News Corp’s New York Post made some serious missteps as the Boston story unfolded over the last week. The Huffington Post has an excellent report on this.
The Post said 12 people had died, when only three had; it said a Saudi man was a “suspect” in “custody”, when he wasn’t; and, perhaps most gallingly, it splashed pictures of two young men on its front page even though it admitted it did not know whether they were suspects or not. The men turned out to be completely innocent. One was 17 years old; he told the Associated Press that he was scared to go outside.
It also covers Rupert Murdoch’s lame response. No wonder media barons don’t want tighter controls. They prefer a free press so they can get stories wrong and not be held to account for this.
What is annoying is that if you bring the journos to task about inaccuracies they will say they are accountable, to their editors. In other words, nobody.
Of course, there were no innacurate tweets, and if there had been one, it would have ended up in the Supreme Court, prosecuted by the Government.
Has anyone here ever read a newspaper from the 1870’s ( try googling “trove” for our Australian Newspaper archives) ? I have an article mentioning a family member calling him a “besotted wifebeater” in his obituary !! Could not happen today with lawyers needing to employ themselves so desperately.
Let’s not get too precious. It’s a bit like wrapping kids in antiseptic cotton wool and then wondering why they are allergic to everything.
oh hilarious ! incorrect tweets cause the US stock market to drop billions of dollars in value in a couple of hours !
Fast moving media is not necesarily the harbinger of truth, I like my media slow, like my gourmet food !