I was standing with microphone in hand, staring into a camera on a brisk evening in Modesto, California awaiting my cue for a live-shot, when in my earpiece I heard the anchor read bits of a story that began with five Arab men” and “FBI.” Twenty seconds later, the anchor stated that the nationalities of these men were unconfirmed, their whereabouts within the United States were uncertain, the names attached could be false, and that they werecnot wanted in connection to any terrorist activities. I assumed that I must have missed out on other elements of the story and went back to focusing on my piece. When I watched the same story in its entirety during the late newscast that night (the most-watched 10 p.m. newscast in the country), I was a bit shocked to find that there was no more information.
  
Though it has been almost a year and a half since the attacks on the United States, hyper-patriotic tendencies still flutter through flag-waving newsrooms. On December 29, 2002, the FBI released an incredibly ambiguous plea for public assistance as it sought the whereabouts of five men for whom it had neither certain names, dates of birth, or countries of origin. The government alleged that these five men–whose pictures they had obtained through an illegal passport trafficker–were in the United States. Not only did the media cooperate by trumpeting such scant facts on the government’s behalf (and sometimes mangling them along the way), it also fell silent in sharing responsibility for the dissemination of an errant message.

As a media person in the “age of terror,” I knew the arguments. It was television performing its obligations to public safety, right? We the media, were helping get the bad guys off the streets, right? We had the ability to post pictures of wanted men on the screen, to awake a citizenry that otherwise might not be “vigilant” enough in these times of extra caution.

Driving to the newsroom the next day, I kept hearing the same story on the largest news radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area, again, with little to no facts. Without pictures, I couldn’t fathom the utility of carrying a radio broadcast stating that there were “five Arab men … suspects …” at large, countries of origin/birth dates/names unconfirmed.

When I compared the wire copy on which the previous night’s script had been based with the source (the FBI’s press release, along with a phone call to the FBI press office in Washington, D.C.), I was dismayed. The FBI had made sure to specify that these individuals were not “suspects,” nor was there any mention of their nations of origin, while the media carrying the message had so casually inserted “Arab” and “suspect” into its copy. All it would have taken was a phone call or a click of the mouse.

Racial bias in the media

The wire story took a costly liberty. The need for speed led the wire copy I saw to read, “FBI searching for 5 illegal Arab immigrants.” Similar or identical headlines ran in the Anchorage Daily News, the Houston Chronicle, and the Bergen Record. As the story spread, the language intensified, culminating with this from Fox News: “FBI Searching for Five Suspected Arab Terrorists.”
  
They report, I decide? Isn’t that the Fox slogan? More generally, was the media being “fair and balanced”? It wasn’t just about one television network or one small paper in Alaska. The blame lies with all of us in the media. We were caught up in what I can only surmise was a patriotic zeal that allowed us to justify the injection of inaccurate and potentially dangerous adjectives, and further, to veil a lack of facts.

I began asking everyone I could find about the rationale of putting loaded information out there without a single confirmed fact behind it, other than the five mug shots. What if we had to run just the pictures of the FBI’s ten most wanted domestic suspects–without any information on their whereabouts, any evidence of criminal activity, no confidence in their names, ages, or places of origin. Would we? Most responded with a resounding “No.” Why then, had everyone been so quick to broadcast this information?

I wrote to the wire service, FOX News, and the local news radio station in San Francisco asking how they could glean such a different news story from the FBI press release. Only a gentleman from the radio station wrote back, saying “[The reporter] did not write this story from an FBI news release. It came from AP.” I didn’t know whether to be comforted or alarmed.

Within two days, news reports surfaced from Lahore, Pakistan, that one of the five men was a jeweler, who recognized himself while reading an article with the FBI pictures. Though he admitted to having used fabricated travel documents before, he claimed never to have been in the United States. Meanwhile, the FBI, the American media, and public continued to search for him on U.S. soil. Eleven days after the initial press release, the FBI withdrew the pictures from their site and announced their decision not to publish fourteen more pictures of men wanted for questioning. The primary reason for their about face, besides the egg on that face, was that the credibility of the informant–the same one who turned over the original five–was less than they had initially suspected, They had, in essence, been lied to.

It wasn’t just the FBI that had fallen for a lie. The town clarions had blown loudly and proudly only days before, running pictures just below the fold, or in the first block of newscasts. As always, the retractions/corrections pages in the aftermath haven’t taken responsibility for poor judgment or made any admission of guilt. Instead, consumers are treated to news stories on the layers of complexity in vetting information at an agency as large and powerful as the FBI. There aren’t diminishing marginal return studies that can pinpoint when the joke got old and when the townspeople stopped running to check on the boy who cried wolf, but we might as well start counting.

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Written by
Hari Sreenivasan, Inthefray.com Contributor

TOPICS > FBI SEARCH >

FBI press release
URL: http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel02/122902press.htm
The original December 29, 2002 press release

“FBI searching for 5 illegal Arab immigrants”
URL: http://www.adn.com/24hour/front/story/695165p-5148190c.html
By John Solomon | Associated Press | Anchorage Daily News | December 30, 2002

“FBI Searching for Five Suspected Arab Terrorists”
URL: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,74118,00.html
Fox News | December 30, 2002

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In The Fray Contributor