Update: Fort Hood

Since the original thread is locked...
Remember Kimberly Munley, who was heralded as the cop who - after being shot herself - brought down the Fort Hood shooter? Yeah, well... not so much.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004042423

So, let's see: Shooter was dead, then not. Hero cop is white woman, then black man. Anyone was to take a flier on which "fact" is next to fall?

Gotta be a product of blogger-mindset reporting: Get it out first, we'll worry about accuracy later.

 

What about the e-mails to al-Qaeda?

 

Oh, those were actually emails to Al Pacino.

 

Hell, the Times can't get the fact of a six year old story right, so it's not always the fault of wanting to be first. It's often a problem of reporting what you want to believe.

 

I hate when people do this.

 

Another bad week for the Times:

"Andrea Elliott’s front page article in the November 9 New York Times played up the thousands of Muslims in the U.S. military and how their “service...is more necessary and more complicated than ever before,” but gave the false impression that a Medal of Honor recipient named near the end of her piece was a Muslim himself, when he was actually Catholic."

 

I understand you've got it in for the New York Times, but it sounds like it was the Army that kept releasing the wrong facts on Fort Hood. They are always so fast to find a hero narrative - Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, etc., etc.

Why not just tell the truth?

 

The truth has a habit of straying off message.

 

Unfortunately, I think the New York Times is the best newspaper in the country. Most resources. Best articles.

I love the variety I can get in it as well; from the architecture reviews, to the travel articles, to the restaurant reviews & recipes.

I've lived in several different cities, and there's a reason I still read the NYT online every morning.

But they need to be better in general and in this article, where the author is criticizing press accounts of a breaking news story, he might want to get his own facts straight when making the comparison to the Jessica Lynch story.

Maybe he just went off of his own memory -- which is never a good idea -- or maybe he wanted to tell the story in a certain way. Either way, he got it wrong.

I wish that is these case -- like in the Muslims serving in the U.S. Military -- they'd be required to not just run a correction, but explain how they got it wrong.

Simply googling Michael Monsoor would have told you that Monsoor was not a Muslim. And where's the actual quote from Capt. Rahman?

He says here: http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/74298/ that he never referred to Monsoor being Muslim, so why does the NYT imply that he did.

Bottom line for me: The Times is the best paper out there, but they need to be better, and the should explain themselves when they fuck up.

 

And yes, the Military should tell the truth when they know it. It's not the media's fault if they go with information delivered to them by authorities in a position to know the facts.

That's why the error about the six year old event bothers me more than this one.

BTW: I believe the source for the Fort Hood info was the Director of Emergency Management on the base, a civilian.

 

These mistakes are minor compared to when The Times was assisting in getting us ginned up to go to war with Iraq.