News veterans say such errors used to be met with more than a shrug. Media shrug at Boston blunders

The inaccurate report by CNN and other news organizations about an arrest in the Boston bombing case was arguably one of the most flagrant errors on a story of major national consequence in years.

When the news organizations later corrected their mistakes, there seemed to be something missing — any big shows of contrition, or even a sense of the magnitude of the error.


It fell to Twitter and the merciless mockery of Jon Stewart, who devoted much of “The Daily Show” to skewering CNN’s John King, to call out the media for their failures.

( WATCH: John Stewart slams CNN on Boston reporting)

In an earlier era, many news veterans told POLITICO, a wrong report on a story the whole world was watching would have produced major repercussions — groveling apologies from reporters and editors, journalism seminars on the dangers of letting rumor outpace fact, and maybe even a few firings at the outlets involved.

In a new media era, many journalists — and perhaps many in the audience as well — seem to accept that information on a big story is fluid and fragmentary, and are ready to move on without pausing long for either apology or explanation, other than to blame their sources.

“Clearly there was confusion or some misinformation,” King told viewers. During more than 25 years at The Associated Press and CNN, King fashioned a reputation as one of his generation’s most dogged reporters.

( Also on POLITICO: FBI releases photos of 2 'suspects')

As of Thursday afternoon, Fox News, CNN, the AP and The Boston Globe had still not apologized for incorrect reporting more than 24 hours earlier. The AP said Wednesday that a suspect was in custody. King and then Fox said an arrest had been made. The Globe tweeted that a suspect was being taken to the courthouse.

“It may be less momentous when you make a mistake because there’s so much news coming and it’s so fast that the next report just overtakes the last one,” said David Westin, president of ABC News from 1997 to 2010. “It used to be you would go on the air and make a formal retraction.”

( PHOTOS: Boston Marathon bombing and aftermath)

These days, an error brings ridicule and scorn — but little clamoring for disciplinary action or public pressure for internal reviews. Many in the industry believe the next news bulletin simply replaces the error.

“The sands cover over the footprints very, very quickly,” said Westin.

“There was a time when, rightly or wrongly, we thought we had a handful of news sources that were authoritative,” he added. “It puts a huge responsibility on the shoulders of the consumer of news to sort through and figure out what is true.”

And in an age of vanishing media mea culpas, it fell to Stewart to enforce standards.

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“In the space of an afternoon, this suspect went from definitely caught and headed to federal court to never existed,” Stewart said Wednesday night. “It’s like a news story as imagined by M. Night Shyamalan.

Media mistakes are certainly not new, but the lack of apology and remorse is a recent phenomenon.

“This has been somewhat gradual, but I’ve never seen it quite so dramatic in the lack of contrition,” said Edward Wasserman, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s been given a normative sheen that this is now the media’s job: pass along when you get it and fix it when it’s wrong.”

The New York Post, which reported Monday that 12 died in the explosions — rather than three — published a photo of two “bag men” on the cover of Thursday’s paper. Then the Post reported on its web site at 1:43 p.m. that both men had been cleared. Gawker and The Onion have both satirized the tabloid over its Boston coverage.

Even when CNN made its last major snafu — wrongly reporting last June that the Supreme Court overturned Obamacare — the cable channel released a statement soon after: “CNN regrets that it didn’t wait to report out the full and complete opinion regarding the mandate. We made a correction within a few minutes and apologize for the error.”

This time, King walked back his mistake on air without fully apologizing. “As soon as our sources came to us with new information we adjusted our reporting,” CNN said in a statement.

“Welcome to the brave new world of real-time digital journalists,” said Mark Feldstein, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Maryland. “In the old days, when media was so much more concentrated and the audience for each one was so much greater, to make a mistake like this would have been catastrophic for the careers of the individual journalists and the news outlet,” he said. “When you see the sausage being made live… you can see how unappetizing some of the ingredients are.”

Feldstein recalled a 1992 episodewhen he worked at CNN in which an anchor nearly reported a false tip that George H.W. Bush had died after collapsing at a state dinner in Japan from stomach flu before a supervisor yelled “stop” from off-camera.

“Nowadays the anchors read what they’re handed and then correct it later,” he said. “The so-called gatekeeping function of the mainstream media has corroded. It just happens with such regularity now that there isn’t the outrage within the news media.”

In December, after the shooting rampage in Newtown, Conn., several media organizations misidentified the gunman’s brother as the shooter, wrongly claimed that their mother worked at the school and speculated that the principal buzzed the killer in because she recognized him. As with the Boston blasts, this information came from misinformed and unnamed law enforcement sources.

Last July, ABC News did apologize after Brian Ross — who has a track record of making false reports — suggested that the suspect in the Aurora, Colo., movie shootings may have had connections to the tea party. Ross based this on a web posting by someone else with the same name who lived in the same city.

Wasserman worries that “the standards of conversation have replaced the standards of publication.”

“You have a very quiet and undeclared modification, if not a repeal, of traditional standards of evidence applied before you publish,” the Berkeley dean said. “Passing along what you hear but haven’t bothered to check out or confirm or verify is now part of what the news media thinks they should be doing. … And you’re now going with what had been essentially rumor.”

The news organizations respond that they are being transparent and clear about sourcing.

After the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office said no arrests had been made, the AP updated its story and added that its source “stood by the information even after it was disputed.”

And after reporting that a suspect was in custody and being transported to the courthouse, The Globe updated its story to explain that “confusion reigned for about an hour this afternoon” over the status of the investigation. “After further reporting, the Globe is no longer convinced that its previously reliable source had accurate information,” the story said.

Viewers, though, often don’t listen carefully to attribution. Studies have shown that corrections are ineffective at banishing falsehoods.

To be sure, this immediacy is often valuable. The speed at which information can reach large numbers of people is unprecedented.

News organizations try to one-up each other, taking a small piece of speculation and fleshing out all the angles. After initial reports Monday night that a Saudi national was a potential suspect, for example, some reporters explored what this could mean for U.S. relations and the local Muslim community.

After a Texas district attorney was shot dead in his home on March 31, several news organizations regurgitated speculation by authorities that a gang of white supremacists carried out the assassination. That proved to be completely wrong: The wife of a former justice of the peace later reportedly confessed and also implicated her husband.

No one has apologized for those stories, either.

Marvin Kalb, who spent 30 years at CBS and NBC, believes this shift began in earnest during coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“There ought to be ethical limits beyond which editors and producers don’t go, but those limits have been eroded in the rush to judgment that’s so typical in the Internet age,” said Kalb, now a senior fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. “It’s hard to stay out of the battle. It’s painful to say that.”

In addition to competitive pressures, Westin said that more people have access to each news organization’s megaphone. In the old days, an anchor could make the final call about what to go with. Now there are junior staffers updating the web site and social media accounts.

“You don’t necessarily have the same editorial hierarchy,” Westin said. “So it’s more likely that it will happen.”

There can be a real-time race to the bottom. Fox News’ Megyn Kelly made a show Wednesday of reporting that her news organization had confirmed the AP’s erroneous report. Back in 2000, it was the other way around: Fox calling Florida for George W. Bush pressured other networks to follow suit.

“It’s the perils of instantaneous journalism,” Feldstein said. “I guess it’s almost inevitable, and it’s easy to ring your hands and scold your finger, but I think most news executives recognize that it could have almost as easily been them. That perhaps makes for a wariness to throw too many stones.”

In 1981, after Ronald Reagan was shot, all three networks reported that White House press secretary James Brady had died. ABC anchor Frank Reynolds and retracted the report and snapped on air: “C’mon, let’s get it nailed down!” It led to a period of soul-searching in the industry and extra layers of caution. Thirty-two years later, Brady lives.

Former Washington Post editor Glenn Frankel, now director of the journalism school at the University of Texas in Austin, said the premium the industry puts on getting it first versus getting it right has shifted over time.

“If whoever’s first turns out to be wrong, there’s not that big a price to pay for that,” said Frankel. “It’s not surprising that people are not inclined to be very contrite about it and when they are contrite about it, it’s not a genuine response.”

Dylan Byers contributed to this report.