John Corbett
2021-02-24 18:43:02 UTC
The very first reports were that the jaws-of-life were used to extract
Woods from his SUV which had rolled down an embankment. I read these early
reports when the story first popped up on my PC and then went right to my
TV and tuned first to the Golf Channel and then ESPN. Not surprisingly,
both had interrupted their scheduled programming to cover the breaking
news story. Both showed the crash site from helicopter cameras. They each
had different vantage points and in neither one did it look to me like the
vehicle had been ripped open by the jaws-of-life yet that report continued
to permeate throughout the evening. I don't know when it got corrected but
I first saw this correction when I woke up this morning.
It's always curious to me how these patently false reports get started but
once they do, it seems everyone picks up on them. Didn't anybody at these
sports and news networks look at the camera shot and wonder about the
report of the jaws-of-life being used to extract Woods from the SUV. It
seems whenever there is a breaking story, reporters forget the rules of
good journalism in an effort to be the first to get information out.
Confirmation takes a back seat. We certainly saw many examples of this in
the JFK assassination. I vividly remember during the Israeli hostage
crisis at the 1972 Olympics in Munich the initial reports indicated that
the nine hostages had been rescued at the airport. It was about a half
hour later when Jim McKay returned to ABC's studio that he reported they
had all been killed in a failed rescue attempt. Then of course we had the
Reagan shooting in which the earliest reports were that he had not been
hit and that Jim Brady had died.
Woods from his SUV which had rolled down an embankment. I read these early
reports when the story first popped up on my PC and then went right to my
TV and tuned first to the Golf Channel and then ESPN. Not surprisingly,
both had interrupted their scheduled programming to cover the breaking
news story. Both showed the crash site from helicopter cameras. They each
had different vantage points and in neither one did it look to me like the
vehicle had been ripped open by the jaws-of-life yet that report continued
to permeate throughout the evening. I don't know when it got corrected but
I first saw this correction when I woke up this morning.
It's always curious to me how these patently false reports get started but
once they do, it seems everyone picks up on them. Didn't anybody at these
sports and news networks look at the camera shot and wonder about the
report of the jaws-of-life being used to extract Woods from the SUV. It
seems whenever there is a breaking story, reporters forget the rules of
good journalism in an effort to be the first to get information out.
Confirmation takes a back seat. We certainly saw many examples of this in
the JFK assassination. I vividly remember during the Israeli hostage
crisis at the 1972 Olympics in Munich the initial reports indicated that
the nine hostages had been rescued at the airport. It was about a half
hour later when Jim McKay returned to ABC's studio that he reported they
had all been killed in a failed rescue attempt. Then of course we had the
Reagan shooting in which the earliest reports were that he had not been
hit and that Jim Brady had died.