I can tell you for 100% fact that media outlets are getting it wrong these days more than ever.
As you guys know, I work for a newspaper chain, and our headquarters is in Sierra Vista, AZ. where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is from. The day she was shot a few years ago, it was a madhouse here, and I got called in that morning to keep the web servers running, because the instant load crashed the larger papers out of Tucson and Phoenix.
You all have probably heard that multiple papers in her district reported she had been killed that morning. All of those papers were papers in our group.
NPR reported her death, and shortly thereafter a publisher of another of our papers talked to a police officer at the scene who said she was dead and taken from the scene in a body bag.
Two sources had her dead, one a credible media outlet, and the other a cop on the scene... we went with the story. We sent an SMS alert to cell phones, posted in our website, and were preparing the headlines. Five minutes after sending the alert, we learned she was in surgery and alive.
The rush to get the story out has become a priority in the news business. The internet has made the demand immediate. People want the story now, not in 15 minutes. And as a result, we're getting stories wrong more and more every day.
It's my firm belief we need to back up, and make sure it's right, because credibility is the only thing separating news outlets from bloggers now. We have to take that more seriously. A few more black eyes to our industry might just wake people up too.
