The all-consuming search in Massachusetts for the suspects in Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings gripped the nation with some of the most startling, and at times unnerving, news coverage in years. In the middle of it all were reporters, camera crews and ordinary citizens with cellphone cameras who were suddenly entwined with the story. When the second suspect was surrounded on Friday night, some reporters were so close to the scene that they could count the number of gunshots and flash bang sounds.
The close interaction of reporters with the unfolding events underscored the complex relationship the news media have had with law enforcement authorities this week. News organizations have been both scolded for irresponsible reporting and employed to relay information to the public, sometimes at the same news conference. Earlier on Friday, the authorities thanked news media outlets for spreading the word that Bostonians should take shelter — and cautioned them against repeating secondhand or thinly sourced information.
As thousands of police officers fanned out on Friday, the Massachusetts State Police asked local and national television networks to refrain from showing any live video of police movements, and for a time the Federal Aviation Administration restricted news helicopters from hovering above the area where one of the suspects was believed to be hiding.
Members of the news media by and large complied. “We’ve only been showing the feeds that authorities are comfortable with,” the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo told viewers about 10:45 a.m., 12 hours after the chaotic situation started with a shooting in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston. By then the first suspect was confirmed to be dead. The second suspect’s face was omnipresent on news Web sites and television, sometimes accompanied by the words “on the run.”
Reporters positioned themselves as close as they could to the action in Cambridge and nearby Watertown, at times spurring law enforcement officials to push them back. At one point, Kerry Sanders, a correspondent for NBC, was reporting while crouching for his own safety, in a scene evocative of wartime coverage from the Middle East.
Around the same time, the CNN correspondent Deborah Feyerick, who was near Mr. Sanders, insisted that the channel’s coverage pause so that it could be put on a delay. Such delays are common when broadcasters are concerned about accidentally showing violent or graphic images.
The tension of the day also played out on Twitter, where seemingly every utterance from the local police scanners was repeated, often without any context. Twitter users urged one another not to share what they were hearing on the scanners, and by midday the audio feeds on at least two scanner Web sites had been taken offline temporarily. On Friday night, as word spread that the second suspect had been spotted, more than 250,000 people were simultaneously tuned to a Ustream rebroadcast of a scanner.
The crowd-sourced criminal justice system that flourished online this week was running at full tilt — and drawing sharp criticism — on social news sites like Reddit, where a number of people used guesswork to try to identify the suspects. There was at least one prominent case of mistaken identity late Thursday and early Friday: some users of Twitter, Reddit and other sites homed in on the visual similarities between a Brown University student reported missing in March and one of the suspects identified by the F.B.I. For a time, the student’s name was trending nationwide on Twitter. But reporters, relying on law enforcement sources, shot down the suggestion that the student was a suspect.
The student’s family issued a statement later saying that the speculation had been “painful.”
That misstep came after several days of frenzied, sometimes inaccurate, reporting about the bombings. On Wednesday, the F.B.I. chastised news outlets that mistakenly reported an arrest in the case, saying it could have “unintended consequences.” But the next day, the authorities used the news media to help display photographs of the two men it was seeking as suspects.
On Friday, network programming was pre-empted most of the day for live coverage of the manhunt. As day turned to night, ABC, CBS and NBC scrapped their prime-time schedules for news and refrained from taking commercial breaks. At a 9:30 p.m. news conference after the second suspect was taken into custody, the Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick, thanked the news media and the public in the same breath.
In places where reporters could not tread because of police restrictions, local residents filled in some of the audio and video gaps. From their front stoops and through their windows, they posted videos of an early-morning shootout and photographs of a vehicle said to be involved in a police chase. The material was quickly scooped up by local television stations and Twitter users. On NBC’s “Today” show, Savannah Guthrie was able to interview two Watertown residents sheltering at home, thanks to a Skype video connection. The residents showed images of bullet holes in their walls, presumably from the shootout.
Some reporters and anchors were visibly drained. At The Boston Globe, Brian McGrory, the editor, said that his staff had been working 16- to 18-hour days since the bombings on Monday.
“We are running on adrenaline, and every moment gets more urgent and more strange,” he said. “For everyone in here, it’s an unprecedented story.”
Bill Carter and Christine Haughney contributed reporting.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/media-becomes-part-of-story-in-boston-manhunt.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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