Sitting on a powder keg, Fox News lights a match

Report, then confirm and then apologize has been the mantra of cable TV news for some time.  It happened again this (Monday) afternoon. But this time the stakes are quite a bit higher than the usual screw-ups by these, so called, news operations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAJmg-eaZXA

False report of a shooting by FOX News

More on this story from Paul Farhi at The Washington Post

Today’s erroneous report comes courtesy of Fox News and reporter Mike Tobin. Tobin claimed to have witnessed a police officer shooting a “young black male” as the man ran away from police. This didn’t just happen anywhere. It happened at Pennsylvania Avenue and North Avenue in Baltimore, Maryland. For those who have been following the unrest in Baltimore you know that intersection has been the center of activity every day for a week.

Here’s what Mike Tobin reported:

Well, about 2:45, we saw a guy running from the cops, here right at the intersection of North and Pennsylvania, where the uh, you know, which has been the epicenter of the unrest here. And as he was running away, that officer drew his weapon and fired and struck the individual who was running away. He was a young black male, and what we saw on the sidewalk as the crime scene unfolded there, there was a revolver laying on the ground. It looked like a six-shooter revolver with a long barrel. The individual who was shot — again a young black male — he was alive. They just took him off in the ambulance, but he did not look to be in good shape at all. I can’t really give you an accurate diagnosis and I could not get a look at his wound but he looked to be in bad shape. 

If you haven’t learned by now, most of what Tobin told us he saw did not happen. The Baltimore Police Department confirms police did not shoot anyone and that the man Tobin said “looked to be in bad shape” wasn’t really injured. Looking at the video of the man being tended to by an ambulance crew, I’m not sure how anyone concluded that man was in “bad shape”.

Police explain no one was shot

Here’s what happened, according to the Baltimore Police Department. Via a surveillance camera, police spotted a man with a gun. Officers found that man and started chasing him on foot. During the chase and take down, the man dropped that gun and it fired, hitting no one. Police did not fire shots. A police official said the man arrested wasn’t even injured, but to be cautious he was taken away by ambulance to a local hospital.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3HDQTnMoKo

FOX News apologizes

By the time the Baltimore Police Department could get the word out that Tobin’s report was mostly BS and Fox News apologized, the damage was done. The Fox News confirmation that police shot someone added to what citizen “witnesses” claimed they saw. It created some tense moments around Pennsylvania and North. Even as I write this (three hours after the incident), many on Twitter continue to cite the original report by Fox News as reason to believe that police are not telling the truth about what happened.

By the time Fox News tweeted Mike Tobin’s report the man who wasn’t shot was shot “multiple times”.  As of 7:37 pm ET Fox News has not tweeted that its story was wrong. The last tweet on the incident came at 3:45 pm and said there were “conflicting reports on gun incident in Baltimore”. This was 22 minutes after @BaltimorePolice tweeted and @FoxNews retweeted that no shooting had occurred. 

If Baltimore escapes any further unrest from this non-incident, Fox News, and anyone else who rushed to report this erroneous story, should count themselves very lucky. This is just part of what is now a long history of reporting first and confirming later that Fox News, CNN and other cable outlets have been guilty of in their efforts to bring us “Breaking News” as it happens.

Those who run most of these cable news operations never seem to learn that taking the time to actually confirm information before it is broadcast or tweeted is why the word “news” is in your name. It really should be part of the contract you have with your audience. It’s what is supposed to make you special and not just another schmuck with a website, blog, Facebook page or Twitter feed.

We don’t need Fox News and CNN for rumors and a reckless disregard for the facts. We have all the rest of social media that takes care of that just fine.

shooting in baltimore was about 10 minutes ago;was running from police when shot

— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) May 4, 2015