A May 20 article about a man who was shot and killed after he waved a brick at a San Diego police officer got the attention of El Cajon’s Lottie “Pat” M. Moore, who thought the word “waved” was too gentle after she read a witness account of what had taken place.
Moore pointed out it wasn’t until after the story recapped recent past shootings in the county that she learned of the events that led to the latest use of deadly force.
While I think the word “waved” was correctly used to describe someone who was brandishing a brick as a weapon, Moore is right in saying the story took too long to tell readers what had occurred.
There’s no problem with the beginning of the story. The first three paragraphs summarized what had happened, gave the name and age of the dead man and noted the time and place of the incident. The fourth paragraph said the officer’s name was being withheld to give him time to let his family know he had been involved in a shooting.
The story unraveled in the fifth paragraph that began with a recap of the number of shootings in the county and the city of San Diego this year. The sixth and seventh paragraphs described other recent shooting deaths involving law enforcement.
The only commonality between the latest incident and the ones described was that law enforcement officers were involved. A line saying it was the 11th officer-involved shooting in the county this year would have sufficed until later.
Probably even more pertinent would have been a line saying that it was the third time in less than three weeks that law enforcement officers in San Diego County had been involved in a fatal shooting.
It wasn’t until the eighth paragraph that the story cited a witness who said the dead man had been beating “an older man” who was later identified as the assailant’s father-in-law.
“Not until the ninth and 10th paragraph do we get a picture of what was happening,” Moore wrote.
The description of what led to the shooting came in the 10th paragraph when a witness was quoted as saying the dead man “kept coming” at the officer, who backed off and then “fired five or six times.” The remaining half of the story said the man who was being choked did not require hospitalization, included conflicting opinions about the dead man by neighbors who knew him, and provided more information about the use of deadly force by San Diego police.
Although Moore wants reporters and editors to be more sympathetic to police, that isn’t their role. However, journalists have an obligation to give readers information on the incident in question before going into the history of similar incidents.
The error was plain to Dr. Jack Birnbaum of San Diego. A headline with a story Thursday about the illness of the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant said: “Kobe still suffering botulism symptoms.” The first line of the article said Bryant vomited several times Wednesday and was believed to be suffering from food poisoning.
Food poisoning and botulism are not the same, pointed out Birnbaum, a physician. “He has a nonspecific gastrointestinal disorder which is most likely due to a virus,” Birnbaum wrote.
He said it was not botulism, which is “caused by a bacterially secreted toxin and causes, not vomiting and diarrhea, but rather paralysis, starting at the top of the body with symptoms such as double vision and trouble swallowing.”
Botulism usually progresses to the need for a ventilator to breathe, he said. “This is a rare disease, with only a few cases reported in this country annually, but also one of serious public health concern because of its potential use as a weapon of bio-terrorism.”
Birnbaum called the headline an example of “sloppy journalism,” and said such errors make the newspaper lose credibility.
“Please advise on why I should believe that your standards in the rest of your news reporting are any higher,” he wrote.
I forwarded Birnbaum’s letter to Chuck Scott, sports editor, who acknowledged the paper had erred, and the editor who wrote the headline erroneously thought food poisoning and botulism were the same thing.
No one knows better than editors how one error can call into question other reporting. That’s why, as Scott pointed out in an e-mail to Birnbaum, the Union-Tribune has a firm policy of correcting errors.
