OPINION: From the editor: Assumptions, info void serve no one

February 10th 5:54 pm | Carey Restino    

This week I was reminded of a lesson I learned a long time ago, one that I learned the hard way, one about assumptions., especially in the absence of information.

One of the saddest stories I ever had to work with was a shooting that happened at a local airport. The first wind I got of it was when the scanner started going crazy one night. Not only were medics heading for the airport, but a doctor had been called to assist the treatment of a gun-shot victim, a toddler, who had been shot in the head. I called one of my reporters and sent him to the airport. The scanner reports sounded bad. I waited. While the reporter tried to figure out what had happened, so did a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News who had been at the airport at the time of the incident seeing his daughter off on a trip to Italy. The Anchorage Daily News at that time was posting this on the internet much more quickly than we were, and so, within an hour and a half, a story was on the Web.

The details were sketchy at best. Police had assisted Federal Marshals in an attempt to apprehend a drug dealer. The drug dealer had his 2-year-old son and infant daughter in the car with him at the time. Gunfire was exchanged, right in front of an airport filled with people. The drug dealer was fatally wounded. The boy was shot in the head.

In retrospect, I'm pretty sure the initial story didn't say that police or marshals shot the boy, but let's just say the assumption was there. In the days that followed, the town erupted in outrage over the police action. Why did they have to apprehend the criminal there, in the parking lot of a busy airport. Why didn't they wait until his children weren't in the car with him. Police knew the children were with him, it turned out. They acted anyway. The anger about the case grew nasty. Some local police found it too much and took a leave of absence because of the trauma. And meanwhile, the facts of the situation still had not reached the public's ear.

It was a few days before the investigating agency released the bombshell: The father had, they claimed, shot his own son. He had, in fact, turned around in the middle of the gunfight and put the muzzle on his boys face and pulled the trigger, they said. He had threatened to do just that, the boy's mother said. The marshals knew he had threatened to do that, and they still went forward. The confusion from the community as it adjusted to this new information was extreme. Some were relieved that our officers were not the ones to cause the damage, while others were even more incensed. It took months before the dust settled, before the letters to the editor stopped pouring in.

In the newsroom, however, we were stunned as well. We realized almost instantly that we had made a grave error, perpetuated by that initial report from the Anchorage Daily News, which we took as fact. We realized that because our minds couldn't imagine anything else, we had drawn an erroneous conclusion: that the police had been responsible for the boy's injury. We had made an assumption, a huge one, and it had colored our reporting of a case, incorrectly framed a situation, and caused the spread of misinformation, which is entire contrary to what most news agencies try to do.

I thought I had learned that lesson very well. There's an old adage in journalism, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." I thought I got that.

But this week, two similar situations came up and in both cases, I failed to apply the lesson I had learned years ago. The first involved the shooting case in Barrow last week. In the release by the North Slope Borough police department, the department said that the alleged shooter was "taken into custody" on Monday morning. That was factually true, and essentially what we wrote, but the piece of information that was missing from that story was that he turned himself in. While it's true that this doesn't change the situation dramatically, and what we wrote was factually correct, I think most readers would have a different response when they learned that this young man was brave enough to face the music voluntarily rather than being found hiding somewhere. I certainly did.

Cue Tuesday, and sadly, another dramatic case involving the death of a young child. New information was being reported by the Anchorage Daily News that had never been released by the borough police, so I called them to ask about it.

What I got was an earful. For about a half-hour, I listened to the frustration of local officers who were dealing with media making assumptions. In the most recent versions of the story aired by statewide media, it was assumed that the children were beaten. The charges against the mother and the boyfriend in the case were second-degree assault, and when one hears assault, one thinks beating, battery, and physical force. While that can be the case, it doesn't have to be. In fact, if you look closely at the charges against both parties, the subsection they are charged under is the one where a person recklessly causes serious physical injury to another person. That can be by creating a dangerous environment, law officers pointed out. One does not have to beat another person to be charged with assault or even second-degree murder.

Assumptions are terrible things. Journalists must be vigilant in guarding against them in their reporting, checking their understanding of the circumstances of each part of a situation. Public perception is a powerful thing, and it's hard to completely correct a mistake after it has been circulated out into the community.

But here's the other thing I'd say about this. Of course officers need to protect the integrity of their investigation, but often times, assumptions creep into the space created in the absence of information. In this case, the borough police chose not to release certain pieces of information that were public record, such as the fact that the district attorney's office had pressed charges against the mother as well as the boyfriend. They chose not to release a lot of other information, too, and I have to wonder if some of that could have been released without compromising the investigation. At the very least, perhaps they could have anticipated the potential confusion over the letter of the law and headed that off at the pass with some clarification.

Both journalists and officials have a responsibility to serve the public and try to keep assumptions and misinformation from infecting an already sad situation. In this case, I believe both entities could have done a better job at that. After all, the goal of everyone involved is the same. Misinformation and assumptions serve no one.