Rieder: Big errors in Navy shooting coverage

Rem Rieder | USA TODAY

How hard is this to learn?

You would think it would be pretty basic: When it comes to naming someone as the person who committed a horrific crime. you wait until it's completely nailed down, no matter how fierce the competitive pressure.

But you'd be wrong.

Once again, in a high-profile tale of horror, we have major news organizations, news organizations that should know better incorrectly naming a suspect, this time in the carnage at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.

This time it was CBS News and NBC News that "scooped" the world with the shooter's ID. And walked it back faster than you could say Richard Jewell.

This just five months after CNN, the Associated Press and Fox News reported breathlessly that there had been an arrest in the Boston Marathon bombing. Trouble is, there hadn't.

But that was nothing compared to the antics of the amateur sleuths on Reddit, who, in the process of playing amateur detective and trying to solve the heinous marathon massacre, targeted a missing Brown University student as the bomber. He totally wasn't. At least in this case, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin had the class to fully apologize for the Redditors' witch hunt.

It's easy to point to the Reddit episode and make fun of all of the misinformation on Twitter. But on Monday, as in many other instances, the miscreants were card-carrying members of the legacy media.

The Boston blunders came a mere four months after the error festival that was the coverage of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Connecticut. In that saga, many news outlets initially and incorrectly identified the shooter as Ryan Lanza rather than Adam Lanza. Well, to be fair, the Lanza part was right. One out of two ain't bad. In this case, the errant networks weren't nearly that close.

Seems to me that while accuracy is always important, it's particularly crucial when you are accusing somebody of truly evil behavior.

The recipes for these debacles is pretty basic. Take one high-profile news story, add a supercompetitve news landscape, then throw in anonymous sources without firsthand information.

If you're looking for perfection, avert your eyes from coverage of rapidly unfolding news events. In fairness, some of the confusion is inevitable (More on this later.) But that's no excuse for fingering the wrong dude.

So how do we break the momentum? There's always the "two source" rule. But that's no panacea. After the Sandy Hook fiasco, Charles Lane of The Washington Post suggested only IDing suspects when the information is on the record. People are a lot less likely to guess if their names are attached. Excellent idea, but don't bet on everyone adopting it anytime soon.

One practice that really needs to go away is reporting directly from the police scanner. It's filled with all kinds of chatter that may or may not be true. It's a starting point. And it was responsible for lots of bad reporting during the Boston bombings. Yet there was WTTG-TV, the Fox affiliate in Washington, D.C., quoting verbatim from the scanner on the Navy Yard carnage. Can't someone get a clue?

In addition to the networks' epic screwup, coverage of the unfolding tragedy was characterized by confusion. How many fatalities were there? How many gunmen? The numbers ricocheted all over the place. But I'd give the media some slack there. It comes with the territory of covering such stories.

The death toll inevitably rises as authorities learn more. As for the number of suspects, the number "three" was was thrown into the fray by Washington, D.C., Police Chief Cathy Lanier. D.C. officials quickly dialed that back to two. The number of shooters remained unclear for quite some time.

As in covering war, some of the fog is a given. But that's hardly an excuse for irresponsible overreaching.