It's not always so.
During the saga of the police stand-off in Montgomery, with a triple murder suspect supposedly hiding in the attic of a home, the news-gathering agency Reuters (like the AP or UPI) generated a story with this headline:
Police Raided Wrong House in Search for Gunman
In the echo chamber that serves as a news distribution service these days, the story spread like wildfire. A photographer for a Montgomery TV station (no, not where I work) tweeting the headline development into cyberspace.
An actual reading of the story, not even a careful reading, would have shown it was just a case of poor writing:
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (Reuters) - A manhunt for the suspected killer of three men near Auburn University in Alabama led police and federal authorities to raid the wrong house Monday night, an FBI spokesman said on Tuesday.
Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were searching for Desmonte Leonard, 22, the prime suspect in Saturday's shooting in which two former Auburn University football players were killed and a current player was wounded.
Police fired tear-gas cartridges into a house in Leonard's hometown of Montgomery, about 55 miles from Auburn.
The location "turned out not to be correct," FBI spokesman Douglas Astralaga said.
Three men were killed and three were wounded in the shooting at an apartment complex near the Auburn campus. One of wounded remains in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head.
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The problem was the use of the phrase "wrong house" with the word raid. We've all seen that movie...police misread the search warrant or just select a wrong home for a raid. But in this case, they had the correct home...it just turned out the suspect was not in it. That's what the Reuters writer was trying to say.
But the damage had been done. Hundreds of news outlets had run the misleading story, and others, like the TV photographer, had sent it to a few thousand of their closest friends.
The story was nowhere to be found later in the day on the Reuters site, though I didn't see a correction.
[The Monday--*and sometimes Tuesday--Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this website]
Hard to infer that the writer trying to say police had the correct home, when he said they raided the wrong home.
ReplyDeleteI think this was a botched story on the reporter's part - potentially combined with misinformation from the person he was quoting.
Montgomery police chief Keven Murphy said they had the correct house, they just missed the suspect being there. He also said the agent was "misquoted."
Reuters should have issued a correction, IMO.
Yes, but it WAS the "wrong home" in the sense that it was not one in which they would find the suspect. I was giving Reuters the benefit of the doubt. Like describing a woman whose dance moves are flawless as a "loose woman". (-: Maybe English isn't the primary language for the Reuters writers?
ReplyDeleteI don't think that Reuters had a reporter on the scene. If true, where did they the person who wrote the story for Reuters get their information?
ReplyDeleteIf the suspect wasn't in the house, who was coughing and walking around in the attic?
Two things...the Reuters reporter quoted an FBI agent, who said "wrong location"...and Montgomery police say they now believe the suspect WAS in the house, but left before they arrived. The "cough"? They says it may have been the product of a stressful situation...i.e. There was no real cough, just an active imagination.
ReplyDelete