by Juliana Pelaez
From movies to the classroom setting, you are told that if you want to be seen first, before other news outlets, you must be first on the scene. You want to be the one reporting on the story before anyone else. But in wanting to be first, reporters must be careful to separate fact from fiction.
Big time news outlets like CNBC, Bloomberg, The Daily, and NBC were tricked into believing that two men heading out of Twitter headquarters, in October of 2022, were employees. Aftera large number of officials and employees were laid off from their positions it was assumed that they were a part of this group. In fact those two individuals were pranksters posing as Twitter employees with devised names.
CNBC’s reporter, Deirdre Bosa, was the first to interview them, asking how they were dealing with the aftermath of their termination. “They are visibly shaken,” Bosa stated. “Daniel tells us he owns a Tesla and doesn’t know how he’s going to make payments.”
ABC7 Bay Area reporter Suzanne Phan tweeted out the story stating that one of the men said he was terminated after a zoom meeting.
Other reporters on the scene and online were hounding the two individuals for a story. In the absence of contacting Twitter management to understand what happened and questioning if these men were who they really said they were, the story is mere words. It then had become something that these reporters were wanting, not something they tried to find. While it does make sense that reporters are always on a deadline and editors want a story, the facts must come first. And in this instance, the facts came second.
Another report related to the Twitter aftermath comes from what we wrote as one of the deadline writings in our final last quarter. A group of men boarded a school bus carrying Jewish grade-school children in West Rogers Park, yelled antisemitic slurs and gave the Hitler salute, according to officials with the Simon Wiesenthal Center (Chicago SunTimes).
The incident occured on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that destroyed almost all synagogues across Germany in 1938. Several people were interviewed about the incident citing this anniversary and how it was harmful to the Jewish community. The story was reported by both the Chicago SunTimes and NBC Chicago—two news operations that people rely on for daily news—and turned out to be fabricated.
Personally, when reading through the story, I thought it was true. I remember I wrote it in a way to explain what was wrong in the situation. Attempting to add the minor details that weren’t added in the story beforehand. It wasn’t until near the end of our time that I discovered that the story wasn’t true and I couldn’t change the direction I already had.
The difference though in what I wrote to what reporters put out was that they shared this to the public without fact checking. They didn’t wait for the footage from the bus to tell the factual story.
Being in any news outlet, the public depends on you to have the news be factual and true. But, in some cases the truth falls wayside to the rush to puiblish. What must be done to prevent this is to take the time on getting the facts and reporting the story that is available. Not what we want to have.
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