I got called out for using the 'official' numbers in a post about the 2013 Boston lockdown

Someone here messaged me last month saying my post was just repeating the FBI timeline without checking the scanner logs from that day. They sent me a link to a site that archived police radio traffic, and the timestamps were off by almost 20 minutes in places. I went back and listened to the raw audio myself, and they were right. I changed how I source stuff now, always looking for the raw data first instead of the summarized report. Has anyone else found a big gap between the public story and the primary source material on an event like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_hugo1mo agoTop Commenter

Happens all the time with breaking news. Official reports get smoothed over for the public. I saw it with a local fire where the first press release said one thing, but the live stream from a bystander showed the events happening in a totally different order. You have to assume the summary is wrong until you check the raw feed yourself. It's the only way to get close to the truth.

parker_park81mo ago

Yeah, that's a solid point from @the_hugo, but I don't fully agree you should always assume the summary is wrong. Sometimes the raw feed is a mess of confusion and panic, and the official report later actually clears things up. It's more about checking both, you know? The truth is usually stuck somewhere in the middle after all the dust settles. Blind trust in any single source seems like the real problem.

terryh201mo ago

That "you have to assume the summary is wrong" part is what I keep coming back to. But how do you know the raw feed itself isn't being framed or edited in a way that's just as misleading, especially when it's from someone who's obviously panicked? Like with your fire example, the bystander might have only caught the second half of what happened, missing the first cause entirely. It feels like we're trading one set of assumptions for another, doesn't it?