Therefore, the woman pictured was the source of the erroneous information while the "media" was simply reporting what she said.
Well, no. That is in principle a
possibility, but you cannot say that
is the case because you only have the reporter's word for what she said.
People say incorrect things all the time, however the "media" is not in error when it accurately reports things that a person may say.
Sure that happens. But if they're doing their job, then 1) they should only be reporting what people say if it's newsworthy, and 2) if what they say is obviously wrong (as in this case), they should note that and indicate why. But that didn't happen here, did it? Under the standards you're setting up, the AP could report that somebody said that American troops were killing babies in the street - without mentioning the fact that it's a homeless dude having alcohol withdrawl hallucinations and there isn't a soldier within 100 miles. They're "accurate" in some very narrow sense of the word, and yet that's not acceptable reporting, is it?
Indeed, that is supposed to be the job of the "media"; to report the facts as accurately as possible and leave any interpretation of these facts to their public.
Well, no, that's not their job. There is no single set of facts to be reported. There are mountains and mountains of facts, they cannot all be reported, and readers can't wade through all of them even if they could. A reporter's job is to find the important facts and report them. They have to filter events, otherwise they're useless.
So if this is just some random woman holding bullets that were never fired from a gun, why the hell is it of any significance to anyone if she claims that these bullets hit her house? Furthermore, if you think that it is for some reason newsworthy (I can't see why, but I'll allow for that possibility), the caption should then have noted that the shell casings were still on the bullets, indicating that the bullets weren't actually fired, and leave the reader to decide whether she's lying or just really confused. But that's not what happened, is it? That's not how the story was presented. And neither the reporter nor any editor anywhere in the chain of handling this story ever decided that maybe the fact that the casing was still on the bullets was a relevant detail. Why is that? It's amazing that you're trying to excuse that. I can understand a reluctance to attribute malice, but jeeze, to not recognize that this is at
least a story of total incompetence is, well, delusional.
