I was pretty surprised yesterday to hear they’d arrested a suspect in the Boston Massacre case so quickly. I guess my surprise was justified. That’s what I get for paying attention to anything CNN has to say. Not that I was alone in my gullibility. All the “serious” news folks dutifully repeated whatever CNN had to say – AP, BBC, CBC, you name it. Not being a serious news person, I’m not sure how shit like this happens. <\/p>\n
I tried to see what CNN had to say about it, but they’ve more or less scrubbed the incident from their website as far as I can tell (not that I spent a lot of time looking). Near as I can tell some law enforcement officer (or “LEO” as we hip crime show watchers refer to them – as in “alert the local LEOs that we have a serial killer on the loose”) was referring to the “Lord and Taylor” surveillance video and said, “we got him.” <\/p>\n
This went from “they’ve identified a suspect” to “an arrest is imminent” to “they have a suspect in custody” to “an arrest has been made” in about ten minutes. Now, based on my years of watching “Lou Grant” on teevee, I could swear that there used to be some kind of unwritten rule about getting something they used to call “confirmation.” Like, verify the information with at least 2 independent sources or something like that. I’m assuming it was an unwritten rule, because if it was written down, maybe they’d still be fucking following it.<\/p>\n
But never mind confirmation. How about clarification. As in asking, “when you say ‘we go him’ do you mean you know who he is, have obtained corroborating evidence, and have arrested him? Or do you just mean you saw some guy with a bag in the video so now you’re gonna go look for him?”<\/p>\n
I would think that would be important to know – but as I said, I don’t work for a major news organization or anything. <\/p>\n
I know it’s all about ratings these days and being “first,” but didn’t there used to be a certain amount of pride in actually being “correct?” Well, whatever.<\/p>\n
So, congrats to the NRA today, as they managed to pay off a large enough minority of US Senators to prevent universal background checks for buying guns. Yet another proud moment in American history. And a proud moment for Republicans, as well. No matter what the issue, figure out what’s the least you can do, and then do less.<\/p>\n
A rather impressive explosion down there in West, TX. “Fire at the fertilizer plant” are not the words you want to hear if you’re a volunteer firefighter. Or if you live (or should I say, “used to live”) nearby. It’s not gonna be a pretty sight when the sun comes up this morning, I don’t think. Hopefully there won’t be too many people killed by it.<\/p>\n
If only those firefighters had guns. Oh, wait. It’s Texas. They probably did have guns. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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