Newtown shooting media mistakes: Is it okay to get facts wrong?

In the first hours after Friday's massacre in Newtown, there was a volley of information and a flurry of corrections. Two shooters .. one .. a mother who taught there .. who didn't .. .. a name that was wrong .. the gunman buzzed in ... broke in... And so it continued. Breaking news with all-news television, ready radio and online updates, tweets, postings and blogs can be a cacophony. Yes, journalists can make mistakes and correct them but in this era of information-surround ... Is it okay to get facts wrong? Again? And again? And still?

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Newtown shooting media mistakes: Is it okay to get facts wrong? - Panel

As the story unfolded last Friday of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, news outlets went into overdrive. Reporters, photographers, tweeters, citizen journalists all rushed to get the story out -- often without letting the truth in. Breaking news creates a frenzy of competition. But the Sandy Hook reporting was feverish. Many of the initial reports were extremely misleading.

Reporters and editors often get it wrong. Almost any major news event requires ongoing corrections. We aired a clip from a moment from March 1981 when U.S. President Ronald Reagan was shot. It was reported by ABC news anchor Frank Reynolds.

The criticism after Sandy Hook was swift: the media must be more careful... How can reporters be taken seriously if they keep fixing mistakes? But some in the media say it's not really that big a deal. It's the nature of digital and electronic journalism to constantly update and correct previous information and viewers and listeners are smart enough to understand.

Eric Deggans is a tv and media critic for the Tampa Bay Times and author of a new book called Racebaiter. She joined us from Tampa Bay, Florida.

Chris Seper is the CEO of MedCity Media and a former journalist who's work has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor. He joined us from Cleveland, Ohio.

And Romayne Smith Fullerton is an associate professor in the faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University and the ethics editor at the Canadian online journalism magazine, J-Source. She was in St. Marys, Ontario.

This segment was produced by The Current's Shannon Higgins and Naheed Mustafa.

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