The Rough Draft of History

What a shitshow that Boston Marathon was. The actual bombing was of course a tragedy but the media coverage was for the most part just a huge ration of shit.

The worst was the New York Post, which ran a photo of two men carrying backpacks and the suggestive headline “Bag Men” on its front page. These people pictured were not suspects, just two guys at the marathon who were carrying backpacks. The paper will try to cry that the actual article did not identify these men as suspects and that the photo was sort of an illustration of the type of people the authorities were looking for, not the actual people.

This is bullshit. Any decent editor would have immediately flagged the photo for making it look like the Post was calling these uninvolved guys bombing suspects. You can say whatever you want in the fine print but people don’t read that and the effect of a screaming tabloid photo and headline would have been to accuse these guys in an emotionally charged situation. Any newspaper writer or editor understands this. They had to know what they were doing. I would sue them for libel.

CNN embarrassed itself with the false information it disseminated. Honestly, I wasn’t surprised by this. This is from the network that made a JFK assassination-level deal out of a cruise ship covered in poop so its credibility has been shot with me. That’s what happens when you hire the man who destroyed NBC.

You know, I can’t wait til Twitter dies just so I don’t have to look at a hashtag again. I was so frustrated last week when I would click on an article that had a timeline of events and it was just a bunch of Twitter feeds in reverse chronological order. It’s sheer laziness on the part of the writer. Just fucking edit those Twitter feeds into an actual, readable narrative that people can consume. No, it isn’t that hard and yes, that is your job as a member of the media. Twitter is good for some things but you can’t just slap a bunch of tweets together and call it journalism. Put things into full sentences.

That whole Reddit thing of having armchair Internet detectives track down the bombers turned out to be the equivalent of the drunken posse on The Simpsons stumbling around and trying to serve justice. It is beyond me that anyone thought “crowdsourcing” could be effective. People were posting photos of that guy on a roof on Facebook with comments like, “If we draw the FBI’s attention to it, maybe they’ll investigate this guy!!1!” Sure. There were hundreds of FBI and Boston law enforcement officials already hunting down every lead, but what it would really take is the Internet Hardy Boys to crack that case wide open.

It is also beyond me how (if I’m getting this right) some people on Reddit were listening to the police scanner and heard the name of that college kid who went missing awhile back and assumed he must be the culprit. Didn’t try to verify it. Didn’t think that maybe they could have mistaken something garbled on the scanner. Just put the accusation out there and made life a lot worse for the family of a missing kid. Great work, Internet Vigilantes.

A lot of people have been saying that you were better off waiting to get the news on the bombing manhunt the next day after things settled down and I think they were right. I spent Friday fascinated by the manhunt and lockdown of a city and I kept looking for news all day. But it occurred to me later that I didn’t need to know about it in real time. I could see the people in Boston needing instant information since they were directly involved and could have been in harm’s way, so they needed to pay attention to Tweets and such. But I was OK reading the account later, after the rough draft of history got edited more accurately.