VaporNews: NBC Retracts Claim That Innocent Man Is Mass Murderer

I'm going to write the guy's name so that he has at least some positive Google search returns: Rollie Chance is innocent and did nothing more criminal than show up to work and drop his employee ID during a shooting.

How did Rollie Chance's name go from being unknown, but not thought of poorly, to being blackened by a media that chases the fog? Based on... this.

An ID was found on the floor at the site of a rampage shooting and the conclusion is that the ID must have belonged to the shooter?

Now I don't think the media found the ID. It was a source of theirs who found it, or heard of it being found, and then tipped them.

But they're the ones who reported this.

Most people in these sorts of situations simply do not know what the hell is going on. And that includes the police. The name "Sunil Tripthani" was mentioned as the Boston Bomber after it was so mentioned by Boston Police during the infamous car chase through Boston.

It's simply wrong to assume that someone who babbles knows what he's talking about, as the media often does. They claim they verify these things, but often the "verification" consists of nothing more than a second person saying, "Oh I heard that too."

As in: Yes, I too heard that rumor from someone who knows nothing at all about the situation. I heard that rumor from someone slightly more ignorant myself.

And therefore it's now "verified."

I like John Ekdahl noting the passive voice used for confessing the error. Were I a betting man, I'd bet they didn't use the passive voice for reporting the false claim. I bet they used a nice aggressive active voice. As in, "NBC can now confirm..."

Myself, I have no idea what's going on. I've chased these breaking news stories enough times to know that most people don't know what's going on. The police probably do not know what's going on, not really, or they'd say so.

We'll know they've figured it out when they announce that a press conference about the suspect (or suspects, I have no idea) will be upcoming. It's not as if they're going to sit on that information for a long time.

Apparently it was CBS' John Miller who was the first (or among the first) to let slip the ignorant misreporting on Rollie Chance's criminal name-tag dropping.

What the Heck? According to false reports, There was a Second Shooting at Bolling Air Force Base!!!!111!Eleventy!!!

Those initial reports are now denied.

How the hell does this happen? How can one report on a shooting that didn't even happen?

posted by Ace at 02:37 PM

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