Not terrorists
You remember those suspect terrorists, arrested in Plymouth after one of them was caught apparently spraying graffiti?
Three men and two women, who were thought to be political activists, were taken into police custody on Friday after police officers discovered imitation weapons, fireworks and political literature during a search of a flat in Plymouth.
Bet you didn’t hear that they were also released without charge, though.
Yep. That’s 422 reports of the arrest, 10 of the release. Only 3 news organisations reported the releases, and all of them as local news.
If we don’t start caring about the other end of this kind of story, then we run the risk of reinforcing paranoid overreaction. The public hears about all these suspect terrorists being arrested; in the absence of any information to the contrary, the terrorist threat seems ever more present, and the disproportionate response is never seen for what it is.
Well, you know now. What are you going to do about it?
2009-04-14 16:47 UTC. Comments: 1.
BW
Wrote at 2009-04-14 20:23 UTC using Opera 9.64 on Windows XP:
Good question, have you got a recommendation?I’m pretty cynical when it comes to the mainstream media, so subconsciously assumed that what you have highlighted above was the case already. However, I also don’t read a story and then actively chase it up a week down the line like I probably should.
What’s worse: paranoid overreaction to ‘terrorists’, or cynical underreaction to ‘news’? The former irritates me, the latter is me…
Being a techie I’m tempting to apply technology to the problem. How about a website to do the following:
*1.* Act as a normal news aggregator
*2.* Allow readers to ‘follow’ stories – now stories occuring at a later date with matching key words/phrases (location, names, etc) are highlighted
*3.* Active community readers identify positive/negative changes to the story (u-turn, fake story, escalation, understatement, overstatement, etc)
*4.* The site identifies trends over time
*5.* New news!
Of course, the only people who would use it would be those who had a mistrust for the media in the first place, or a vested interest in a particular story. The mainstream media is unlikely to report on their own failure or sensationalism.
Another angle here is that one of those local news sources was a regional BBC site, so if a story was reported nationwide isn’t there some oversight/regulation (due to the unique way the BBC is funded) that could make them report follow-ups at the same level? I suppose that would make the 6 o’clock news a bit longer…
Cheers, apologies for length