I subscribe to an email service from CNN. They send me "Breaking News" whenever it happens.
Examples of the breaking news might range from a natural disaster like Katrina to the death of an important person like William Rhenquist. It is a great service and I often hear about news quickly that way since I do not watch television or listen to the radio all the time, but I might be at my dest at work reading email.
Overall, I am lucky to get 2 or 3 of these a week.
Over the Labor Day weekend, I got about 10. I don't mind them as they are usually very entertaining, but this weekend, CNN.com was off its game. I feel as though they screwed up with the following two messages.
Sunday, September 04, 2005 6:06 PM-- AP: Army Corps of Engineers says police killed some of its workers as they crossed a bridge on the way to repair a canal.
Sunday, September 04, 2005 6:28 PM -- AP: Army Corps of Engineers says its contractors were not killed by police, but gunmen who fired at them were killed.
Both are factually correct and I am probably reading more into this than I need to, but why didn't they wait to find out the facts before sending out the first email?
It just seems a tad bit fishy to me that the first qualified as breaking news and they didn't have all the details. With all the news organizations competeing to get the news of tragedy into the ears of the American people first, they probably rushed to report this and assumed all the facts were true.
The tragedies in the southeast have been bad enough. At least report the facts correctly and not necessarily first.
2 comments:
call me crazy but isnt that the definition of breaking news? It's just happened and you dont have the full story yet!
Crazy.
The idea of news from CNN should be accurate.
Accurate.
Accurate.
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