On Tuesday morning, as all hell was breaking loose, there were several stories hitting the news wires that were later dropped with no explanation. For example, what about that bomb at the State Department? What about that airplane that was said to be circling Dulles Airport? A guy at work kept talking about that plane circling Dulles, saying his wife was only 5 miles from there (and my wife and kids were 2-3 miles from there). You can probably recall more examples.
I have noticed this happening before. Remember when that nut Weston shot up the Capitol? I looked at the breaking story on washingtonpost.com and at first they were reporting two gunmen at the Capitol. Once Weston was in custody mention of the second gunman was quietly dropped.
My General Question is: has there been any study of this curious phenomenon in journalism? The way rumors fly around rapidly and unchecked in the first burst of the heat of the moment. And the way they’re later hushed up just leaving you wonder what really happened about that. You’re left unsure whether there was really nothing there, or was something covered up?
The story of the bomb at the Capitol was recanted serval times on Tuesday by news organizations.
It is standard practice in journalism to drop erroneous facts in later versions of stories, to avoid their being repeated. Under the best of circumstances, corrections will be sent out and reported, but given the crush of news this week, the corrections may not have gone out, or if they did, the news organizations were too occupied with the latest events.
and what the hell about the report all over the news last night about them finding 10 police alive in the WTC basement. I can find no mention of it in any news now. There was one posting here on the SDMB that the story was a hoax.
How about the Oklahoma City bombing news coverage? I clearly remember networks at the time reporting quite confidentally about a second un-exploded bomb in a nearby building. This angle was quietly dropped sometime during the afternoon…
There was also on CNN Tuesday stories that the Mall in DC was on fire, right before the Pentagon crash was reported. But the news reporters use qualifiers and say something like “We are getting reports of blah blah blah happening” or “Unconfirmed sources are saying blah blah blah”. Then if it turns out to be bogus, they stop talking about it or under ideal conditions retract or ammend the report.
It’s still going on–the news last night was full of the story about detainees at La Guardia and JFK, carrying false documents and knives. This morning, everyone’s been released, and they were never carrying weapons. There was probably some incident that occurred, but it probably bore little relation to the preliminary news accounts.
Ditto the 10 policemen; another story that evaporated overnight, although I haven’t heard whether it was mis-information or a hoax. (It immediately struck me as fishy–why would a cell phone call come in 3 days late?)
I distinctly remember the first news reports I heard on Nov 22, 1963 stating that the shots had been fired from a grassy knoll. And then I didn’t hear that phrase again for years, until the conspiracy theories started coming out.
The ten policemen story was a hoax. ABC reported it, they interviewed a man in a fire helmet (fireman, or volunteer impersonating a fireman?) that claimed he had spoken with a woman who had received a call from her husband’s cell phone, and that the husband was trapped on level 2 of WTC 1, etc. Thirty minutes Ted Koppel retracted the story – it had been a hoax (either by the woman with the cell phone or by the man in the fire helmet).
I have noticed this happens in almost every “major” news story. As events are unfolding there are inevitably some stories that are reported that later are discovered to have been false and simply never spoken of again. The example I can give is during the night of the LA riots, some news broadcasts were reporting riots in other major cities (Atlanta is the only town I can recall clearly). Of course by morning it became obvious this was not true.
There should be some sort of term for this phenomenon. It happens all the time.
In fact wasn’t it just last night that the TV stations said the FBI had arrested 4 or 5 guys at JFK with fake crew badges and knives ? This morning I heard they released all but one of those guys - seems it was a “misunderstanding”. Whoops.
i’m still dying to find out what is goin’ on with Robert Blake! what the hell happened to this story? somebody shot his wife! does anybody even care anymore?
on a side note: i bet gary condit is (i wont say happy) relieved the spotlight is off him for the time being!
I remember some time ago, a B-52 crashed near an airbase, sliding sideways into the ground. I don’t remember the details but I saw video footage one evening on one cable TV channel, and then, -nothing. Nothing on any other channels later that night. Nothing in the paper the next day, nothing on any news shows. No mention of it at all, even on the same channel that carried it the night before.
Much later it appeared as a story on 20/20, this pilot was reported to be something of a hot dog who had performed dangerous maneuvers with his plane (and crews) before. This time he crashed. I would guess there was some concern over possible sabotage or terrorism to justify the media black-out, but it still was rather spooky.
Nobody else I spoke to about it over the next few days had seen it, and many thought I was nuts, until the 20/20 show aired. (I live next to an air force base, so there's lots of locals involved who follow these things.) - MC
This is another reason google is so great Doghouse Reilly: it caches pages, so deleted stuff can frequently still be found. I’ve seen this a number of times with items featured on memepool: embarrassing stuff is discovered and linked to, deleted by a site, then linked to as a cached google page.
Thanks for the input, folks. Putting our heads together, we can discern three types of nonstories for the memory hole:
Mistakes that are later retracted. “Our previous report on the ten cops buried alive turned out to be untrue.” Looks like there are a lot of these.
Actual coverups of real events. No disclaimer, just silence. Good example provided by MC of the B-52 crash.
The ones that are neither retracted nor confirmed, that just leave you hanging. Was Weston really acting alone at the Capitol, or was there a second gunman? Never heard anything more about that. The very early reports of shots from the Grassy Knoll, subsequently hushed up, are very chilling. And was there or was there not a plane circling Dulles Airport after all the other flights were grounded? Was it a U.S. fighter jet patrolling the area? Was there no plane at all? It just vaporizes. Eerie…
I was following the events online from the UK, and I remember reading that either United or American had “confirmed” that a 5th plane had come down in an “undisclosed location”, and that up to three further planes had been hijacked and were the subject of “deep concern”. This followed on from a report that another plane was headed for Washington.
I guess the most likely explanation is #1 above - that these were simply jumbled reports which weren’t filtered owing to the understandable confusion. My initial reaction was that perhaps they had been shot down (perhaps even in error) and that the govt were obviously keen not to broadcast this fact to an already overwhelmed US public.
But then I’m assuming that it wouldn’t be an easy task for the authorities to cover up the fact that a 5th plane had crashed - I guess we’d have heard something by now if it had…
The first report I heard of the plane going down in Pennsylvania stated that it was “forced down by military fighters”. I only heard it phrased like that once.