Amanda Knox and a trigger-happy media

The UK press had a bad day yesterday, as, perhaps conditioned by years of coverage, a number of them announced that Amanda Knox had been found guilty , when, in fact, she had been acquitted. [caption id=“attachment_99741” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“A number of UK newspapers, including the Daily Mail, announced that Amanda Knox had been found guilty, when, in fact, she had been acquitted.”] [/caption] “The English media, who are on the side of the victim, the poor Meredith Kercher, renamed the pretty Amanda “Foxy Knoxy” just to underline her elusive craftiness. The American media, on the other hand, all support her… If you add this to the mess of the investigation and the disavowal of the expert (analysis), you see how far the story has gone off the rails of a judicial investigation and onto the more fanciful, popular ones of TV reported the BBC . For the past few years, there’s been a transatlantic divide on the issue, with UK press clearly against the accused, Amanda Knox. [caption id=“attachment_99743” align=“alignright” width=“175” caption=“The extent to which the UK press jumped the gun can be gauged by the number and the width of papers who got it wrong.”] [/caption] The extent to which the UK press jumped the gun can be gauged by the number and the width of papers who got it wrong. “The Daily Mail has launched an internal inquiry after mistakenly publishing a story on its website claiming Amanda Knox had lost the appeal against her conviction for murdering British student Meredith Kercher. The same mistake was made on The Sun website, Sky News and The Guardian’s live blog, but the Mail appears to be the only news outlet that ran a full-length article,” reported Press Gazette. The saving grace, if it can be called that, was that the news products got their stories wrong only in their digital editions, and not in print. In what is perhaps the most famous gaffe, Truman won the election against Dewey, much to the embarassment of the Chicago Daily Tribune. Here, too, the cause seems to be one of being preconditioned to believe in a particular outcome, in this case, a Dewey victory. “Weeks prior to the 1948 election, many leading editorial writers and political columnists relied on early Gallup Polls, which predicted Thomas E Dewey’s win over incumbent Harry S Truman. Truman’s strategy was to bypass the press by taking his case to the people in a “whistlestop” campaign. An issue of the early edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune was handed to Truman after the election. The headline declared “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Truman upset Dewey despite having the support of only 15 percent of the nation’s daily papers,” says the US Library of Congress . [caption id=“attachment_99746” align=“alignleft” width=“200” caption=“Image courtesy: Library of Congress”] [/caption] The most embarrassing gaffe award, however, must go to CNN. “Multiple premature obituaries came to light on 16 April 2003, when it was discovered that pre-written draft memorials to several world figures were available on the development area of the CNN website without requiring a password (and may have been accessible for some time before). The pages included tributes to Fidel Castro, Dick Cheney, Nelson Mandela, Bob Hope, Gerald Ford, Pope John Paul II, and Ronald Reagan,” says wikipedia. You would think that ‘victims’ would be upset if they read their own obituaries, but not Rudyard Kipling, who read a report of his own death in a magazine. “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers,” said Kipling.