A Look At the Boston Bombing Reporting

By Nicole Mosca

With all of the tragedies over the past week, families are hugging each other, calling those they care about and sending prayers to those lives forever changed.

We once again have witnessed the news outlets competing for the latest and most up-to-date breaking headlines. Fortunately, for one young man, not everything on the internet is true. Unfortunately, not everyone takes this into account.

A photo of a teenager was highlighted in a newspaper as a suspect, and now he fears going to school due to the harassment he has received from this report. When he saw this photo, he went to the authorities to clear his name, but has been harassed on social media from complete strangers receiving over 200 messages.

The paper is standing by their story.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/18/teen-portrayed-bombing-suspect/2095259/

What we are forgetting is that journalism is not like instant pudding. You can’t just add 140 characters and have a story. There are people to interview and sources to check. When we live in a world of having everything at our finger tips, we tend to forget these simple steps of news reporting. There was a surge of postings on Facebook and Twitter following the bombings in Boston, where not only users were posting some misinformation, but so were the news outlets. There was so much conflicting information that CNN released an article of these virtual mistakes.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/16/tech/social-media/social-media-boston-fakes/index.html?sr=fb041713bostonfake12a

Is there a way to prevent this in the future? Is this the new way of obtaining information during an emergency? I hope not.