Double Check

摘要

It's time for another of those cautionary notes that are occasionally necessary in this always on, always reporting, always posting world.The reporting on last week's Washington Navy Yard shooting, which was essentially an eight-hour ongoing breaking news story, was a tragedy of errors, thanks to a combination of premature reporting and, apparently, ill-informed sources.Not to belabor the issue, but when the number of shooters is wrong, the weapon is wrong, and even the name of the shooter is misreported in some quarters, nothing is right. And in an age of tweets and text alerts and instant crawls, it's actually even more imperative to keep "oops, this is what we really meant" from becoming the New Normal.