News Reporting-Fact or Fiction?

When you tune in to the evening news, do you usually pretty much assume that what you hear is the truth of the story? How would you know if you are hearing the truth? If you're like me, you tune in to your favorite station and feel comfortable quoting the 'facts' you hear there in the break room the next day. I mean, don't the reporters go to the source and get the facts? Don't they have to check the facts? Would they broadcast as facts things without checking, or even worse, the speculations of the reporter?

Granted, when news is breaking I'm not surprised to hear things reported by witnesses that later turn out to not be true, like the man who was interviewed on the scene of school shooting. His wife was the teacher in the classroom where it happened and he said that his wife had told him that the boy got out the gun, aimed deliberately at the girl and shot her in the stomach on. Later news reports clarified that the gun was in a backpack, cocked and went off when the boy bumped the backpack on a desk.

So, when my daughter found herself privy to some of the inside information of a tragedy that happened to close friends, I started switching from station to station to get as many of the stories as I could. I was surprised when I noticed how the details varied in the stories being reported by the different stations. The tragedy involved the drowning deaths of a father and his small son. One station reported the canoe had capsized and neither of the victims were wearing life jackets. Another station said that neither of them were wearing life jackets, but that two jackets were found in the canoe.  How could they be in the canoe if the canoe was capsized?

The child's body was found right away, but his father's wasn't found until a week later. Meanwhile, the news quickly turned to other, more violent happenings, but when the body was found, the story at the one station about the canoe capsizing still contained that detail when they reported the discovery of the body.

I was thinking about writing this post about the varied inaccuracies when my daughter called and said that there were so many inaccuracies in all the different news sources, that she found it really upsetting and wanted to let me know what they knew there on the scene as the friends of the victims. It was interesting that she was noticing the same thing I was.

What it seemed like was that it was considered a minor story and so whatever they got as 'facts' at the beginning was good enough. When the follow-up story was written, the earlier report was rehashed. I guess it doesn't matter to most viewers if the canoe capsized or not, any more than any of the other inaccuracies seemed to detract from the center of the story that a father and son had drowned and that it was an accident.  It is only disturbing to those who are closest to the story and would like to see the facts reported accurately, and maybe also to those of us once removed, as I am who would really like to know what actually happened.

So, the moral of the post is to remember when watching/listening to the news that while the major facts of the story may be mostly accurate, you are probably only hearing an approximation otherwise, particularly for something that is a breaking story, and even if it's an old story, there's a likelihood that old inaccuracies are being rehashed along with the new information that brings the story to the front of the news again.  My husband suggests checking to see which station reported it most accurately. That may be the station to watch for the closest approximation to the truth...