Media, Take Note: ‘The Race To Be First Often Results In The Race To Be Wrong’

By Bob Oakes and Deborah Becker April 20, 2013

BOSTON — The Boston Marathon all by itself is a media event widely covered by news media internationally, but the bombings on Monday and the day-long search for the suspects drew even more reporters, producers and news personnel to the city.

Not all of the nearly non-stop news coverage this past week was perfect — in fact, some of it has been receiving pointed criticism.

For an analysis of the media coverage of the marathon bombings and the manhunt, WBUR’s Bob Oakes and Deborah Becker spoke with David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent.

Boston Marathon Bombing: Significant Developments:

Monday, April 15: Bombs at the Marathon finish line kill three and injure hundreds more
Thursday, April 18: Black hat and white hat: FBI releases photos and video of suspects
Thursday and Friday, April 18-19: MIT police officer is killed; shootout in Watertown; one suspect dies, other escapes
Friday, April 19: Manhunt for surviving suspect as Boston area is put on lockdown

Friday evening, April 19: Lockdown lifted; suspect is located and captured in Watertown
Monday, April 22: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev charged with using a weapon of mass destruction
Wednesday, May 1: Three college friends of Dzhokhar accused of disposing of backpack
More Coverage: Boston Marathon Bombings

http://profiles.google.com/barry.kort Barry Kort

“I think you have to have a degree of confidence in the nature of the material and in the sourcing itself being close enough to the origins of the information that you feel as though this hasn’t been just some sort of an elaborate game of ‘Telephone’ being played through the federal law enforcement bureaucracy.” ~David Folkenflik at 7:08 into the audio segment.

In view of what David Folkenflik says in the above excerpt, I wonder what to make of Governor Deval Patrick on Meet the Press describing to David Gregory the contents of an FBI surveillance video which the Governor says he has not actually seen with his own eyes.