By MARIA LUIZA LAGO
When I read the report on Fox News about the Brussels attack, I remembered of what I learned about source trust and how we should use our sources in journalism. First, to tell the readers about the exact number of injured people on the attack, they used as a source a CBS tweet. Shouldn’t they be asking the Belgium authorities about it instead of basing their number on a tweet of another news organization?
With that, I go to the second point where in the article is cited an “intelligence source with firsthand knowledge of the investigation” about where the attackers were focusing more the explosions and where it exactly happened.
If Fox News had a “firsthand knowledge of the investigation source” why not ask them the exact number of injured people on the attack? The name of the source is not cited on the article which makes me even more confused and suspicious about the kind of information that the text provides.
The hurry about giving the information to the readers, specially on breaking news cases, is not uncommon in journalism. But we have to be careful in those situations. News reporting is an art and it is supposed to be done in a way we can offer our readers the most accurate information we could have gathered.
In a time where news organizations are trying to have a say on a certain topic, sometimes some inconsistencies can slip and the effects are directly reflected on the journalist and on the reader that consumes this type of information.
The article has other trustful sources, from officials and new agencies, but there is still a lot of citations from other sources not related to Fox. Sources in this type of story are really important (in all types of stories) but focusing on this one, the readers want to know accurate and precise information and it would be helpful if the information was checked and crossed checked with other official sources or if they could have more warranty that the data or the quotations were taken by the journalist that wrote the piece.
The Zavantem Airport in Brussels and a subway station at the heart of the city were bombed by the Islamic State terrorist group (ISIS) on Tuesday morning. According to The New York Times, at least 30 people were killed in the attack and more than 230 people were wounded. Social media and news media companies are using the hashtags #BrusselsAttacks and #prayforbrussels to talk about the subject and relate to other articles about it on social media.