Police Heroism Not Newsworthy at Boing Boing
While feebly attempting to get up to date on all my feed reading, I stumbled upon this post by Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing. Nothing spectacularly unusual there… just a rumors about the level of military operations in New Orleans, and an objection to the term “insurgents” being applied to the armed gangs that have been terrorizing the city. At the bottom, however, I noticed two updates. The first was a letter from a reader adding information. The second, was this:
Update: The Army Corps of Engineers is now reporting that police just shot and killed some of its workers as they crossed a bridge on the way to repair a canal.
“How horrible!” I thought. As there was no link provided, I went to go look up the story myself. As it turns out, the Associated Press apparently misinterpreted the story, and reported it erroneously. The police shot and killed 5 members of an armed gang, who opened fire on the Army Corps of Engineers team as they crossed the bridge. The police successfully protected the workers. Why… these police didn’t make a horrible mistake, they did something good!
I started to compose an e-mail to Xeni, informing her of the correction, but then thought that I should first make sure that she hadn’t already updated the article. She had:
No retraction. No mention that the cops killed the bad guys and protected the good guys. The update was simply deleted. Why is it that news of police malfeasance is newsworthy, but news of police heroism isn’t?
I e-mailed Xeni, expressing my concerns, but have yet to receive a response.
