Police scanners have always been part of newsrooms, used by cop reporters to gather information, but never cited.
That, however, is changing.
Once a journalistic taboo, mainstream news organizations have begun to quote police communications during breaking news events, most recently during the mass shooting in San Bernardino on Wednesday during which 14 people were killed.
There's a pretty predictable pattern to this: As news breaks, Twitter and Reddit users begin to find and send out links to local police scanners that are streamed over the Internet. Scanner jockeys then begin posting details of what they hear in these communications. The media ends up using either what its journalists hear on the scanner or quote what others are discussing online.
Austen Allred, founder of crowdsource news organization Grasswire, watched as members of the media repeated or retweeted second-hand scanner information as the situation unfolded in San Bernardino on Wednesday.
"The frustrating thing to me yesterday wasn't that there was random people tweeting stuff on the police scanner -- I don't think you can avoid that. What's frustrating is that there are paid professional journalists... and they're literally copying and pasting those tweets," Allred said.
Listening to scanners is part of the job, but journalists know that the information is at best a rough guide of where to start and far from verified. But with the pace of modern reporting reaching a full sprint, some media organizations have begun to source police scanners. The New York Times has done so at least during the past two highly publicized mass shootings: San Bernardino and Colorado Springs on November 27 when three were killed.
On Wednesday, the Times also posted a link to a scanner broadcast in its live blog.
@moneyries @nytimes NYT was using scanner info & quotes in its story on Planned Parenthood shooting Friday, too— Catherine Thompson (@KT_thomps) December 2, 2015
NYT using police scanner chatter in its Colorado shooting story feels….unconventional https://t.co/leRifebaE2 pic.twitter.com/fgbg6idOg9— Katherine Krueger (@kath_krueger) November 27, 2015
Times national editor Alison Mitchell noted that the paper had used scanner reports primarily for color and had refrained from directly reporting any unverified information.
"We are aware of the potential for unfounded rumor, and and we have looked at each piece we have used carefully. Much of what we are doing is listening for leads to follow up on," she said.
Other outlets have used scanner reports in a variety of ways. CBS produced a video with scanner chatter overlaid, as did a Boston ABC affiliate. Some on Twitter alleged that Don Lemon had referenced scanner information on CNN.
Scanner reports also appeared in Breitbart's liveblog and a variety of smaller blogs.
It might be easy enough for journalists to ignore the chatter on Twitter if it weren't for the fact that they're sometimes beating media outlets to key information.
San Bernardino police uttered one name over their communications systems in the early aftermath of the violence on Wednesday. By then, those communications were being broadcast across the Internet to people who then quickly posted information to Twitter and Reddit.
Scanner: Farook Sayed - was acting nervous, left the building, 20 mins later shooting began— Caz (@MissDBunker) December 2, 2015
scanner: FAROOD SAYED named #sanbernadino #California— Caz (@MissDBunker) December 2, 2015
That name turned out to be right -- at least phonetically -- but represented just one of many pieces of unverified information that spread quickly online.
Authorities now believe that Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife were the shooters who killed 14 people and wounded 17 others during a holiday office party in San Bernardino.
Scanner information appearing online in a matter of seconds is a problem for people that follow breaking news as well as journalists that are being pushed to the limits of ethical prudence in the ever evolving battle between being first and being right. Unverified and often false information is now becoming indistinguishable from facts, and journalists are rarely helping to distinguish between the two.
It's also an issue for the police, whose
Samuel Freedman, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School noted that "there's nothing new about journalists listening to police scanners," but called the urge to source scanners as "the quintessence of two modern journalistic dilemmas."
Those are, he said, whether it's better to be first than right, and how to handle amateurs that are acting as journalists.
Assuming that it will be impossible to prevent scanners from being broadcast online or from people to disseminate scanner information (it is technically a misdemeanor in California), journalists are facing a difficult road ahead. Even the relatively fast pace of Internet media seems slow compared to the anarchy that is the social media/scanner scene.
Journalists now have to parse through some of the most spurious information ever publicly released as fast as possible. Get it right, and they're still behind the scanner. Get it wrong, and they risk destroying their career.
"These kinds of situations put an added responsibility on the professionals," Freedman said. "Retweeting or Facebooking something or putting something out on Instagram, doesn't absolve a professional journalist from the responsibility of making sure something is accurate."