Boston to Bangalore: When media, politicians jump the gun...

Within minutes of the blast near the BJP office in Bangalore on Wednesday, motormouth politicians were implanting their feet firmly in their mouths with fatuous comments that insinuated that it had been orchestrated by the BJP itself to garner sympathy ahead of the upcoming Assembly elections. Just the fact that politicians had begun viewing the blast through a political prism even before the smoke had dispersed from the blast site, and were toting up potential gains and losses, points to the cynical manner in which politics is played, even in grave matters of national security. The contrast with the situation in the US, where politicians across the spectrum have observed enormous restraint in their public pronouncements on the Boston Marathon blasts,  has been striking. Nor was this the first time in India that politicians have jumped the gun with reckless remarks that seek to extract political mileage from acts of terror. In an earlier time, the reflexive resort was to blame Pakistan for any and every terror attack in India, even before forensic investigations had begun.  Even given the history of Pakistan’s perverse attempts to sponsor terror attacks in India, these statements did inadequate justice to the complexity of terror attacks, and their increasingly home-grown nature. Such insta-punditry only served to interfere with the due process of the investigation. [caption id=“attachment_705642” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Playing politics with the Bangalore blast. IBN screengrab[/caption] On the other side of the political spectrum, too, the readiness with which leaders painted chromatic hues to such attacks - branding them “saffron terror” without a shred of evidence, thereby effectively sending the investigators barking up the wrong tree - validated the perception that our leaders - such as they are - are not incapable of playing politics over the dead bodies of victims of terrorism. Even the Union Home Minister exhibited an extraordinary partisanship of spirit when he used a party platform to make the grave allegation that the country’s leading Opposition party, the BJP, was actively running terrorist training camps.  He was subsequently forced to express contrition for that remark, but it demonstrated just how perverse the discourse around terrorism has become in India. But if the restraint of politicians in the US in the context of the Boston blasts was worthy of emulation, the conduct of sections of the US media in the past two  days hasn’t measured up to the standards of professionalism that they once used to be acclaimed  for. In just the past few hours, media outlets in the US have had to be reprimanded by the FBI for their reportage of their investigations into the Boston blasts, which in some cases peddled wholesale untruths or laced their accounts with a heavy dose of innuendo. Two big television networks -  CNN and Fox News - got a little ahead of themselves and reported erroneously, citing unnamed law enforcement officials, that an arrest had been named in connection with the Boston blasts. As this report recalls, CNN made an egregious error when it reported that an arrest had been made in connection with the blasts, and was forced to backtrack after an hour. It had earlier claimed, again citing unidentified sources, that “a dark-skinned male” had been identified as a suspect, based on CCTV and television video footage and photographs of the blast sites. CNN’s John King reported: “I was told they have a breakthrough in the identification of the suspect, and I’m told - and I want to be very careful about this because people get very sensitive when you say these things - I was told by one of these sources who’s a law enforcement official that this as a dark-skinned male.” The official, he hadd, “used some other words” that he would not repeat on air until more information came his way. “There are some people who will take offense even in saying that,”  he added. ( Watch the CNN footage here) Later, in a statement to Huffington Post, a CNN spokesperson claimed that the network’s reportage about the arrest had been backed  up by several sources. CNN, he said, had “three credible sources on both local and federal levels… Based on this information, we reported our findings. As soon as our sources came to us with new information we adjusted our reporting.” Leading wire service agency The Associated Press and several newspapers, including the prestigious The Boston Globe, too ran with the erroneous report that an arrest had been made. All this prompted an extraordinary reprimand from the FBI asking the media to “exercise caution and attempt to verify information through appropriate official channels before reporting.” “Contrary to widespread reporting,” the FBI statement said, “no arrest has been made in connection with the Boston Marathon attack. Over the past day and a half, there have been a number of press reports based on information from unofficial sources that has been inaccurate. Since these stories have unintended consequences, we ask the media, particularly at this early stage of the investigation, to exercise caution and attempt to verify information through appropriate official channels before reporting.” A day earlier, Fox News and New York Post had reported that authorities had identified a Saudi suspect in the Boston blasts, but as this report establishes, it was a false alarm. Yet, even as the Saudi man was in hospital with injuries from the blast, his apartment was searched and his roommate was subjected to a five-hour interrogation. In this instance, at any rate, the news reports were indeed based on law enforcement action that did search a potential suspect’s apartment - and to that extent the reports themselves were not unfounded. But taken with the other instances of faux pas, they point to the risks to the investigation when the media jump the gun with their reportage of sensitive cases of terror. The only arrest that has so far been made relates to the case of suspicious letters that were sent to US President Barack Obama and a US Senator. The letters evidently contained traces of a poisonous substance. The suspect,  a Mississippi man named Paul Kevin Curtis, was charged by Federal officials.