There are two ways to go about this:cbr600 wrote: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.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"
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.
