How We Get It Wrong

Nearly every news organization in North America, and likely several overseas, tweeted and emailed the news yesterday: A suspect is in custody in the Boston Marathon bombings. 

A few minutes later they tweeted or emailed again that the detail was false.  No one was in custody or even under arrest.  So how does this happen? Easily.

A law enforcement official (police officer) who wasn’t authorized to speak about the case (not known at the time) told a CNN reporter that a suspect was in custody. He was obviously misinformed or misheard something or, possibly, was telling the truth but wasn’t supposed to leak it.  We don’t know yet.  What we do know is, believing the officer’s word to be legit, the CNN reporter went with the story.  Then everyone picked it up, believing that CNN, The Boston Globe and the Associated Press, who all had the details, were credible sources that could be trusted.  Although we independently confirm local stories there is no possible way for us to make a phone call and talk to someone in authority in Boston to confirm something like this.  There has to be  a certain level of trust.  Unfortunately, the higher-ups in the Boston police force disputed the report and everyone had to retract it.

So what are my colleagues to do? (I wasn’t on duty at the time.) All they can do, or I would have done, is to explain that all of these credible news sources believed they had confirmed the story but it has turned out to be false.  This is very different than picking up something from Twitter and just believing it to be true.  All standards were followed.  Are we happy about it? Not at all. Is it what happens when you work with human beings? Absolutely.

Early on in the story Boston Police not only believed there were two bombs at the Marathon that didn’t detonate, they also thought a third bomb had gone off at a library.  The explosion among the books turned out to be a mechanical problem and the third and fourth devices – false.

Think about the chaos for a moment.  When the explosions occurred people abandoned their belongings and ran.  Every backpack, purse, pouch, bag and box had to be checked to make sure it wasn’t a weapon. And there must be hundreds of officers going over thousands of photos and videos that are being turned in. Add to that, the old broken telephone phenomenon on the police department where someone hears a bit of something and draws a conclusion. The cherry on top is the media’s hunger for any little snippet of something new.  Put it all together and you’ve got a recipe for mistakes. Fortunately this one was corrected quickly but it’s still a mistake.  And as I said at the outset, it’s not surprising at all.