources.”
Frankly, I felt bad for the poor, clumsy bums. They’re out there working on two hours of sleep, trying to do what they’ve always done and done well. But how can they compete, when perfectly ordinary people are tuning in to online police scanners and posting what they hear on Twitter and Reddit? Those Reddit people won’t be held to any standards at all. If they post wrong information, oh well. There are no jobs to lose or executive editors to yell at them. Nobody expects them to get everything right because they’re not trained journalists; they’re plumbers and software designers and semi-professional bloggers.
Not so at CNN. It was fairly clear that after the third round of false information, the on-scene personalities got stern lectures from somebody in Atlanta. By the climax of the thing, which felt very much like a scene from “Die Hard VII,” the CNN reporters were being more careful than ever.
“We think we’re seeing police officers, Deb. They’re wearing uniforms and carrying sidearms, and each of them has a patch that says Boston Police on it. At this time, yes, we think they’re police officers but we remind our viewers that it’s very early on in this investigation. Also, we can’t say for sure that the bubbles on top of the police cars are red, but we have several sources who say they are. Red, that is. Although, you didn’t hear that from me”
The poor, baffled bastards. The art of news reporting has changed so much in recent years, it’s hard for any of us to know exactly who we’re competing with. Even in dinky Lewiston, I’ll show up at a stabbing or hit-and-run or yet another goat incident and there will be five people with smartphones posting their photos instantly on Facebook.
“Hey!” I’ll protest. “Cut that out; you’re not a professional. I’m telling.”
But that’s the way it is, in the words of … I don’t know, some legendary news anchor who didn’t have to worry about all this crap. It might have been Walter Cronkite, but don’t hold me to that.
Unless it turns out to be true, in which case you heard it here first.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. That is true, for sure, no lie. He even has a desk and an email address: mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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