Update: Statement from news director at WOIO at the end of post.
First off: thoughts and prayers with the victims, friends, staff, students and families at Chardon High School after today’s awful, awful shootings.
The news has been fast and furious since just around 8 a.m. this morning when a teenager opened fire in the cafeteria at Chardon high school, killing one and injuring four others.
Shockingly, not all of it has been accurate. And while social media is particularly wonderful in keeping the world up to date with breaking news in situations like this, it’s also a medium through which misinformation flows rapidly. You know that already, though. The case of the alleged Twitter photo of “TJ Lane” is a good case study in case you need to be refreshed.
To be clear, the photos showing a teenager with two guns and a message that appears to read “02-26-12” and “high school massacre” are not of TJ Lane. Chardon students themselves have tweeted that it’s not him.
But they’ve been dubbed as such by everyone from 19 Action News here in Cleveland to Alan Cox to Q104 to WBNQ in Bloomington, IN, not to mention about half of Twitter’s users. (We’ve got a call in to WOIO to see what sort of confirmation they had before running the photo on the air and on their site. We’ll let you know what we hear back.)
Steve Huff had been blogging the situation this morning and posted the supposed Twitter photos as well. He later removed them after actual photos of Lane from Facebook and the school yearbook emerged and looked dissimilar enough to the gun picture that commenters were raising questions.
The photos in question actually started showing up on Omegle last Friday with a message that the poster was going to storm his school with guns and kill everyone he could before killing himself.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2012.
Disturbing and shameful.
Sorry we are still so fucked up and I’m sorry that it is easier for a kid to get a gun, than it is for an old guy to get some pills for the shingles.
oh my god woio sucks!!!! i will never again watch their channel. How do you post something you dont have confirmation of, nothing better than an ambulance chaser, disgusting to say the least. my heart goes out to the families involved what an awful tragedy and to the family of the gunman. As funny as it sounds his family is going to have a lot to process and deal with. It’s just awful!
“Thats great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane and Lenny Bruce is not afraid”…
You’ll never get the real story behind WOIO’s reason for posting those pics without confirmation. That’s because they’re the National Enquirer of Cleveland broadcast news. They just want to get ratings, they don’t care how they do it. I don’t watch them because they’re offensive to me as a viewer.
Um I am sorry to be so obvious here- but the police SHOULD Be on the look out for who this kid REALLY is if it isn’t him… THIS is a clear message of a problem! I can not believe regardless of its ‘validity’ to being TJ- that anyone is upset this came out. I think it is a good thing it has been posted all over, maybe this will help identify who he really is. I agree- brows are nothing like the actual pics – I would think its a different kid, but I am no expert.
Not to be a dick about a sensitive issue but the police did not could not shut down a twitter account. Twitter wouldn’t even cooperate with the PD at all ever. Read the legal agreement.
Another classic example of newspeople rushing to spit out a story while giving no regard to checking if its true or not. They sensationalize the original story as breaking and fresh and all that crap, but when they retract they do it so quietly…