The value of good reporting

This week's T-P story by Katy Reckdahl covered an incident in Treme where 20 NOPD cruisers broke up a peaceful funeral procession. It's only the latest in a series of such outrages and I posted the initial article here on Wednesday. In the article, Reckdahl repeated the consensus belief of the marchers that the police were responding to complaints lodged by "newcomers" to the neighborhood who didn't understand the long history of these kinds of funeral processions. While I suspect that this aspect of the story is likely true, Reckdahl did a poor job of checking her facts. I and several other commenters on Wednesday worried about the lack of quotes from any of the complainants and wondered, as mominem put it, "if we are getting the whole story".

Today, Karen follows up with this.

I have a friend who is one of the "new comers" in Treme. She did not call the Police and she has no idea who did but she was singled out as the snitch.

The rest of the night the crowd that had assembled stood in front of her house screaming and throwing things. She did speak to Katy in depth and I guess she had nothing to say that would support the assertion that "they" the newcomers are trying to ruin Treme.

At New Orleans News Notes, Media Maven more thoroughly examines the flaws in the reporting here.

In the Reckdahl articles we have anonymous sources, unsupported statements and questionable quality of support (a random resident isn't exactly an authority). Did the copy editors raise concerns? Reckdahl might be right that "newcomers" are to blame, but her articles doesn't try to answer that question.

Biased, incomplete reporting is bad reporting... and in this case, potentially dangerous... whether you agree with the reporter's biases or not. By giving a flawed report on this problem, is Ms Reckdahl helping or hurting the cause of those with whom she is in sympathy?