Dear Mr. Garfield,
I am an occasional listener to your program and generally appreciative of its content. This evening, I heard an interview with someone from (I think)WABC, justifying the practice of "news reporters" interviewing young children who are eye-or-ear-witnesses to crime of unimaginable dimensions. You, Mr. Garfield, issued the interviewee a TOTAL PASS, not even when he compared the practice to reporting a multi-car collision on a highway. Words cannot express the feeling of revulsion that I felt toward this reporter, toward you, and your "editor, Brooke." Your collective, total insensitivity to the feelings of these surviving young children deserves the label of sociopathic behavior. I hope that none of you have children, or ever will. The shallow end of the gene pool is overstocked already.

In recent years I have adopted the habit of not following breaking news because of the number of errors in reporting. Something I've noticed with this particular event is a lack of any kind of summary articles explaining what's known to date. Today I remembered wikinews/wikipedia. They have a fantastic summary of what's known to date and the information appears to be carefully cited:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting

Hey, who were the federal sources that were initially cited?? "Many of the reports relied on unnamed law enforcement officials, typically federal, or even the vaguer "the authorities," in at least one instance." NPR, Folkenflik, Morning Edition, 12/18/12 Why would a new organization go to "sources" not even at the scene of the crime?? This seems to happen a lot, and those sources are never scorned for being WRONG!

No, "oops ... oh well" is not acceptable or inevitable, or, at least, it wouldn't be inevitable if tech-worshippers like Jarvis weren't so quick to discard accuracy as out-moded, unlikely and even undesireable.

Specifically, you don't get off the hook by coming up with your own facts and then labelled them "alleged." Alleged by whom? The police? A doctor? A witness? If the answer is "alleged by me," then you're just a gossip, hiding behind a phrase that doesn't apply. In that context, "alleged" is as much a fraud as the well-worn "some say," and the sad, apologetic "arguably."

Surely, you will have more to say about the coverage of this event. I hope that one part of that will be to draw a contrast between the deluge of coverage on Newtowne/Sandy Hook and the dearth of news about kids killed by Americans in far away Yemen, Pakistan, etc.

I hope parents are giving guidance to their children about how they speak to other kids about this horror. I - and I expect others on this site - loved being the bearer of news from a very early age, getting to "enlighten" my less informed buddies. Luckily for me, that news was never as terrible as this, but I still cringe at how unthinking I was about the impact of dire facts on young ears, and how the playground mob might play them for ghoulish drama. Is this something the media (grown up newshounds) can give guidance on?

Would you lend the weight of OTM to try and change the practice of the media to refer to mass murderers as "The Shooter"? Admitting that it is probably too much to ask that the person's name should never be mentioned, thereby consigning them to being forgotten for all time, they should at least be referred to as what they really are.

One can only speculate on the desire for posthumous notoriety with these tragic individuals. If there is a deterrent effect to knowing that one's name will never be known other than as Mass Murderer versus the perversely glorified label "The Shooter", it's a simple policy to embrace. And it just might help stop the next one.

I would love to hear some discussion of how different interest groups will try to spin this incident to serve their agenda. I'm seeing a lot of posts on facebook, reddit, and blogosphere trying to pin the blame on the news media coverage, insufficient mental healthcare, and guns to name a few. I know if I worked in PR in any of these industries, I would be working around the clock right to shape how the national conversation unfolds.

Sad how quickly the guilty-until-proven-otherwise machine ramped up.
I wonder what it's like to have the nation think you are a child killer (because of someone else's mistake), even if it's only for a few minutes.

Martha is right. This is about vanity and being first : the achilles heal of journalism. Everyone wants be the first.

Also fascinating how often he used "we," "they," and "you," and how rarely he spoke in the first person singular.

Jarvis blames the speed of the Internet, but refuses to acknowledge that being first is about VANITY.

ABC was reporting a possible second shooter in today's shooting. In such a tragedy with law officers, parents, and the press swarming the scene it's amazing that more mistakes weren't reported. The A&E Network replayed a CBS tape of President Kennedy's shooting some decades back. There was speculation of a second shooter, reports of more than Officer Tippit being killed, and other things that proved not to be true.
The internet and cable television gives us instant misinformation as well as information. Those same outlets repeat errors, allow spin to be added, and generally create an entire echo chamber of what might actually be a small detail.