Sifting Through The Noise

Every resident in greater Boston was caught up in the panic that descended upon our city after the tragic shooting of an MIT police officer on Thursday night. The people of Watertown and students at Harvard University and MIT spent Thursday night through Friday afternoon holed up in their rooms in fear, eyes glued to smartphones and computer screens, relaying any and all updates and rumors to friends while listening for remote police sirens. But much of the information being propagated by the media was inaccurate, and Harvard’s administration should have done more to make sure that reliable information was available to students. In a situation where many equate information with safety, official channels must be as fast as responsibly possible in keeping people abreast of ongoing events. Otherwise, misinformation will almost certainly pervade.

From the bombings to the search for suspects and from the manhunt to the investigation into the motives of the Tsarnaev brothers, it is obvious news sites, social media, and texting dominated the dissemination of information throughout the week. In this maelstrom of information, the media was occasionally guilty of presenting unconfirmed falsehoods as truths. The New York Post was quick to point the finger at a Saudi national in relation to the bombings, bringing unwanted attention to an innocent college student. CNN was criticized for embracing sensationalism over reality and often sacrificed the truth in order to publish flashy updates on the crisis, with John King incorrectly reporting that an arrest had been made on Wednesday, April 17, two days before the suspects were actually apprehended. Meanwhile, the general manager of Reddit was forced to apologize after a destructive digital witch-hunt for the bombers undertaken by many of his users falsely named various innocents as suspects.

The combination of being bombarded with false information along with our generation’s dependence on social media for information made it particularly difficult for Harvard students to discern false news from the truth, especially given the situation’s emotional intensity. To further complicate matters, the Harvard administration failed to provide reliable, official information throughout the week to the detriment of our confused, scared student body. The administration was particularly silent during the bombings, when students relied largely on Google’s “Find a Person” application and on The Crimson’s website to keep track of their friends and family. The administration’s silence while some students heard incorrect information about potential explosions on Brattle Street, Massachusetts Avenue, and Copley Square only exacerbated on campus. Although there were improvements during the manhunt, we need consistency from the administration in times of crisis.

However, Harvard’s official communication can only do so much to dispel misinformation from other quarters. Without second question, some media outlets immediately highlighted the Tsarnaevs’ Chechen ethnicity and linked the Boston bombings to the Islamist movements in the unstable North Caucuses region of Russia. These faulty assumptions are a symptom of the media’s impulse to carve out narratives before a storyline is clear, and it is up to us to wait for reliable news before we form our opinions.