By Julie Bosman
The New York TimesPublished: 8/30/2006
Excerpt:
"Solved!" declared the front page of The Daily News on Aug. 17, the day after an arrest was made in the decade-old JonBenet Ramsey murder case.
But yesterday, almost sheepishly, a small headline across the bottom of the page read: "JonBenet case collapses in shambles."
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. ...
... 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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