As a cub reporter, the worst part of my job was calling up a friend or family of a recently deceased young adult and asking for a quote on the record. The conversations usually went like this:
ME: I know this is a sensitive time, but can you comment on the ... the person?
THEM: I don't know what you can say when a 20 year old drops dead from an aneurysm.
ME: So that's no comment?
THEM: I'm just ... look, say, 'I can't believe it happened. They were so talented.' I'm going to sit in the dark and drink now.
ME: Me too. Thank you for talking to me.
And then one day, it was a Washington Post reporter who was calling me to ask to comment on my dad's death the day before. I remember thinking, I should make her job easier. And then I remember thinking, There is nothing I want to put out in the public. So I said "No comment," apologized and hung up. I appeared in the article as "A woman who answered the phone said the family had no comment."
The first important thing is: That reporter called. The second important thing is: I decided I had nothing to say. The reporter and I each did our jobs in our specific situations.
In journalism, there is a saying, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." The implication is twofold: Your job requires you to verify everything before you report it as fact, and that sometimes, those verification processes feel awkward and unnatural.
Yesterday, there was a minor tempest among the echo chambers of tech journalism and Twitter. In a nutshell: Michele Catalano wrote a blog entry recounting a phone call from her husband in which he claims six people who flashed badges came to his house to ask him about his Internet search history.
Nowhere in the story she recounts is a specific law enforcement agency mentioned, just "six agents from the joint terrorism task force." Nowhere in the story does she mention whether her husband asked for a warrant before he let these six badge-flashers inside. Nowhere in the story does she question her husband's account.
(If your mother says she loves you, check it out.)
Which is fine -- this is a blog and Catalano's under no obligation to act like a journalist on her own blog.
But what happened next illustrates the differences between tweeting, blogging and journalism. High-profile aggregator Dave Pell led off his daily newsletter with the blog post, giving it the same editorial weight as other daily links from the New York Times, NPR and Mother Jones. Other media outlets that rely on blog-first-report-second models began picking up Catalano's blog post as if it were a reported and verified narrative. Several people I follow on Twitter posted a link to the Medium account. It's understandable: The notion that anyone can come "investigate" based on your Google searches would seem to underline the narrative that has been unfolding over the revelations about the extent of the U.S. government's online surveillance.
The problem is not that Catalano wrote her story. The problem is that blogs at media news outlets reposted first, reported second.
(If your mother says she loves you, check it out.)
It wasn't until late in the afternoon that reporters managed to finish doing actual reporting -- you know, calling law enforcement agencies and verifying the accounts.
The Washington Post had the first story out of the gate, with a quote from the FBI noting that the six badge-flashing men were, in fact, "officers from the Nassau County Police Department who identified themselves as such." Later, a .jpg that is alleged to be from the Suffolk County police department began circulating, saying they were the ones who had visited Catalano's husband. So is the story that the FBI is confused about Long Island geography? Understandable -- all I know of the place is from Billy Joel lyrics.
As of right now, the "real" story is this:
1. The police are saying that they visited Catalano's husband because he had been Googling "pressure cooker bombs" and "backpacks" at a former workplace, and his nervous former employer called the cops.
2. Catalano claims: "We found out through the Suffolk Police Department that the searches
involved also things my husband looked up at his old job. We were not
made aware of this at the time of questioning and were led to believe it
was solely from searches from within our house." Remember, she says she was not at the house during the incident in question and her account is based on the recall of a phone conversation that left her "shaken and anxious."
Her original Medium piece is still up with its lede about six agents from a joint terrorism task force and the statement that "somewhere out there, someone was watching"; there is no editor's note at the top directing readers to any clarification, but a note at the bottom.
Catalano is not talking to the press. She doesn't have to. I imagine it can be bruising to have other people questioning your account of what is true.
But reporters checking out her story does not amount to "hostility" because they're questioning things like, "Who came to the house? Why where they there? What did they say?" It's merely checking things out.
This whole thing reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the Terry Pratchett book, The Truth:
‘People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new
things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They
like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do.
They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not
supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.’
We all hope our mother's love is olds. But if you're a reporter and your mother says she loves you, check it out.
