The Newsroom 3.1: Media on Media

I could've lived without a show about the Boston bombings, but if it was to be done, the best way to do it would be The Newsroom, which told the story of the Boston bombings tonight with all of the brilliance and trimmings we've come to expect of this remarkable show.   A good way indeed to start off its final season, sad as that fact is and tragic as the Boston bombings are.

As always, the media are the story on The Newsroom, and, in particular, the way not only The Newsroom crew but other media covered the Boston bombings.    The Newsroom people are understandably wary of going with any story or information too soon, given the burning they received with the Genoa story last season.   But not so other media - traditional and social.

John King on CNN, in reality and on this episode, wrongly reported that the FBI had a suspect.   King was and is a well-respected journalist, so The Newsroom was tempted to go along with his report, but wisely holds back.

Far more egregious is what Reddit did in reality.   They crowd-sourced an attempt to identify the bombers, and came up badly wrong.   The suspect they thought they ID'd - a Brown University student - was in reality a poor soul who hurt no one except himself.   After Reddit put his family through the anguish of an incorrect identification as one of the bombers, the family suffered further anguish when it was discovered that the student was missing because he had taken his own life.   Will was right to lash out at citizen journalism in this case.

Meanwhile, as always, The Newsroom has other stories percolating and ready to boil.   Neil, for noble reasons, may be guilty of abetting espionage.   And it seems that the whole network may be vulnerable to a hostile financial takeover.

The Newsroom has just started - as Will also says near the end - and, knowing that this will be the last season it starts, I miss it already.


analysis of the first two seasons


See also The Newsroom Season 2 Debuts on Occupy Wall Street and More ... and (about Trayvon Martin) If Only There Was a Video Recording ... The Newsroom 2.2: The Power of Video ... The Newsroom 2.7: Autopsy of a Bad Decision ... The Newsroom 2.8: The Course of True Love ... The Newsroom Season 2 Finale: Love, Triumph, and Wikipedia

And see also The Newsroom and McLuhan ... The Newsroom and The Hour ...The Newsroom Season 1 Finale: The Lost Voice Mail



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Why the Rolling Stone cover with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is Helpful

I was briefly on WCBS-TV Channel 2 news this evening, talking about why I thought the Rolling Stone cover with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was helpful.   Actually, I was interviewed for about 10 minutes, but as often happens with television, only a few words made it into the newscast, which you can see below.   Here's the gist of the rest of what I had to say -

We live in a world, unfortunately, in which human monsters come in many forms.   I say unfortunately, because sometimes the person next door, who looks like us, may be a monster.   This means that we may be especially unlikely to see the monster coming - and to avoid the awful harm that ensues.

The Rolling Stone cover - in addition to its well-researched, thoughtful article - makes this point very well.   The MySpace photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shows what looks for all the world like what a kid his age wants to look like - try to look cool, trying to impress girls.   Blowing up innocent people at the Boston Marathon looks like it would be the last thing on his mind.  But that's what he apparently did, and that's why it's so important to call attention to this seeming disconnect between attractive image and deadly deed.

It's not as if magazines never put photos of terrible people on their covers.   Adolf Hitler was Time magazine's "Man of the Year" in 1938, followed in 1939 by Joseph Stalin.   Time put them there not because they were good or remotely admirable.  Time put them there because of the bad impact they were already having on their countries and the world.

The notion that Rolling Stone was trying to glorify Tsarnaev is about as logical as Time magazine was trying to glorify Hitler.   Rather, in both cases, the magazines were doing their job: bringing details of monsters to us, so we could better understand them, so we could perhaps recognize what they are in the future, before they commit their atrocities.

Evaluating Traditional and Social Media in Boston Bombing Reporting

I was interviewed this morning on KNX1070 Radio and earlier in the week by AP and USA Today and college radio stations about the media coverage - including errors - of the Boston bombings and the hunt for suspects, and thought I'd share what I said in the interviews here.

First, we need to distinguish between traditional mass media and social media (or what I call new new media) and the intersecting ways in which they covered the story.

The big flub in traditional media was the reporting on Wednesday by CNN and other outlets that the two suspects had been arrested.  This turned out to be false.  And since some news operations - such as MSNBC - refrained from reporting this, CNN and the others came in for much criticism.

At least three points, however, need to be kept in mind regarding what happened with the traditional media.

One, the media are always caught between the conflicting goals of getting the news out as quickly as possible and making sure the news reported is accurate.  The public wants both, and is entitled to both.  Further, people in times of crisis do better with more information - being kept in the dark, or feeling you don't know what's going on in life-and-death situations, is a prescription for high anxiety and jumping to all kinds of wrong conclusions.

The second is that John King on CNN who first went public with the wrong information that arrests were made obviously didn't just make this up.  He reported what he had been told by law enforcement.  So, the blame for this incorrect reporting resides at least as much as with law enforcement, which gave King the erroneous information.

And third, and most important, the incorrect reporting in no way impeded the bringing of the two brothers to justice.  

How did social media do in the past week?

The big error occurred on Reddit, and its crowd-sourced identification, based on the photos of the suspects, of two people as the bombers who in fact had nothing to do with the bombing.  This error was compounded by the unfortunate fact that one of the two people wrongly identified was a student missing from Brown University, whose family was already worried about him.   And the error was technologically compounded by its dissemination on Twitter.

On the other hand, crowd-sourcing was crucial in bringing the real bombers to justice, as the public responded with their own photos after the FBI's somewhat blurry photos released on Thursday.   The ubiquity of cameras in phones is making it increasingly impossible for criminals who strike in public to remain anonymous.

So social media, like traditional media, get less than perfect grades for their performance in the past week.  But, on the whole, both helped far more than they hurt.  Traditional media did for the most part keep the public accurately informed during this crucial time, and social media crowd-sourcing played a crucial role in apprehending the suspects.

And regarding the wrong information, we were made aware once again of a truth about all reporting, traditional as well as social media, that we should always keep in mind:  don't believe everything you see and hear from any journalist, whether professional or citizen, whether on CNN or MSNBC or Reddit or Wikipedia.   Take everything with a grain of salt.   Don't accept it as truth unless and until it is confirmed by all sources.   In that way, a wrong report's damage can be limited, and we can reap the benefits of being the best informed people in history, as did this past week with the reporting from Boston.