Investigators are looking into whether two agents were shooting at each other in error. One was wounded, one killed. And this is the passage that I find bothersome:
Really? They’re going to compare the bullets recovered from the scene and the victims to each other’s guns? They’re going to interview all the witnesses about where everyone was and what direction they were shooting??? Well, imagine, that, who’d a thunk?
It’s not that I object to a bit of education in a story, but it seems a waste to go out and find an expert (who has no knowledge at all of the particular incident) to make statements that anyone with half a brain would know. It’s wasting the reporter’s time and it’s wasting of the experts’ time.
And I see it all the time. It is never enough to simply write the obvious – they have to provide an “expert” to validate the obvious.
So, at what level is something SO obvious that no expert is needed? And can that level be changed?
Frankly I don’t see your problem here. The reporter asked an expert to explain how an investigation would be conducted, and printed the expert’s response. You may believe the expert was too elementary in his description, but that’s hardly the reporter’s fault.
For the sake of argument I’m going to disagree that the average newspaper reader automatically knows what the process is in a friendly fire investigation, especially since, as the story points out, no one can even remember the last time the Border Patrol had one.
No, I don’t believe the expert was too elementary. I believe the expert was unnecessary. I believe that any competent reporter would know the elements of an investigation without resorting to experts. I believe the exact same story could have been written without an expert.
Is it a “claim” that in a shooting, there are usually attempts to match up bullets with guns? Is it a claim that police will interview witnesses to a possible crime?
Boyo, you are assuming every single reporter and/or editor everywhere knows everything about everything.
Let me tell you something, I’ve known journalists writing for a daily city newspaper who needed “experts” to explain the process of hiring a superintendent of schools, how to get a beach parking permit and who investigates violations of the pooper-scooper bylaw. Reporters might be covering a suspicious death in a nursing home one day, the spraying of pesticides to kill mosquitoes carrying EEE another day, and the cleanup of hazardous waste in an old landfill another day. Or they might be covering all three of those stories and the ribbon cutting of a new medical center all on the same day.
Do you think there’s a journalism class on ballistics in case one is assigned a story about a shooting at the border?
Actually naming the expert sources of your information and their credentials in the published story is not only a courtesy to the people who provided the facts to the writer, it also lets the reader know the reporter is not simply pulling stuff out of his ass.
Nonsense. I also talking about general knowledge, not technical details. Everyone knows police interview witnesses to crimes, and almost everyone knows that bullets can often be matched to the guns that fire them. If a reporter doesn’t know that much, he or she is in the wrong profession.
And yes, I agree that it is a courtesy to cite a source. OTOH, for information like this there was no need to seek out a source.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that gets reporters in trouble. Who draws the line between “common knowledge” and “making shit up?”
This very board is full of people who get smacked around for repeating urban legends, half-true factoids, and outright lies. Are you expecting a reporter to describe the process of a forensic investigation based on what he’s seen on Law & Order?
For all the fact-checking and verifications that journalists do, it’s amazing that they still manage to get a huge number of things completely wrong. I’d rather they quote an expert on something trivial than rely on “common knowledge” about something more novel.
“According to Boyo Jim of the Straight Dope Message Board, there’s no need to explain what will happen in the investigation because everybody already knows that stuff. But if we do explain, we should do so without asking anyone the procedure.”
I’ve seen worse, stuff that makes you wonder if they are writing for alien overlords or something “experts say some parents feel a strong sense of attachment to their children” kinda stuff.
Have you met the public? We need to be told everything, every time.
Besides, reporters aren’t supposed to be part of the story. They relay information. If they relay their own information they’d have to back it up and we’re right back where we started.
The “investigators”, I assume, are part of an official inquiery, not journalists writing a story.
Well, you aren’t an “expert” so your opinion is just that…the opinion of someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about.
Frankly, I don’t see what your issue is. A journalist doesn’t “just know” what happened. They weren’t there. They aren’t experts in ballistics. To get the story, they need to research the facts of the story from people who actually were there and interpret those facts based on the opinions of experts who know what the facts mean.
Watch the movie Shattered Glass when you get a chance (staring Manaquin Skywalker). It’s about journalist Stephen Glass who made quite a career for himself writing “factual” articles he just totally made up.
Do you know how to match up bullets to the gun that fired them? I don’t. I think it has something to do with the marks left by the rifling in the barrel. But I don’t really know the minutae of it. How accurate is it? I mean they make all Glock 17s in a couple of Glock factories using the same machinery. So how different are the marks left on two different bullets from two different guns of the same model? And how accurate is the identification once the bullet has been deformed from crashing into someone’s skull?
And when you say “police try to match up the bullets”, who are you talking about? Some beat cop who answered the call?
Reminds me of a dinner conversation I had with some of my clients a couple of years ago. It went something like this:
Client: What you do doesn’t seem that difficult.
Me: It’s not…for me.
Client: Well I don’t see why we are paying you so much. Why can’t we do it ourselves?
Me: Ok. I guess tomorrow I will book a flight back to New York.
Client: But we don’t know how to do what you do.
Me: And that’s why you pay me so much.
No I don’t know how to math bullets to the guns that fired them. Nor does the story have even a scrap of information as to how it’s done. If the story was about matching bullets to guns, or if the story included any details about how it’s done, an expert to provide such information would be completely appropriate.
In journalism, there is a line between “reporting” and “editorialising” which must not be crossed. If a reporter is objectively reporting a story, he or she should be “invisible”, and only report things that other people have done or said. So if an opinion needs to be expressed about what will or won’t be done, then that opinion needs to come from a third party, unless the piece is an “editorial”, expressing the opinion of the newspaper.
