Patterico's Pontifications

9/16/2013

Big Media Names Wrong Person As Mass Killer For Umpteenth Time

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:40 pm



Allahpundit has the details, but I think he’s being too nice:

By my count, this makes three times in slightly more than a year where someone in professional media has misidentified a killer publicly. Ben Howe reminded me that Brian Ross didn’t pull his infamous theory about tea partiers after the Aurora shooting out of thin air; he googled for James Holmeses in Colorado and that led him to a tea-party site listing a “Jim Holmes” from Aurora as a member. In the hours after Newtown, CNN reported that it was Ryan Lanza, not his brother Adam, that was the gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary, a mistake that blew up so quickly that Lanza had to pause during his family’s implosion to update his Facebook page to tell the world they had the wrong man. And now, within the past few hours, a double whammy from CBS and NBC:

CBS News and NBC News retracted reports about the identification of the Washington Navy Yard shooter on Monday, just minutes after each network reported that the suspect in question was a Navy chief petty officer named Rollie Chance.

Didn’t the New York Post put a picture of the wrong guys on their front page just after the Boston Marathon bombings? Yes, they did.

So this makes four times Big Media has misidentified a killer publicly in recent months. In fact, it seems far more likely that they will do so than that they won’t.

Thank God for the elevated standards of Big Media!

Open Thread: Navy Yard Shootings

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:59 am



Be skeptical of early reports.


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