New York Times Changes Story in Less Than 20 Minutes -10/2/11

http://www.rense.com/1.imagesH/splashprotest.jpg

 

 

Eh, could be more monumental.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/10/why_did_the_new_1.php

" Why Did the New York Times Change Their Brooklyn Bridge Arrests Story?
"The above photo of juxtaposed screenshots from the New York Times website has been making the rounds on Facebook, and it shows two very different takes for the same story on yesterday's Brooklyn Bridge arrests. The screenshot on the left, from 6:59 p.m., appears to reflect what many protesters are saying: The police tricked them into marching on the bridge. At 7:19 p.m., any mention of the police allowing demonstrators onto the bridge was removed from the lede. Why did they make this change?

We asked City Room Bureau Chief Andy Newman, and he said the following:

At every point yesterday as the story unfolded, we offered the most complete account we could of a large and chaotic scene that could not be grasped by any one person. The earlier version had almost no input from the police. The later version reflected the accounts of the police, protesters and of course our reporters at the scene. The later version, read in its entirety (not just the one highlighted sentence in that photo), reflected the various perspectives much more thoroughly. The final version of the piece was more thorough still.

It's worth noting that one of their reporters at the scene, freelancer Natasha Lennard, was among the over 700 arrested. The original City Room report that Lennard contributed to says that police did in fact allow protesters onto the bridge:

After allowing marchers from the Occupy Wall Street protests to claim the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge and get partway across, the police cut the marchers off and plunged into the crowd and began making arrests around 4:15 p.m. Saturday.

That paragraph is now nowhere in the story."

Eh. The first one strongly put the cops in a bad light. The second one didn't assign blame. Even if the cops baited them, that's a different story. This seems like basic event reporting.

That seems to beg the question - if the initial reporting puts the cops in a bad light, must the story be changed to eliminate this?

Depends on the type of story. Like I said, the bit seemed to be vanilla, photo-based event reporting, not something investigative. Unless it was widely known/publicized that the cops planned this, this wasn't the place for that information.

This isn't to say that the NYT didn't get a nasty phonecall or two.

"Unless it was widely known/publicized that the cops planned this"

No, even if they didn't plan anything, they let the protesters go on the bridge, then once the protesters were on the bridge, changed their minds and arrested them. That is wrong, and they should not have any grounds to arrest protesters for simply being on the bridge, if they allowed them to be there to begin with.

That's not really what I'm talking about, but I agree.

I suspect it is on facebook, because these people are desperately seeking some type of grand narrative.

But what it could mean is something simple. 

The police allow a few on the bridge.  And then there is a tense conflict, once they are there.  Then the police seperate them from the rest to avoid the conflict spreading.  And then arrests are made.

Most of what happens in these mob movements is that police and the mobs make each other crazier than they could possibly be individually.  And so they don't know any other way of handling themselves, given that they've given up on rational thinking hours earlier.  Or maybe they were never rational to begin with.

Yep, I recently read that they blocked the road for 4 hours straight.  So a few hundred people can get their way vs. thousands of drivers.  Not very democratic of these 'democratic anti-capitalists'.