This morning, I woke up to a text message from my good friend, Jeff Soto. It read:
"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/us/30jewell.html?_r=1& --- The fact that he died is not important. But it is important that people be reminded of the dangers behind the media drawing their own conclusions. This was during a time when news did not travel so quickly and arrogantly, yet still had the power to damage lives and reputations. Worth looking into and drawing similarities to how Boston is being handled."
The heavy-set Mr. Jewell, with a country drawl and a deferential manner, became an instant celebrity after a bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta in the early hours of July 27, 1996, at the midpoint of the Summer Games. The explosion, which propelled hundreds of nails through the darkness, killed one woman, injured 111 people and changed the mood of the Olympiad.
Only minutes earlier, Mr. Jewell, who was working a temporary job as a guard, had spotted the abandoned green knapsack that contained the bomb, called it to the attention of the police, and started moving visitors away from the area. He was praised for the quick thinking that presumably saved lives.
But three days later, he found himself identified in an article in The Atlanta Journal as the focus of police attention, leading to several searches of his apartment and surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and by reporters who set upon him, he would later say, “like piranha on a bleeding cow.”
The investigation by local, state and federal law enforcement officers lasted until late October 1996 and included a number of bungled tactics, including an F.B.I. agent’s effort to question Mr. Jewell on camera under the pretense of making a training film.
In October 1996, when it became obvious that Mr. Jewell had not been involved in the bombing, the Justice Department formally cleared him.
“The tragedy was that his sense of duty and diligence made him a suspect,” said John R. Martin, one of Mr. Jewell’s lawyers. “He really prided himself on being a professional police officer, and the irony is that he became the poster child for the wrongly accused.”
In 2005, Eric R. Rudolph, a North Carolina man who became a suspect in the subsequent bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., pleaded guilty to the Olympic park attack. He is serving a life sentence.
Even after being cleared, Mr. Jewell said he never felt he could outrun his notoriety. He sued several major news media outlets and won settlements from NBC and CNN. His libel case against his primary nemesis, Cox Enterprises, the Atlanta newspaper’s parent company, wound through the courts for a decade without resolution, though much of it was dismissed along the way.
Jewell's case is considered an example of the damage that can be done by reporting based on unreliable or incomplete information.
Jewell died August 29, 2007, from natural causes at the age of 44. He was suffering from severe heart disease, kidney disease, and diabetes.
Two of the bombing victims filed lawsuits against Jewell on the basis of this reporting. In a reference to the Unabomber, Jay Leno called him the "Una-doofus". Other references include "Una-Bubba," and (of his mother) "Una-Mama." Jewell was never officially charged, but the FBI searched his home, questioned his associates, investigated his background, and maintained twenty-four hour surveillance of him. The pressure only began to ease after Jewell's attorneys hired an ex-FBI agent to administer a polygraph which Jewell reportedly passed.
The 19-year-old ethnic Chechen can be seen in video taken by security cameras placing a backpack near the finish line of the world-renowned race last Monday, the criminal complaint said, alleging he acted in concert with his older brother, who was killed during a shootout with police early Friday.
The brothers carried two backpacks containing pressure cooker bombs that ripped through the crowd near the finish line, killing three people and wounding more than 200, the complaint said. Ten people lost limbs from the bombs packed with nails and ball bearings.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators in his hospital room that he and his brother acted alone, without any help, according to reports by CNN and the New York Times. He said his older brother was the driving force behind the bombings, CNN reported. The Times said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev admitted to investigators to being involved in planting the bombs. These reports could not be independently confirmed.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured late Friday after a massive manhunt. He was hospitalized with what the criminal complaint said were gunshot wounds to his head, neck, legs and hand.
Tsarnaev was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and with malicious destruction of property resulting in death. Each count carries the possibility of the death penalty if he is convicted.
More charges are likely, legal experts said.
The 10-page complaint drew from video and still images captured by security cameras, the media and the public at the race before and after the bombing. It did not mention a motive, leaving that as one of the mysteries of the investigation.
Mike Mulugeta and Sunil Tripathi, armed and dangerous fugitives, alleged marathon bombers, and reported killers of an MIT police officer.
Scores of red-eyed journalists and news junkies, already gathered on Twitter and deconstructing every grunt and squeak on the police scanners, launched into a public, real-time data scrape for information on the named suspects. Tripathi was a big deal, having gone missing from Brown University last month without his wallet, leaving only a mysterious note that spurred FBI agents to investigate his disappearance.
There was just one problem: Mulugeta and Tripathi had nothing to do with the events unfolding in Boston. America awoke this morning to reports that the bombers were two young Chechen-Americans, with a third possible accomplice. Virtually no one in the media, who had pushed the Mulugeta-Tripathi narrative just hours before, acknowledged the shift. They simply plowed forward with more real-time misreporting.
Sketchy and incorrect first reports in breaking stories like these are par for the course. Few media outlets have distinguished themselves by being fast and reliable this week; far more, like the New York Post and CNN, stood out by screwing more pooches than a junkyard mutt with blue balls. But this instance—an entire industry naming the wrong suspects, and amplifying the error—was a particularly epic fail, and it seemed to be going down the blackest of memory holes.
Good Piece: http://gawker.com/5994892/your-guide-to-the-boston-marathon-bombing-amateur-internet-crowd+sleuthing
"How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.
Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, 'Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.'
But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies."
Mainstream news is only giving us what we want. Because, if we don't get what we want, we don't watch; If we don't watch, ratings go down and advertisers (funding) goes bye-bye.
The question is, have we been conditioned by the mainstream media to crave cheap emotional roller coaster programming over actual information that could be beneficial to us or is it just in our nature?
Another issue that comes into play here is the unspoken agreement between news sources and their sources of revenue (advertisers) regarding negative coverage. For instance, in many of the recent mass shootings, psychotropic medications, undoubtedly were a factor. However, they were rarely mentioned, if ever, in mainstream news programs. It is no coincidence that advertisements for many of those medications air within those programs.
The lesson to be learned is that you can not have 100% trust and 100% profit simultaneously, especially in an environment where unbiased information is relied upon at the same time as entertainment value and advertising restrictions. We would have to be totally naive to believe the information we are receiving from mainstream news sources, who operate under these conditions, could be without flaw; Whether that be intentionally or unintentionally.
This is why it is vitally important to be as universally informed as possible on important matters so that you can trust your intuition as a credible source to go from.