The Fort Hood Incident: Slight Discrepancies
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My sympathies and best wishes go out to those who lost someone in the Fort Hood shooting. It was a needless tragedy (like Iraq).
This event was yet another study in press coverage. It is said that one needs to note everything that first appears in the press because after that, the spin gets applied.
The reason I bring this up is because I have heard and read several conflicting reports:
- there was one shooter
- there were three shooters
- the shooter was dead
- the shooter was alive
Now, it should be fairly obvious to most people that there is rather a large difference between one and three shooters. Likewise, there is a huge rift between dead and alive. These aren’t the kind of mistakes a trained reporter should make. These aren’t the kind of mistakes a five year old would make.
I wasn’t there so I don’t know what happened but I can assure you that my forensically untrained eye can spot the numerical as well as respirational discrepancies. I am not even making any claims - just wondering about the slight differences in facts reported.
One Comment
MikeHenley
November 7th, 2009
at 8:20am
Give the media credit for overcovering this thing like crazy, but don’t blame them for reporting what they were being told.
Remember it was total chaos for a while and many incomplete and even wrong bits of information floated around, even from the Killeen police who were there (the cop who shot Hasan was a lady cop from KPD, working as security on base) and the soldiers. Two people other than the shooter were arrested, at first, suspected initially of being involved (chaos working again).
The shooter was badly wounded and thought to be dead at first, but doctors later reported that he was in a coma, but still alive, and transferred to the military hospital facility in San Antonio. The base wen into total lock down and the Army was officially saying almost nothing at first, so eyewitnesses provided a lot of incomplete and sometimes wrong information. In this case the media was doing the job of reporting a tragedy and keeping nervous listeners as informed as they could.
Kick ‘em when they deserve it, but in this situation, their biggest crime (in my eyes) is continuing to milk the situation unceasingly.
Thanks,
Mike in Temple