There have already been two major media blunders this week, and one extremely annoying correction, and it’s not even Wednesday.
The first big mistake comes courtesy of the conservative news and opinion website RedState, which falsely suggested Monday that Parkland teen David Hogg might not have actually been at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school on Feb. 14, when 17 students were shot and killed.
The original article, which was based on a CBS News video, asked, “If Hogg was at school when the shooting began, saying he heard gunshots and the fire alarm, then why is he talking about riding a bike three miles to get to school on the day of the shooting?”
The problem here, according to the author, is that she misunderstood the content of the cited video.
The RedState story, whose original text has been struck through completely, bears a new headline that reads, “UPDATE: CBS Video Confusing. Hogg Was On Campus.”
The story also carries two author’s notes, the latter of which reads, “After reviewing all of this, it appears that the problem was that CBS included a very confusing quote without context. Hogg was on campus during the shooting and returned several hours later to interview people across the street. … I am sorry for the error and have updated the post accordingly.”
The second bungle comes via the Intercept, which claimed in a headline Monday that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was harvesting Facebook data to hunt down illegal immigrants.
This is simply not true, according to a rather lengthy correction published that same day. The documents cited in the story have little, if anything, to do with immigrants or immigration law.
“Due to errors by editor Ryan Grim, this story and its headline originally reported that the investigation referred to in the ICE emails targeted an immigrant. The story as filed did not include those errors, or any others,” the note reads.
It adds, “The documents reported on in the story do not establish that the target of the investigation was an immigrant or that the individual was being pursued for immigration violations. The target of the investigation was, according to the documents, based in the New York metropolitan area, while several of the ICE agents on the emails were based in New Mexico. Additionally, this story has been updated to include a comment from Facebook.”
The third instance of a media misstep this week is a much, much smaller thing than the previous examples, but it really annoys me, so it’s going on the list.
The New Yorker published a fluff piece on Monday comparing one of the Parkland teens to Joan of Arc. As if that weren’t silly enough, the story also referred to firearm used in the Feb. 14 shootings as a “semiautomatic machine gun.”
Never mind that “semiautomatic machine gun” inches us towards oxymoron country, the Parkland shooter used the popular and widely discussed AR-15 rifle, which is simply a semi-automatic. Rifles like the one used on Feb. 14 fire one round for each pull of the trigger. A machine gun, on the other hand, fires multiple rounds at one pull of the trigger. They are also illegal to own without a special and extremely rare federal license.
There’s no excuse for members of the press or anyone involved in the debate surrounding gun violence to still be this ignorant of the basics of firearms. Do your job.
