When breathless news came Wednesday that CNN almost singly had a scoop nobody else had, that a suspect had been arrested in the Boston Marathon bombing, there was the fleeting feeling that here was a chance for this maligned and tarnished news operation to straighten and righten itself and rise to a former prominence.
That didn’t last long.
After crowing on the arrest, and building on it to the degree they had a race-based description (“dark-skinned”) and speculated on the arraignment and trial, word came from a more plugged in correspondent that no, nobody had been arrested.
An unusual FBI statement later brought an even more sternly worded denial, warning about people getting ahead of the story.
Well.
The trio left on the corner of a Boston street, checking their phones incessantly, didn’t take the time to say something like: Well, we apologize for that; we will slow down and double check before we report something wrong again. Instead, they talked about how this kind of thing might have happened, how one end of the law enforcement (i.e., those in the know) may have different from those at another end (i.e., lowly people who find time to call John King). They talked and talked and talked, as they always do.
The Boston bombing is one of those occasions when the need for people to know what’s going on is huge, and the amount of information available to give them is miniscule. In fact, it’s about as small as it was when the bombs exploded during the event Monday, killing three and injuring more than 170.
They know that the bombs were improvised devices made out of pressure cookers filled with nails and an incendiary device and hidden in a duffle bag. So in addition to the incessant footage of the building exploding and the old guy falling over, there was a second repeated loop of a computer animated pot filled with nails and put in a duffle bag. It was almost like a recipe for further mayhem, easier to cook than noodles.
Rather than clear their throats, clear the air and go to maybe some other areas that still demand coverage, such as the gun vote in Congress, they kept standing at that street corner, looking at phones, and jabbering their way out of it. This is not the manner of solid reporting, and it was another low point for CNN.