Shut Up Iris

I may have mentioned before some of the things I hate (American cars,BMW's, scientists,Christians, conservatives, liberals, computers, Dell computers, laptops, racists, Americans, Iranians, Afghanistan, let's face it, I just don't like that many things...........) and I think I should add to that list:Major News Outlets. I just don't see why reporting has to be as hard as they make it. The thing that set me off today is the coverage of the Fort Hood shooting. I left work last night having read articles and seen coverage of the shooting in which one shooter was killed, one had escaped, a police officer was killed and eight people were dead and twelve were wounded. These reports came from Fox News, MSNBC, Rawstory.com. I come to work today to find that every single fact that was released about the Fort Hood shootings before I went to bed last night was absolutely wrong.



The only 'fact' from last night that has remained 'accurate' is the shooter has a muslim sounding name and that he is (not was) an army psychiatrist.



The worst part in all of this is that it's very easy to see why mistakes were made and it boggles the mind to see that they are the exact same mistakes that 'journalists' made in covering Michael Jackson's death, the balloon boy and the shooter at the holocaust museum stories and those mistakes are stem from news outlets wanting to be the first with a news story.



I can see the allure of getting to the scoop first, the problem is that in American news outlets 'first' has completely replaced 'accurate' in journalism. Let's take a look at the Fort Hood shooting story, erroneous headline by erroneous headline.

First: Last night it was reported by Fox and MSNBC that one shooter had been killed and that one was still being sought and then went on to cover how the base and all surrounding schools had been put on lock down. Because everyone knows that in a murder spree the obvious place to hide is a school. What? The fact is that there was one shooter, he was shot and detained and is in stable condition.The worst part is that no single news site cites a source for the erroneous information. Which means they assumed, or they made it up. Both of those things are what a 'reporter' does when he wants a headline but can't be bothered to wait for the facts.



Second part of the anatomy of this news clusterfuck fail: Police officer shot and killed. Wrong. Had any single journalist checked they would have found last night that the hospital was reporting that the officer had been shot, was in stable condition after undergoing surgery. Who cares, LIVE police officers don't make headlines, DEAD police officers do, let's call her dead, there is your headline, next story!?

Lastly we now know that twelve people were killed, not eight and that thirty one were wounded. Now I know you are thinking 'well I'm sure that eight people were probably killed at the scene, and others died later, that's not lazy journalism' ah-ha! But only ONE person died in the hospital, eleven were killed at the scene, and if the reporters didn't know how many were dead WHY DID THEY PUT IT IN THE STORY.

Fuck. It's hard enough to make sense of the world with the facts but when major news outlets are so purposefully stupid putting news being first before news being accurate it makes it impossible to trust any news source, well, you CAN trust one new source.



That's right, some boring asshole in Englandland decided to use caution in reporting last night. When I looked last night after checking Fox, MSNBC and Rawstory, I went to bbc.co.uk and saw the headline and it was about the Fort Hood massacre, just like the other news sources. The main difference? The BBC listed no body count , listed no speculation and simply listed the facts, shooting at Fort Hood, several wounded, several possibly dead more information as the story develops.

Now this morning Fox, MSNBC and Rawstory have scrubbed their sites to try and hide their wild and inaccurate speculation while the BBC simply updated last nights story with the facts to fill in the blanks , the BBC even waited all night to post the shooters picture to make sure they had confirmation that the picture was in fact the shooter.

Some day Americans will wake up and stop buying news from inaccurate, overblown sources. There ought to be some law against sensationalist, inaccurate reporting. It also turns out that one of the facts today in the US media is STILL wrong, the gunman isn't an Arab, he is a Palestinian raised in Virginia. It says so right on the BBC news page and the in depth well researched 'shooters profile' another thing our major media missed. Instead of trying to get a 'scoop' and and running all over the lives and bodies of the victims why can't we just wait and get the story right? The American public deserves it and more importantly the victims of the shooting deserve it.

The Fort Hood shooting is indeed a tragedy, unfortunately a tragedy now compounded by the slanderous and tabloid reporting by our major 'trusted' news outlets.