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Sunday, September 23, 2001
Truth was casualty in rapid reporting
Inaccuracies in TV reports on Alice man helped fuel public anxiety
By Deborah Fisher
Caller-Times Editor
   ON Tuesday, misinformation was reported on local television about the arrest of a Pakistani man in Alice that caused family members watching television at home to call loved ones at work, worried about their safety.
   Some saw a report on one station that listed specific buildings in downtown Corpus Christi that, in the context of the report, could have been misconstrued as possible targets.
   This and rapidly spreading rumors caused enough concern to evacuate at least one downtown building and a hubbub of activity in trying to get and disseminate correct information so that people would feel safe to come back to work the next day.
   There were basically three major things wrong in TV news reports Tuesday about the man arrested in Alice on a charge of an immigration violation:

That guns had been confiscated.

That aerial photographs of downtown Corpus Christi had been found.

That there might be some connection with the recent terrorist attacks.
   Inaccuracies
   First, weapons were not confiscated, although ammunition was.
   Second, photographs were found, but the photographs were shot at ground-level and described by the FBI as something a tourist might take of a skyline. They were not aerial photos, which would imply they were shot from an aircraft or from the sky somehow.
   Third, the man has not been in any way linked to any terrorist activity, according to the FBI. Nor was he arrested on any suspicion of terrorism. He was arrested on an immigration violation charge.
   To understand how things went wrong in our TV media reports, it is important to understand the rapid nature of rumors, especially in light of current events; the squeezed time period broadcast news has to get, verify and edit information; and the reliance the media have on anonymous, unnamed sources who seem to have knowledge of an event, but really are just passing along second-hand or hearsay information.
   Network affiliates
   I will focus here on television reporting teams of the three main network affiliates: KRIS-TV (Channel 6), KIII (Channel 3) and KZTV (Channel 10).
   From a review of newscast tapes, here are some of the major missteps that fueled the misinformation and misperceptions that day:

At 5 p.m. on Channel 3, anchor Holly Ames opened saying "The FBI's investigation on the terrorist attack on America is hitting very close to home." Then at 6 p.m., anchor Joe Gazin opened by saying, "There's a new local connection in the ongoing investigation of those terrorist attacks." Reporter Dave Johnson at 6 o'clock told viewers that the man was "being investigated for possible, and we underscore the word 'possible,' terrorist activity."

At 5 p.m., Channel 6 opened its report saying that "A Pakistani national is arrested in Alice on weapons charges" while video of the burning World Trade Center and New York aftermath was shown. Then, later, the reporter, Allison Smith, said that "even more alarming" were "aerial photographs" found of One Shoreline Plaza, Wilson Plaza and the Frost Bank downtown. "What was he planning to do with those photographs? We don't know," the reporter said.

Channel 3, which had no information on "aerial photographs" in its 5 p.m. report, reported at 6 o'clock that "several boxes" of photographs had been found and "of particular interest was that the pictures appeared to zoom in on the very, very tallest buildings in the picture and left the rest of the picture pretty much out of focus."

Channel 10 also reported at 6 p.m. similar misinformation - that weapons had been confiscated and aerial photographs had been found.

Channel 6 at 6 p.m. listed five "seized weapons" it had earlier referred to as "high-powered."
   Call for calm
   Each station interviewed the mayor of Alice, who called for calm. And each interviewed people who knew the arrested man or had been in his store and who said they were surprised about the allegations. And each of the reporters on the scene in their own way seemed to try to qualify the "shocking" information ("shocking" was a word that showed up in the newscasts) by saying much of this was still under investigation.
   Probably the most solid reporting was the obtaining of the affidavit related to the case filed in federal court. Channel 6 obtained this.
   But how did so much go so wrong so quickly?
   Bob Doguim, the FBI media representative in Houston whose division includes the Corpus Christi office, said he gave many interviews that day to reporters - television, newspaper and radio. "I couldn't keep up," he said. He said he was doing interviews from the office, from the car, from his home.
   He first heard of the false aerial photograph story Tuesday from an FBI agent in Corpus Christi who called him to tell him that it was being reported in the Corpus Christi media. There were no "aerial" photographs and no weapons confiscated by the FBI, Doguim said.
   Problem is, both the Channel 6 and Channel 3 news directors said their reporters never talked with Doguim. The reporters tried, couldn't get him, so instead relied on familiar - and what seemed like reliable - law enforcement and other sources in the field who told them what the FBI had found. Unfortunately, those non-FBI, anonymous officials were giving information that did not match the FBI's information.
   Rapid pace
   Here's how Doug Tisdale, the news director at Channel 3 described it: "Things were just happening so fast, which is not an excuse. Dave (the reporter) was trusting his sources. I trusted Dave." On the Gazin lead-in about the "new local connection" in the terrorist attacks, Tisdale admitted, "That was a bit bold."
   Sandra Forero-Richards, news director at Channel 6, said the mistakes in her newscasts on the weapons sprouted from a list on the affidavit that her staff was quickly reviewing before a newscast. The affidavit was clear that the weapons listed were weapons the man had admitted to purchasing. But because unnamed area law enforcement officials had told her staff that weapons were confiscated, her staff made the leap that these were confiscated weapons, she said.
   So how did the news stations recover and correct the information?
   Channel 3 got a bit more right about the story at 10 o'clock on Tuesday. Virginia Broady was the first to say photos of buildings were "tourist-like."
   Channel 6 actually realized its mistake with its weapons list, Richards said, but because of an editing problem, did not make clear the corrected information in its 10 p.m. report.
   Not until the next day at 5 p.m. and again at 6 p.m. did Channel 3 announce it was "clarifying" the story and telling viewers that the man had only been arrested on federal immigration violations, no weapons had been seized, and the FBI had reported no link to any terrorist action, Tisdale said.
   Story corrected
   Channel 10 corrected its story at noon on Wednesday with longtime local newsman Walter Furley saying that the FBI told KZTV that the information about the arrest had been distorted by the media - that the man had only ammunition, no guns and no aerial photographs.
   Channel 6 never did anything it called a correction or clarification, Forero-Richards said. Instead, 6 chose to update the story with correct information. "As we were putting stories on the air, we were giving them better information every time," she said. Channel 6, she noted, never used the word "terrorist" in its reports, although the video of New York during the announcement of the Alice arrest, she admitted, was "the most severe mistake we had."
   That video, she said, was scheduled to go with a different story on New York, not with the Alice story, but was mistakenly allowed to run at the same time. It was pulled after the 5 p.m. newscast.
   Interestingly, the person whom I talked with who had the most praise for the local media was Doguim, the FBI media agent. He remarked about how quickly the local news media recovered from reporting the misinformation by fixing it the next day. And he thought that there was a true effort by the reporters he talked with to get the information right.
   When events become most exciting and people are calling the news media to tell them about the latest amazing and shocking rumor they heard - and there's a lot of that going around lately - it is our duty as journalists to listen and investigate.
   'Move carefully'
   That didn't happen successfully Tuesday night and the buzz around town was hot. It was the first thing my husband quizzed me about when I got home. With more time to work the story, the Caller-Times article the next morning was accurate. But the misinformation the day before created such frenetic activity that on our Internet site, caller.com, the Alice story drew the highest number of hits of any story since we've kept track of local Internet traffic.
   "Everyone is so keyed up on this thing," Tisdale with Channel 3 said. "Our phones have been a frenzy" since the Sept. 11 attack with people calling in about suspicious things they think they see in their neighborhoods.
   I imagine the media is not the only one receiving calls. In fact, the whole story of the man in Alice began when the FBI received complaints on Sept. 12, Sept. 14 and Sept. 17 that the Pakistani man had weapons.
   For journalists, however, Tisdale, summed it up well:
   "In broadcast media, there is a competition to move fast and get it out, but in cases like these, we've got to move slow and move carefully."


Caller-Times Vice President and Editor Deborah Fisher can be reached by phone at 886-3607 or by e-mail at fisherd@caller.com

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