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Joe Paterno, who coached 409 football wins and two national championships before being fired by Penn State for not doing enough about an assistant coach's alleged sexual assault, died Sunday morning of lung cancer.
But his death was reported Saturday night, 14 hours before it actually happened.
A student Web site called Onward State reported Paterno's death based on two sources confirming an internal email at the university. The Web site founder said the email was later found to be a hoax. But by then major news media, knowing the end was near, had picked up the story.
One online account of the screw-up mentioned the newsroom adage, "Get it first, but first get it right," attributing it to Walter Cronkite.
Actually, the phrase dates back to 1923, when it became a slogan of the International News Service. INS merged with United Press in 1958 to form UPI, which kept using the phrase.
Walter Cronkite worked for United Press from 1937 to 1950. If he didn't hear the phrase before, he would have seen it on UPI Stylebooks in the 1960s when CBS was a UPI subscriber. UPI was still using it when I went to work for the company's radio network in 1984.
Some older commentators have made much of the fact that this is nothing new, that news organizations got big stories wrong long before there were Web sites and tweets and the like. This is true to an extent. Every few years, commodity markets are briefly jarred by false reports of some major world leader dying or having a heart attack.
We've all heard the line, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," attributed to Mark Twain, who actually did say something similar, though not identical, after a New York newspaper published on obituary for someone else named James Ross Clemens. Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Clemens.
Warning: People are always attributing to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde or Winston Churchill clever remarks made by others. I would almost call it a coincidence that Mark Twain actually made the exaggeration remark.
Despite journalism's long history of getting things wrong, there is really no question that the chance of error has increased as a result of Twitter and Twitter news aggregators.
UPI used to drill into its employees the fact that the company had "a deadline every minute," but a minute seems like an eternity these days.
More importantly, in my opinion, the format of Twitter makes it harder for a report to be couched or caveated. Alleged information is punched out without detailed disclaimers.
An official announcement from the State Department appears in the same type font and point size as a report from a Web site operated by students.
The modern news anchor, news editor or news aggregator of any sort needs to have a sense of caution about the very real possibility that an early report on anything may be wrong. This affects whether you run it, how you run it, and what tone of voice you use if you run it.
Most news anchors I watch seem only to be able to read [some better than others] what is in front of them on the TelePrompter - stories that are usually written by someone else. I wonder where the analysis [or caution] would come in...-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[It is not true that anchors only read te TelePrompTer. Most have computers in their anchor desks and an increasing number are also tracking news tweets on their iPhones. The modern anchor needs also to be an editor, with the judgment to properly handle all the information and quasi-information laid before them. HMD]
Posted by: Chris | 01/23/2012 at 09:42 AM
If so, Howard, then a lot of anchors need more practice to develop that judgment. Many of the local anchors just seem to be reading text, and about the only thing they can change-up on is when the floor crew puts up the wrong video to the story the anchor is reporting on.
Posted by: Chris | 01/24/2012 at 10:59 AM