Poynter on the Record

... It was a day of delicate backtracking for the news organizations and television programs that, two weeks earlier, had breathlessly announced the news that John Mark Karr had been arrested in the death of JonBenet Ramsey. News of Mr. Karr's arrest had landed on the front pages of newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, and filled hundreds of hours on the cable talk shows that had obsessively covered the case from its beginning in 1996. ...

... Media ethicists, citing journalistic missteps in the accusations against Richard A. Jewell over the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, immediately questioned the renewed attention that news organizations placed on Mr. Karr.

Bob Steele, who teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said there was a rush to judgment over Mr. Karr's involvement. "There were headlines on cable news shows that directly said or implied that the case was solved," Mr. Steele said. "That was journalistically problematic, and it was ethically suspect to do that. The pieces of the puzzle were incomplete when the Karr story broke."

"There were a lot of unnamed sources flying around in that first week, and that's really dangerous," he added. "There were some sources saying, 'This is the guy, we have him nailed.' "
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