jumping the gun, good or bad?

Great Debates
1

four or five times during the war a story that ‘jumps the gun’ has been posted. finding chemical weapons that turn out to be something else.

is this a good or a bad thing? it definitly makes the reporters look silly, but is the alternitive better? the “we found out this was a weapon a month ago… but we didn’t bother to report it untill now” might hurt them more in the long term… with lots of conspiricy theorys about why we covered up this and that.

what do you think?

2

Well those stories was usually leaked from the US military, as ‘not confirmed as of yet’ or somethin similar…

So the error on behalf of the journalists is really them printing sumthin like “Chemical weapons factory found” instead of “Pentagon sources: We found weapons factory”.