Tiffaney Gipson's List: The Boston Marathon Bombing 2013 Postive and Negative

• On Wednesday afternoon, CNN and several other news outlets incorrectly reported that officials had arrested a suspect in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings.
• CNN described the alleged perpetrator only as a “dark skinned individual,” and host Wolf Blitzer also pushed reporter John King to say whether the suspect had an accent.
• Less than an hour later, CBS tweeted, “JUST IN: Man sought as possible suspect is WHITE MALE, wearing white baseball cap on backwards, gray hoodie and black jacket.”

• In repose to one or perhaps both of the reports, the FBI released a scathing statement cautioning journalists not to jump to conclusions:

   

  Contrary to widespread reporting, no arrest has been made in connection with the Boston Marathon attack. Over the past day and a half, there have been a number of press reports based on information from unofficial sources that has been inaccurate. Since these stories often have unintended consequences, we ask the media, particularly at this early stage of the investigation, to exercise caution and attempt to verify information through appropriate official channels before reporting.
• Here are some examples of the other “unintended consequences” wrought by journalists’ misinformation in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings:
• Journalists hounded a victim and his neighbors. After the attack, authorities spoke with a Saudi national who was a witness to and victim of the bombings. But several media outlets mistakenly reported that he was a “person of interest” or a “suspect,” and the New York Post even bragged about this “world-beating scoop.”
• The Wall Street Journal reported more bombs. On Monday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that police had found five additional explosive devices, on top of the two that had been deployed. It was only minutes later that federal authorities dismissed that report as inaccurate.
• The New York Post gave an inflated death count. As the country braced for what could have been even more tragic numbers of casualties, the New York Post tried to rush to be first to report the news. This led them to incorrectly inform the country “there are at least 12 dead,” a number they later defended that count, four times the actual number of fatalities, by saying, “a law-enforcement source told The Post it could be as high as 12.”

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• Twitter user with the handle @DeLoBarstool posted a brief tweet: "Uhh
• a Twitter user with the handle @DeLoBarstool posted a brief tweet: "Uhh explosions in Boston" – the first online record that can be found of the two bombs that went off near the race's finish line, killing three people, injuring 170 more and sparking a dramatic city-wide manhunt watched around the world.
• a Twitter user with the handle @DeLoBarstool posted a brief tweet: "Uhh explosions in Boston" – the first online record that can be found of the two bombs that went off near the race's finish line, killing three people, injuring 170 more and sparking a dramatic city-wide manhunt watched around the world.
• a Twitte
• Twitter user with the handle @DeLoBarstool posted a brief tweet: "Uhh explosions in Boston" – the first online record that can be found of the two bombs that went off near the race's finish line, killing three people, injuring 170 more and sparking a dramatic city-wide manhunt watched around the world.
• Twitter user with the handle @DeLoBarstool posted a brief tweet: "Uhh explosions in Boston" – the first online record that can be found of the two bombs that went off near the race's finish line, killing three people, injuring 170 more and sparking a dramatic city-wide manhunt watched around the world.
• DeLo –
• might not have been the most credible source, but it appears he was the first in the city to report it. And unlike many of those who were to follow, he at least got the facts right – in contrast to breathless reporting from some of the most heralded parts of the US media, including CNN and the Associated Press.
• tired comparisons of "old versus new" media and more an examination of the online tools now available to the media, police and members of the public, and how they interact and influence each other in real time.
• One crucial question is whether the whip-like response of social media and its unlimited appetite for content after an event such as Boston causes the established media to struggle to stay relevant by publishing half-baked snippets and worsening the industry's natural reflex to want to be first with the news.
• The other is whether the virtual manhunt conducted online, by users of social media sites such as Twitter, Reddit or 4Chan, helped or hindered the actual manhunt taking place in the streets around Boston – and exposed innocent individuals to danger.
• "Though it started with noble intentions, some of the activity on Reddit fuelled online witchhunts and dangerous speculation, which spiralled into very negative consequences for innocent parties," Reddit's general manager, Erik Martin, known online as hueypriest, wrote in an unusual mea culpa on the site.
• Even the White House was paying attention to the cacophony last week
• President Barack Obama telling the US on Friday, following the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: "In this age of instant reporting, tweets and blogs, there's a temptation to latch on to any bit of information, sometimes to jump to conclusions. But when a tragedy like this happens, with public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it's important we do this right."
• What followed that first tweet was a week-long firehose of reportage, reaction and emotion, as millions rushed online
• in Boston the aftermath and search for the perpetrators practically invited the city's residents and those motivated to follow events online to take part themselves.
• One glaring opportunity was the Boston police department scanners – or radio – streamed online, meaning anyone in the world with an internet connection could follow, raw and verbatim, what officers were saying among themselves.
• The Boston PD's own Twitter account issued a blunt message to the scanner-addicts: "WARNING: Do Not Compromise Officer Safety by Broadcasting Tactical Positions of Homes Being Searched," which was itself retweeted more than 20,000 times.
• That warning came too late for the unfortunate family of a missing Brown University student, who was named via Twitter and Reddit as a suspect based on garbled police scanner transcripts
• "Mike Mulugeta", an unconnected name that came up on the police scanner and was confidently tagged as a suspect. At least "Mike Mulugeta" doesn't appear to exist.
• Reddit users known as "redditors" organised a branch of the site to crowd-source sifting through the pile of images, some from official sources such as the FBI, but others from those who attended the race and posted still and video footage, in a hunt for clues to the killers.
• he main online venue, a "sub-reddit" named /r/findbostonbombers, has now been taken down. But at the height of activity it produced a sprawling Wiki-like spreadsheet on Google that carried hundreds of comments about supposed suspects, with the nicknames and eve
• ames of supposed suspects leaking out into the wider social media.
• Reddit users didn't nail down the actual suspects, even if they had the brothers in their sights,
• Washington Post headline: "Online detectives flourish, damage, help during Boston manhunt".
• Washington Post's FBI sources, is the early release on Thursday of the photographs of the Tsarnaev brothers, in part to limit the damage being done to those wrongly being targeted as suspects in the media.
• What it did provoke
• the FBI said it was concerned that other sources identifying the Tsarnaevs could turn the manhunt into a free-for-all, "with news media cars and helicopters, as well as online vigilante detectives, competing with police in the chase to find the suspects".
• n the end, it was new technology that tracked down the marathon bombers – but not the technology of online crowd-sourcing
• it was the FBI's examination of 2,000 digital images and closed-circuit video footage using sophisticated software – combined with an old-fashioned identification provided by injured spectator Jeff Bauman, who appears to have seen Tamerlan Tsarnaev place the bomb that blew Bauman's legs off.
• A phone call from the brothers' aunt to the FBI tip line appears to have been the final confirmation.
• The more traditional, mainstream branches of the media had a worse week. The New York Post would win the wooden spoon for reporting, which began with false reports of 12 people being killed in the explosions, to its front-page photograph on Thursday of two innocent students it labelled "bag men", while stripping the photograph of context. And then there was its false claim that investigators had a Saudi Arabian national suspect "under guard at an undisclosed Boston hospital"
• erhaps worried by the damage to his newspaper's reputation, Rupert Murdoch himself took to Twitter to claim that the "bag men" photo had been distributed by the FBI. That was labelled "a totally dishonest excuse" by Mnookin tweeting in response to Murdoch, an illustration of social media's strange bedfellows
• The more celebrated brands of CNN and the Associated Press didn't exactly enjoy a reputation-burnishing week in Boston, with experienced CNN correspondent John Harwood going on air on Wednesday with news that a suspect was under arrest, a report confirmed by AP and the Boston Globe, and then carried throughout the world

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• spectators and runners passed cell phones around to let loved ones know they were okay, whether via text or Twitter. And many, many pictures were snapped, posted, viewed and forwarded around.
• y now everyone knows the Boston Police, FBI, CIA and Joint Terrorism Task Force, among others, will be mining those pictures and communications for clues, evidence of anything that might prove to be a lead in determining who attacked the runners and fans and why.
• But is there a darker side to mobile phones and social media in a disaster?

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• Then, a day later, people on Twitter made exactly the same mistakes. Besides the mistaken identification of the Brown student, Thursday night’s tweeters—including many local reporters covering the manhunt—couldn’t get straight whether one or two suspects had been arrested, whether the suspects were dead or alive, and whether they were light- or dark-skinned.