Rumors, Hoaxes Get on the Air

Two dramatic stories were unfolding as people here and in much of the nation went to sleep Thursday night, or found that they couldn’t sleep, in part because of the gripping TV reports that continued into Friday morning.

One was a story of hope, a miracle story: A distraught wife had received a cell phone call from her policeman husband, buried under the rubble of the World Trade Center. He and nine other cops were alive! As spotlights illuminated the scene, rescue crews raced to find them in “The Pit.”

The other was a chilling story of terror: Two more apparent suicide hijacking teams had been thwarted at New York airports, found with the same sort of knives and box cutters believed to have been used by the hijackers who crashed jetliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. One of the suspects even had attended one of the same pilot training schools as the hijackers.

Both were high-stakes human dramas, hard to turn off--and both not true, it turned out.

They also were not the first false reports, or rumors, that have been aired in the wake of the worst terrorist assault on American soil. They won’t be the last, either.

“In a story like this, there’s going to be a lot that’s confusing for a long time,” said Peter Landis, news director for New York 1, an all-news cable network that reaches 1.7 million households throughout the city and that reported both of Thursday’s ultimately false stories.

For people in New York, closest to the trade center disaster, both stories were impossible to avoid. At least some network news shows carried each tale nationwide as well. Fox News played up the drama of the rescue; ABC played up the evidence suggesting new hijacking attempts.

In both cases, classic “official sources” played a part in each.

New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik was present when a hysterical Sugeil Mehia, dressed in medical scrubs, told authorities that her husband had just called, saying he and the other police officers were alive. A rare note of hope after two bleak days of excavation, her report electrified the weary search teams, giving them new incentive to dig for the survivors and risk their own lives.

“It was all fake,” Kerik reported Friday morning, after Mehia had been charged with reckless endangerment, obstructing fire operations and filing false reports. “There was no husband. There was no phone call.”

‘Rumor Moves More Quickly on Air’

“These are the inevitable byproduct of a chaotic story breaking before people’s eyes,” said Tom Goldstein, dean of Columbia University’s journalism school. “Some of the rigors of verification get lost.”

He recalled one reporter observing that a small plane was flying overhead, “and the camera points on it,” suggesting some significance. “And it just flew away.”

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani appealed to the media to be more careful, noting that false accounts “can be very dangerous and emotionally damaging.”

“One of the dangers of 24-hour news coverage by all of the major networks [is] rumor moves more quickly on air,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s actually surprising we haven’t had more of it, that we haven’t had 10 or 15 rather than four or five.”

If you see a story like the terrorist attacks as a narrative, it’s natural that the rumors and tips that fit that narrative “are the ones that slip past,” she said. “You want to believe there are survivors, and everyone fears a continuing terrorist threat.”

Earlier Thursday, a policeman had been among those gleefully passing on another story that spread through the search crews, and into live news reports, that five firefighters had been rescued after two days under the rubble, found in an SUV in an air pocket.

Later, fire officials said that two firefighters had been rescued--after falling into the space a few hours earlier.

News executives said they were relaying only what officials had told them when they later reported details that made it seem as if groups of people being questioned at LaGuardia and Kennedy airports almost certainly were terrorists.

“That came from two pretty high-level sources,” said New York 1’s Landis, “telling us that these people they stopped were on ‘watch lists,’ they had phony papers, they were found to have box cutters.”

His and other networks had reporters doing stand-ups at the largely empty airports, passing on those details and others, such as that authorities had confiscated knives. On Friday, federal officials said that though one man was carrying his brother’s pilot certificate, none had weapons. And five were questioned only because someone at LaGuardia wrongly believed their luggage carried suspicious crew stickers.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said the detentions had “zero, nothing to do” with Tuesday’s attacks in New York and Washington.

Landis, 52, who prides himself on being the “graybeard” reminding his staff of 150 to “check and double-check,” said he was still trying to reach one of the sources to find out where the bad information came from.

“We’re being pressured in two ways,” he noted. “To get the latest information on, and the pressure from viewership, which feels somehow you are withholding information.”

Meanwhile, the rumors keep coming, whether that a van filled with explosives was stopped in the New Jersey Meadowlands, or that a man survived a fall from the 82nd floor.

Landis said he is not reporting bomb scares any more or even initial reports on which bridges into lower Manhattan were reopening, instead telling viewers, “There’s confusion, and as soon as we know it, we’ll let you know.”

“The more I think about it,” Landis said, “the more I think that’s the way to go.”

Journalism experts have praised the overall TV coverage, especially the restraint shown during the initial hours when networks could have shown bodies flying from the towers, images some newspapers did publish.

“The media, released from the commercial imperatives that normally enslave it, have done a good job,” said Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley’s journalism school.

‘The Media’s All Too Mortal’

But as developments slow and everyone grows tired, “some of the old imperatives--to be first, fast and sensational--are beginning to crawl back into the competitive race,” Schell said.

“People almost will these rumors into seeming to be the truth,” he said, calling Thursday’s reports “an expression of our most inner yearnings to catch someone and not be caught helpless [and] that somewhere, somehow, somebody was able to be saved or rescued.

“In this sense, the media’s all too mortal.”

Bill Shine, Fox News Service’s executive producer, said the network got on the story of the 10 buried cops when a rescue worker mentioned it on air. “He said, ‘One is communicating with his wife.’ Our desk scrambled to confirm.”

In the meantime, both Fox and ABC hammered home the potential of tremendous hope amid the mountain of rubble.

Jeffrey Schneider, vice president of ABC News, said that as soon as the network confirmed the call never took place, anchorman Ted Koppel alerted viewers.

But network decisions do not trump local affiliates’ news judgment. In New York, WNBC broke away from the network and played the story of trapped men as late as 11:20 p.m. EDT. While Fox and ABC had long before announced it was a hoax, viewers of WNBC were not told until 9:30 the next morning.

“What I learned is that there’s a bunch of sickos in the world,” Shine said.

All the TV executives agreed that the airport story had to be reported in some form after officials detained passengers and canceled plans to resume New York-area takeoffs. But their take on what happened differed. CBS reporter Jim Stewart from the start downplayed any possible link to the earlier hijackings; ABC made more of it.

“We broke the story, and we had impeccable sourcing,” said Schneider. “We had multiple sources telling us the same thing, and we felt that it was an important and big story. This morning, some federal law enforcement agencies have been trying to minimize that, and we reported that, as well. ABC reported this morning that the people were let go today, but we are vigorously pursuing our original story.”