Updated: While the story of the Tucson shootings spread, early reports were mixed and often conflicting. This is often the case in a breaking and developing event. However, incorrect reports that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had died spread across the Twittersphere, sparked by tweets by NPR News, Reuters and CNN — some of which were subsequently deleted. Here’s a look at some of the tweets, in rough order:
Reuters was one of the first to put out the news on Twitter. Others, like BreakingNews then retweeted the story. They attributed it to Reuters:
A short time later, Reuters deleted its tweet that the congresswoman had died.
At about the same time, NPR (@nprnews) and BBC News (@bbcbreaking) reported that she died, too. Both have NOT deleted those tweets as of this writing. (Disclosure: I have worked as a consultant to NPR, but am not doing so currently.)
Andy Carvin, who is the senior strategist on the social media desk at NPR, explains in our comments section the timeline of NPR’s reporting and the reasoning behind some of the decisions: “I posted that she had been killed because that is what we were reporting, and as soon as I saw we were backing off from that assertion, I posted the followup noting that as well. I very briefly considered deleting the incorrect tweet, but concluded it was both pointless and inappropriate.” Separately, NPR’s executive editor posted an apology for the initial report which sparked NPR’s tweet.
The BBC’s Alex Gubbay writes in our comments: “As many other news organisations did, we believed the information to be correct at the time, but updated accordingly as soon as we realised that was not the case. In terms of deleting tweets, we didn’t feel it appropriate or helpful to do so, and that remains the case now.”
CNN’s political director, Sam Feist, said CNN confirmed she was dead, and his tweet was RT’d by @cnnbrk. Feist’s report was deleted on Twitter, as was the cnnbrk report.
Later in the day, NPR Correspondent David Folkenflik responded in a series of tweets to some of the criticism about NPR’s early incorrect report. “Not hard to believe eyewitnesses might be convinced she was dead & say so,” he wrote in part. “It’s ahistorical to think initial reports in earlier incidents were uniformly accurate, tho journos should be accountable.”
While we can debate this point all day, to us the more interesting question is this: Should you delete tweets in cases like this?
One argument in favor is to stop or slow the retweeting. But this is difficult, if not impossible. And it is tempting but impractical to call for a squad of people to monitor tweets. For hours after it was reported she was alive, people kept discovering the original tweet that she was dead, retweeting it to their friends without seeing the update. In several cases, the retweet of the incorrect report came three or more hours after the report first spread:
The counter-argument is that, in a breaking story, there are bound to be conflicting, sometimes erroneous reports. As one journalism professor tweeted, Lots of error in media, Twitter but remember, following breaking news is a continuing effort, not a one-shot-now-I-know effort.”
Adds NPR’s Carvin, “Deleting the original tweet wouldn’t have altered the fact that many of those followers had already seen the mistaken tweet and retweeted it. So based on that reasoning, I decided to be transparent about the mistake and not try to hide it.
So we ask: is deleting a tweet after the fact a lack of transparency, especially if any subsequent tweets don’t admit the error? Is a news organization obliged to tweet that it was wrong? Does the retweet function make such actions moot? We strongly believe in transparency, as do many of you. But whether deleting tweets is a responsibility or not, and whether a news organization must tweet that it was wrong, should lead to serious discussions in all newsrooms.
What do you think?
