How To Fumble a News Story

I've been watching with interest - and not a little frustration - the recent evictions of Occupy protesters in the States, and how the possibility of federal involvement in the raids has been covered by the media. 

You dig through the debate at your own peril by now, but here's what I've pinned down.

More than a dozen cities moved to evict Occupy protesters from their campgrounds earlier this month, all acting in the space of ten days and using similar tactics. Department of Homeland Security vehicles were spotted at a number of the evictions, including one in Portland.

Later Oakland Mayor Jean Quan revealed to the BBC that she participated in a conference call of 18 cities before the wave of crackdowns began. There was another set of conference calls headed up by the Police Executive Research Forum.

Rick Ellis, a reporter for the (somewhat dodgy) news aggregate site Examiner.com, said an unnamed Justice Department official told him on background that local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

The official said the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement. Mr Ellis said he was attempting to get an official response from the DHS.

Credible news sources mentioned Ellis' reporting, including executive editor of The Nation Richard Kim, who called for transcripts of the conference calls to be released. "If you have nothing to hide, if you didn't coordinate this, if you didn't develop these strong-arm tactics on these calls, release the transcript."

It's an attention-grabbing story, leading to troubling questions about whether the already-controversial DHS overstepped their bounds with Occupy. The problem is that Mr Ellis is relying on an unnamed source and has no other evidence to back him up, leaving him wide open to accusations of sloppy journalism.

Later he followed up with responses from "several high-ranking DHS officials on background," saying the DHS was only involved in Occupy arrests on federal property in Portland, and DHS is not actively coordinating with local governments or police agencies on the Occupy evictions.

It raises a lot of genuine questions for me as a journalism student:

• If Mr Ellis does have a contact with the Justice Department, what could he have done to strengthen the story before publishing?
• Was DHS's role in Portland common knowledge and no big deal, or did Mr Ellis' reporting force them to admit it?
• If we can't trust an unnamed Justice Department source claiming federal involvement in the evictions, why should we trust unnamed sources from the DHS claiming they are not actively involved?
• Should I view this as an example of a tabloid blowing a story out of proportion, or an example of why bloggers and "hobby journalists" can't take the place of well-paid investigative reporters?

I'd love it if a credible news organisation with good contacts and resources would find out if the whole thing is baseless, or if there's a real story hidden behind botched reporting. But that probably won't happen, because the whole thing has devolved into an Internet fight split along the usual lines.

On one side we've got Naomi Wolf spinning the story into a huge conspiracy theory, and on the other we've got angry Obama supporters attacking Wolf and demanding retractions and apologies from anyone who brought it up. Richard Kim hurried to distance himself in the face of such criticism on Twitter, saying he was not confirming DHS involvement by discussing Ellis' story.

By the time the next news cycle begins tomorrow, the issue will be so toxic that I'll be surprised if any qualified reporter will want to touch it.