“The reality is, as a society we absolutely need to slow down and recognize that certain things are not knowable right away, “says Salwen. “Things can just take time.
” We’re all publishers now. If you have Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, you’re in the publishing business. And if you’re posting without checking, you’re part of the problem. And I include myself in this, by the way. I’m not always as slow and mindful as I could be.
“We as a society rush to judgement and the person on the other end is the human toll . “
Another journalist, Henry Schuster, who was a producer for CNN at the time of the bombing and arranged Jewell’s first interview as a hero, agrees. In an open and honest article for the Washington Post – “ I helped make Richard Jewell famous – and ruined his life in the process “- he describes the apology he left it too late to make.
Schuster politely declined to comment further , saying he had said everything he wanted to in his article, but was happy for it to be quoted.
Image: Alice Hawthorne was killed in the attack
Law enforcement sources were leaking to several media outlets, not just the AJC, that Jewell was under investigation, he says.
” Instead of going with the more neutral language we favored, [CNN president Tom] Johnson had the anchors on set hold up the front page of the journal and read the headlines.
“By the time Jewell’s lawyer heard the news reports and managed to get through the FBI switchboard to his client, telling him to get out of the field office, the collective weight of law enforcement and the media had begun turning Jewell from a hero to a villain. “
Writing about” making sense of it all these years later, when I have an Emmy on my shelf for CNN’s coverage from those first hours “, Schuster concludes:” We in the media got it wrong, even though our reporting was right. There’s the paradox: Jewell really was the FBI’s main suspect. Yes, the FBI has a lot to answer for, but this is about our responsibility.
“Suppose that CNN had been more nuanced and called Jewell a person of interest ; our repetitive and relentless coverage would still have made it look like the authorities thought he was the culprit.
“In my own reporting, I’ve learned to be more skeptical of sources, especially when they claim to speak for government – especially at its highest levels. My stories these days don’t go to air without relentless fact-checking, and my scripts have more footnotes than any term paper I did in college.
“But the lesson is, that isn’t always enough. It’s also how you report it and how everyone else is reporting it, too. Someone else’s guilty plea and several court settlements did not give Jewell his good name back. Maybe the film finally will . “
NBC correspondent Tom Brokaw also apologized for his coverage in a tweet posted in December, saying he” deeply “regrets what Jewell and his mother went through, and said: “I hope we all learned a lesson, including the FBI which was my principal source.”
Law enforcement also got things wrong, says Alexander.
“First and foremost, there was a leak. Leaks like that should be criminalized. Second there was confirmation bias, although it was not called that at the time. A profile suggested Jewell was the likely bomber and too much of the investigat ion centred on trying to prove that conclusion was correct. That said, hindsight is of course – .
Image: Eric Rudolph later confessed to the bombing
The bomber turned out to be 29 – year-old Eric Rudolph, who went on to commit three further attacks against abortion clinics and a gay bar in Georgia and Alabama in the two years that followed before he was identified in 2017. It would be five more years until he was caught.
The timing of the payphone warning of the bomb, it was realized fairly early in the investigation, meant Jewell couldn ‘t possibly have made the call. In fact, it was an AJC journalist who spent the time working out the timings and realizing they couldn’t work, and reported the story.
However, when it came to the content of the call, the audio was never released by the FBI to the public.
“This isn’t a grand epiphany or anything but one thing I would have done differently is push even harder for the 1997 call that had been made warning of the bombing to be released, “says Alexander. “The decision was made not to publicise and it was a missed opportunity at the time.
” Had the FBI played that tape during the broadcasts of the Olympic Games there’s a pretty good chance someone in the public would have recognized Eric Rudolph’s voice.
“If Eric Rudolph had been found then, there are three more bombings that wouldn’t have happened. “
And Richard Jewell may have remained the true hero he always was.
(More than) years later, in the digital age, the story of the security guard who went from unknown to global hero to public enemy in the space of a few days feels perhaps even more relevant now.
So how do we reverse the world’s relentless thirst for immediate information?
“I think we really need to think about – and I say this as a journalist, as someone who’s absolut ely a defender of the freedom of the press – maybe we need to take a hard look at changing our laws in the US, “says Salwen.
” Maybe we need to protect people a little more than we have been. “
Richard Jewell stars Paul Walter Hauser in the titular role, alongside Jon Hamm as the lead FBI investigator, Sam Rockwell as Jewell’s attorney, Olivia Wilde as AJC reporter Kathy Scruggs and Kathy Bates, who has been nominated for an Oscar, as Jewell’s mother. It is out in UK cinemas now
The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the man caught in the middle, by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen, is also available to buy now
(Read More) [CNN president Tom]
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