TexasCHLforum.com

austinrealtor wrote:

Bart wrote:How do you know it wasn't a subgun?

Educated guess. Which is far and above better than what the newspaper did, which was uneducated parroting of the police.

Bart wrote: Did you inspect the weapon? Did you even see a picture?

No, and neither did the police or the newspaper. Yet they assert as fact in the article that it was a submachine gun. My letter openly questions the basis of this "fact" and calls them lazy liers until they can prove the facts they report. They don't have the basis to report this as fact.

Bart wrote: Also, if the police said it was a subgun and it wasn't, your complaints should be to the police department for making a false statement, not to the newspaper for reporting what the police said.

I complain to the newspaper because the newspaper printed the false information without doing their JOB and _______ the information. Just because police say something doesn't mean its worthy of printing in a newspaper (though it does help the newspaper avoid libel charges, which is why lazy reporters and editors don't lose their jobs for printing inaccurate information as long as those lies came from the police ... btw, not saying there is actual libel here, unless the suspect is caught and wrongly charged with possessing an unlawful weapon in addition to the armed robbery). Police purposely lie to suspects, the media, etc. all the time. It is the job of a journalist to decipher the facts from the spin, regardless of the source or subject of a story.

I worked in the newspaper business as a writer, editor, designer for more than 10 years. I know exactly how this garbage gets inserted into the paper and it's pure laziness and lack of regard for the basic duty of a journalist to check the facts before printing something. This was a two-paragraph brief likely written verbatim from an APD press release with ZERO fact checking, much less the critical thinking required to question the accuracy of a report given by "authorities".

Reporters and editors MUST as a responsibility of their jobs have the general knowledge to question the veracity of a statement like "convenience store robbed by man with submachine gun" ... it's a reporters' and editor's job to know that such a thing is exceedingly rare and unlikely and to at the very least couch the statement with a phrase like "according to witness" or "purportedly" or something. A better and more time-consuming task would be to question the reporting officers and the witnesses and victims and see what exactly they saw that led them to believe the gun was a submachine gun and then decide from that point how to proceed with the story based on those reports and the basic knowledge of firearms available with the click of a mouse onto a wikipedia page.