Questions surrounding the Fort Hood shootings

There seems to be many lessons coming out of the reporting of the Fort Hood shootings last week and one may well be how do you balance confirmation of facts with the race to get the story out first.

The pressures to break news on the web can often outweigh the journalistic checks and balances and it is worth reading this feature from Greg Marx over at CJR.

He looks in detail at a report that appeared on Sunday in the Fort Worth Star Telegram in which the article stated that

In 2001, Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center was led by Anwar Al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born scholar now living in Yemen. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, according to new disclosures by a Fort Hood acquaintance, was an admirer of Al-Awlaki who has been described as a radical Islamist.

Unfortunately the article had failed to track down this source and as Marx writes

the Star-Telegram hadn’t actually tracked down a close friend of Hasan’s—rather, it had found a novelist who said he had spoken to this unidentified friend, and had decided that, at least in this case, a bit of journalistic telephone passed muster.

How the right has responded to Fort Hood

Maybe not surprisingly the right wing media in America have come out all guns blazing following the Fort Hood shootings.

Media matters reports that

Right-wing media figures have used the shooting at Fort Hood as an excuse to attack Islam and American Muslims in particular, with Debbie Schlussel, for example, urging readers to think of the alleged shooter "whenever you hear about how Muslims serve their country in the U.S. military." Additionally, commentators have blamed the shooting on "political correctness," with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade suggesting the implementation of "special debriefings" for Muslim American soldiers to prevent future attacks.

via Huffington Post