Denham Hitchcock: we do have some names for you, some names to match those faces that the FBI gave us a little earlier, the first one, his name is Sunil Tripathi...He's been missing now for about three weeks, his family even asking his whereabouts, trying to get some information on where he is. The second man, Mike Mulugeta, no information on him I'm sorry to say, nothing that's come out just yet. — Channel Nine, 6pm News, 19th April, 2013

Welcome to Media Watch, I'm Jonathan Holmes. And that was Nine News's Denham Hitchcock, on the 6pm news the Friday before last, conveying with impressive certainty information about the Boston marathon bombing suspects that turned out to be absolutely wrong.

In Boston, it was 4 in the morning, and Hitchcock, like a host of other reporters, had been trying to follow a chaotic series of events, including the murder of a policeman, for some hours. As the Daily Telegraph's Miranda Devine put it ...

Newspapers such as the Boston Globe and our own Daily Telegraph made sense of the chaos with stories on their websites, confirming facts and correcting misinformation. — Sunday Telegraph, 21st April, 2013

Well, there was certainly plenty of misinformation on social media. For example, at around 5.30 pm Sydney time - 3.30am in Boston - there was this tweet from...Miranda Devine

Reports: Black hat guy=Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta; White hat guy=Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi RT @KallMeKG: BPD scanner identified — Twitter, 19th April, 2013

By 'black hat' and 'white hat', Devine was referring to these pictures of two suspects, released ten hours earlier by the FBI.

But the names she tweeted were wrong. And she wasn't alone. Not by a long way. On his Daily Telegraph blog, Tim Blair was reporting the names...** Media Watch has corrected this statement.

Police scanner identified them as MIT students Mike Mulugeta and Sunil Tipath. Mulugeta (suspect #1 black hat) is dead... — Daily Telegraph Online, 19th April, 2013

...though that post was taken down within hours. So were posts on the Sydney Morning Herald's and The Age's websites...

The Boston Police Department has identified the suspects by name. Suspect one is Mike Mulugeta and suspect two is Sunil Tripathi. — Sydney Morning Herald Online, 19th April, 2013

More embarrassingly, or at least, more visibly, Seven News's Angela Cox used the names on the 6 o'clock news...

Angela Cox: Mark, we now have unconfirmed reports that the men have been identified - 2 young men, one of whom's been missing for the past month. He is Sunil Tripathi, a 22 year old Indian American student who's been missing from his home in Pennsylvania since March 16th. The other is Mike Mulugeta, less is known about him. — Channel Seven, 6pm News, 19th April, 2013

At least she said 'unconfirmed reports'. On Nine, as we've seen, Denham Hitchcock conveyed no such uncertainty. And half an hour later, he was back live on A Current Affair with the news that one of the suspects was dead...

Denham Hitchcock: ... his name is Mike Mulugeta, we don't have much information on him... Now the other man, Sunil Tripathi he is the man who is still on the run at the moment, he is the man that police right throughout these suburbs are searching for. Swat, FBI, local Boston police, everyone. — Channel Nine, A Current Affair, 19th April, 2013

All very dramatic. The next morning - hours after the names of the Tsarnaev brothers had been officially released - readers of The Age's first edition found a picture of Sunil Tripathi on page one...

...reported missing by his family...Sunil is reported to have been named on a police scanner as one of the suspects. — The Saturday Age, 20th April, 2013

In fact, Sunil Tripathi had indeed been missing for a month - and last week, tragically, his body was found floating in the Providence river in Rhode Island. He had nothing whatever to do with the Boston marathon bombings.

As for Mike Mulugeta, he simply doesn't exist.

It's easy to be wise after the event. But there are lessons to be learned from what The Atlantic magazine has called

The anatomy of a misinformation disaster — TheAtlantic.com, 19th April, 2013

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal tracks the start of the confusion to a series of tweets on Thursday evening, Boston time, soon after the FBI had released photos of the suspects...

I'm more than a little freaked out right now about the photos of suspect #2. Looks just like a kid from my area that went missing exactly a month and has yet to be found. — Twitter, 18th April, 2013

Social media sites were soon awash with pictures comparing Suspect no 2 with the missing Brown University student, Sunil Tripathi.

Then, around 10.30pm in Boston, a shootout at the MIT campus in Cambridge left a policeman dead. In the mayhem that followed, at 2.14 am - quarter past four on Friday afternoon , eastern Australian time - a Boston policeman mentioned a name on the police radio network. This is the actual recording...

Last name Mulugeta, M-U-L-U-G-E-T-A, M as in Mike, Mulugeta, — Boston Police Department Radio, 19th April, 2013

The man's first name wasn't mentioned. The policeman was using the standard phonetic alphabet to distinguish M for 'Mike' from N for 'November' in the name Mulugeta. There was no suggestion that the name had anything to do with the gunfight in Cambridge, let alone the marathon bombings.

But everything on the police network was being scanned and transcribed onto unofficial websites. Almost immediately, one person tweeted the name - wrongly...

Just read the name Mike Mulugeta on the scanner. — Twitter, 19th April, 2013

Half an hour later, a man called Greg Hughes sent a crucial tweet, since deleted. This redacted version is all we've been able to find

BPD scanner has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi. — Twitter, 19th April, 2013

Seven minutes after that, @ KallMeKG sent out an identical tweet - that was the one Miranda Devine adapted. So did thousands of others. The magic letters 'BPD' - Boston Police Department - made it sound official. The tide was unstoppable.

Yet it was nonsense. The name Mulugeta, as we've shown, was mentioned on police radio without context. And the name Sunil Tripathi wasn't uttered at all on any police radio network. As Alexis Madrigal writes he couldn't find a mention and...

Multiple groups of people have been crowdsourcing logs of the police scanner chatter and none of them have found a reference to Tripathi, either. It's just not there. — TheAtlantic.com, 19th April, 2013

Someone had heard what they wanted to hear, and social media had gone crazy.

At 4am in Boston, with the names all over the web, Seven and Nine's 6pm bulletins went to air in Eastern Australia. Using the names is perhaps understandable - though Sky News, which was broadcasting all afternoon, didn't do so, nor did the ABC or, so far as we can tell, any American TV network.

What's worse is that neither Angela Cox nor Denham Hitchcock ever corrected their errors on air. Indeed next morning on Weekend Today, Cameron Williams actually said this...

Cameron Williams: ...social media's been getting a lot of it wrong, but Denham Hitchcock is on the spot and he will give us the facts this morning as they stand. — Channel Nine, Weekend Today, 20th April, 2013

So he did - but Hitchcock didn't mention that the 'facts' that he'd relayed the night before were wrong.

By contrast, the social media site Reddit, which helped to fuel the misinformation, has publicly apologised for its role.

And in Australia, Ten's the Project, which also fleetingly mentioned Sunil Tripathi on Friday evening, was back last Monday with a thorough explanation, an apology - and an interview with Sunil Tripathi's sister Sangeeta.

Sangeeta Tripathi: We were mostly just very sad, and very scared. Clearly Sunil's in a fragile state right now, wherever he is, and we were just really worried about him — Channel Ten, The Project, 22nd April, 2013

Alas, it now seems likely that before his name was ever connected to the Boston bombings, Sunil Tripathi had taken his own life.