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lkd wrote:

austinrealtor wrote:

lkd wrote:Not trying to defend the cops or the newspaper, but if the robbers pointed a Tec-9 or similar at the victim ( and those are definitely popular), the victim would definitely have told the cops it looked like a submachine gun.

And if the article had stated "looked like a submachine gun" instead of stating authoritatively that it was in fact a submachine gun, then I'd have no problem with it.

I'm just saying, if the victim said, "No, it was definitely a submachine gun", how are the cops (or reporter) going to argue? I guess you could preface all parts of your article with "it was claimed that" or "the victim alleges", but I'd think that most editors will strike that out before it goes to copy, unless it was a CYA thing.

Again, the "preponderance of reason" supports your theory, but it's far more likely the reporter was just parroting something in order to hit a deadline.

What if the victim/witness says "It was definitely a bazooka" but it turns out to be a potato gun? Or what if the victim/witness says "it was definitely a lightsaber" but it turns out the witness is off his meds and just watched Star Wars before the incident?

At what point does the journalist's own common sense and vast encyclopedic knowledge of random things lead him/her to question "is this accurate?" "is it likely?" "is it even possible?" regardless of what is fed to him by authorities, witnesses etc. Part of the problem is that today's journalists don't have that well-rounded knowledge that the old pros did, especially in terms of knowledge of firearms etc (which my letter attempted to correct in some small way). Part of the problem is today's journalists don't care or don't understand the difference between fact and hearsay.

I agree it's a moving target of when you do or don't use the "alleged" qualifier (or similar), but that's a journalist's job. I did it for more than 10 years. Most journalists are cautious to avoid libel, better journalists are also cautious to avoid falsehoods of any kind regardless of the legal consequences. In the long run, consistently being "wrong" especially about the same subject over and again, can be more damaging to the Fourth Estate than any libel case. Just look at how many people on this forum, how many citizens who lean to the right politically, simply DO NOT TRUST the media anymore.

Certainly the technological innovations that fostered widespread and less expensive competitors and the catostrophic increase in the price of paper are huge factors in the accelerating downfall of the American newspaper industry. But simply being "wrong" too often hasn't helped retain readership.

lkd wrote:Not trying to defend the cops or the newspaper, but if the robbers pointed a Tec-9 or similar at the victim ( and those are definitely popular), the victim would definitely have told the cops it looked like a submachine gun.

And if the article had stated "looked like a submachine gun" instead of stating authoritatively that it was in fact a submachine gun, then I'd have no problem with it.

cbr600 wrote:

austinrealtor wrote: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 not likely a submachine gun would be used in a robbery. It's also not likely a criminal would use a Jaguar as a getaway car. However, if the police say the suspect fled in a silver Jaguar, do reporters and editors have a responsibility to verify the make and color of the vehicle? Are the reporters also supposed to verify that it was a man (not a legal "child") who robbed the store? When can they, in your opinion, report what someone else says? It seems to me that unless they witnessed the crime, they have to report the event according to someone else, whether that's the police, the victim, or other witnesses.

There are two ways to go about this:

1. Verify the facts before you report them, or
2. Couch the specifics in the initial report until you verify them

The article states that a submachine gun was used. Period. No qualification. The paper did not have enough facts, even if police used the term "submachine gun", to report this as unequivocal fact. This is why in the good ol' days of news, when facts were more important than sensationalism, you would often see the word "alleged" as a qualifying factor before a statement of fact was written. Even better were reporters who could write a narrative in which all statements of fact were attributed to named sources. And facts from those sources that were in dispute or questionable were not reported until they could be verified.

Where each paper draws the line on this is subjective. In reference to your particular examples, the make and color of a car are more easily recognizable by the average person than whether a gun is a submachine gun, a semi-auto carbine, or an airsoft toy. But you'll often see "silver sedan" instead of "silver Jaguar" if the make can't be verified. Or at the least you'll see "witnesses reporting seeing a silver Jaguar". If this news brief had said "the victim/witness said the gun was a submachine gun", I'd have less problem with it because it is not written as a fact of the story, but merely as the recollection of an eyewitness - a much narrower and less concrete element of a story than a written statement of fact.

As for the adults vs. child description, again this can be easily couched by stating "male suspect" - doesn't differentiate between a child or adult. Adding in dark skinned, approximately 5-9, appoximately 30 or 40 years old further explains possible details without stating unequivocally that the suspect is a 5-9, 125 pound Mexican-American 26 year old.

But "male suspect" and "grey sedan" and "a gun" aren't nearly as sexy in a headline as "black man" or "silver Jaguar" or "submachine gun" ... too much "puffery" and writing "style" has replaced solid reporting and factual articles as newspapers continually compete with ever evolving and improved alternative media - radio, then TV, and now the internet. Reporters quickly learn that "just the facts, ma'am" doesn't cut it anymore when they get that first assignment on the cop beat at the big city newspaper. Their leads have to be "catchy", they need a "theme" to each article - much like an opinion or fiction writer.

This two-paragraph news brief could have easily been easily been written to merely state a man with a gun robbed a convenience store. But then it wouldn't be the lead item would it? Because such things happen frequently. The "fact" that the robby was committed by a man with a "submachine gun" makes it sexy enough to lead the police blotter. In fact, without the "submachine gun" angle, this little news nugget likely would not have made it into the paper at all.

And that, my friends, is manufacturing news instead of reporting it.

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.

LAYGO wrote:One major assumption was that the already proven criminal went thru the legal process to own a SMG. While I agree with your remarks, just seems funny to explain the process of the LEGAL possession of a SMG truly matters to a person willing to rob a store. I'm sure no criminal out there owns an automatic weapon.

</devil's advocate>

Good point, and I probably should've more overtly pointed out that the relative lack of full-auto guns in circulation at all - because of expense/hassle of obtaining one legally - means they are even less likely to show up stolen than the countless shotguns and junk revolvers that end up stolen and in hands of crooks in poor parts of towns all over the country. The subtle point I was trying to make is that if someone is going to go through the time and expense of obtaining a $15,000 transferable full-auto weapon, they're probably going to keep it very well protected in a gun safe or whatnot.

This little two-paragraph brief in the Austin paper this morning just really got my goat. So much so that I wrote the following diatribe and just sent it to the letters to the editor section, knowing full well it's way too long and they'll never print it.

http://www.statesman.com/news/local/cen ... _frontpage" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Robber had submachine gun

A man robbed a Southeast Austin gas station of an unspecified amount of cash Thursday using a submachine gun, police said. No arrest was made Thursday.

The robbery took place about 6:20 a.m. at the Chevron station at 2317 S. Pleasant Valley Road.

My letter to the editor:

Please note: I realize this letter is way too long to meet your 150-word limit for publication. But perhaps the editors of your paper will read this and take it to heart and stop perpetuating the same lies in print. If you’d like me to re-write this information into an extended letter or “column”or whatever for purposes of printing in your paper, I’d be happy to do so. Or better yet, perhaps one of your reporters could spend the five minutes it just took me to dig up the below information from a few quick Google searches, and add a few more minutes interviewing some “experts” and write an article explaining to your readers the difference between what your paper (and most other media outlets) reports and reality in reference to firearms in this country.

The lead brief in your “Central Texas Digest” crime blotter on page 2 of the Metro section November 19, 2010, is stunning example of laziness, ineptitude, parroting of authority, and likely an example of outright bias by your newspaper toward gun control.

It’s amazing that you managed all of that in a two-paragraph brief. Realizing that you likely cannot see your errors for yourself let me explain. It all boils down to the terms “submachine gun.”

Do any of you even know what a submachine gun is? Do you actually think someone who would stick up a convenience store would have the means to possess such a weapon? Does such critical thinking even cross your minds when you see these terms, or do you just repeat what the Austin Police Department tells you?

Below is an outline of questions that your reporters and editors should be asking any time they see inflammatory terms such as “submachine gun”, “machine gun”, “assault rifle”, “assault weapon”, “AK-47”, “machine gun”, “automatic weapon”, etc. proposed for printing in your newspaper:

- How do the witnesses and/or police know what kind of weapon was used? Was the weapon fired? Or is the description based solely on appearance. The only way for the average person (even many police officers) to differentiate a “machine gun” of any kind from a look-a-like semi-automatic weapon (or even a toy) is if the weapon fires multiple rounds from a single squeeze of the trigger. If more than one bullet does not leave the barrel with one squeeze of the trigger, then by definition the weapon is NOT a “machine gun”, “submachine gun”, “assault rifle” etc.
This information is not difficult to find – simply go to the reporter’s best friend, wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submachine_gun" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

- If you still believe the suspect had a true “machine gun” of some kind, how did the suspect acquire such a weapon in the first place? The current laws on civilian ownership of such weapons – stemming from the Federal gun control acts of 1934, 1968, and 1986 – make ownership by average Americans extremely difficult and expensive. The average cost for a civilian to own a single legally transferable machine gun is more than $15,000. Do you really think a convenience store robber has one of these tightly controlled, limited-supply weapons? And if he has it, would he use it to stick up a quickie mart when a $100 Saturday Night Special would complete the same task just as easily?
For more information about how to obtain such a gun, read the first link that pops up in Google for “buy a machine gun” - http://www.impactguns.com/store/machine ... ities.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Is it not a more distinct possibility that the suspect DID NOT in fact have a “submachine gun”, such as the H&K MP5 shown in the photograph on the above-referenced wikipedia page, but instead had a semi-automatic copy of that gun, perhaps one that only fires the lowly .22LR bullet that most of us fired at YMCA summer camp years ago? Like this GSG-5 rifle for instance http://www.impactguns.com/store/GSG5.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ? Or perhaps the “weapon” used was not even a firearm at all, but instead a very realistic “airsoft” replica toy like this one http://www.airsoftextreme.com/store/ind ... ts_id=3887" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Can you tell the difference between a real “submachine gun” and one of the many other possibilities just from looking at the gun? Me neither.

But to be able to put the terms “submachine gun” in a headline, even on a minor crime brief, draws attention (it certainly drew my attention). And that’s all your newspaper is really trying to do, right? Draw attention? Sell papers? And perhaps while you’re at it, contribute just one more little nugget of misinformation toward the irrational fear that any criminal in this country can get his hands on a machine gun and wreak havoc.
It just isn’t so. And your brief is a bold-faced lie.

You owe your readers a retraction and explanation of why you reported something as fact that you could not have possible known to be true.