Before the real Virginia Tech Killer was identified, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist named Michael Sneed (female) posted a story on the newspaper's website citing sources claiming:
"authorities were investigating whether the gunman who killed 32 people in a rampage on the Virginia Tech campus was a Chinese national who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa."
This story immediately got picked up by Chinese media and bloggers, and went all over the Chinese Internet, as journalist and blogger Luqiu Luwei describes (original Chinese version of her post is here). Then the Sun-Times goes and changes the original story multiple times, with various versions documented by Letters from China, China Point, and James Fallows (here and here), among others. They erased the original version of the story, as if it never existed, and it is now (as of this reading at 4:30pm Hong Kong time) replaced with a new version describing identification of South Korean student Cho Seung-Hui - with no mention or trace anywhere of the earlier version. Except that if you Technorati that article's URL you'll see lots of people quoted from it and blogged about it, and the original is also preserved in the Google Cache.
I agree with Fallows' condemnation of the Sun-Times' failure to acknowledge the mistake combined with what appears to be a strategy of pretending they never reported a massive piece of misinformation:
Amending information in real time is a virtue of the web. Covering up one’s tracks is not. Wasn’t this pretty much what Orwell had in mind with the concept of the “memory hole“?
For the Oneline Journalism Hall of Shame record, here is a screengrab of the original article taken from the Google cache (click to enlarge):
No can't be. I still think the killer is a Chinese.
Well, Korean or Chinese, they are all Asians. So its an Asian shooter.
I'm just very surprised that he spoke English very well and puzzled. If he had hated rich people, why didn't he do his killings at Wall Street or something? Why pick Virginia Tech where not all the students are rich?
I do not think this has any significant thing to do with his race nevertheless. For if that is so, then wouldn't a significant portion of American school shooters be children of recent immigrants? Why weren't the Columbine shooters Chinese or Koreans? Why were they typical white middle class Americans? There is I believe a fundamental problem with American schools or children which the media isn't reporting.
Also, it isn't just the etnicity of the killer that the media got wrong. The media also initially got wrong the motive behind the killings. Initially, the media reported that the motive was due to a disgruntled Cho Seung-Hui who just broke up with his girlfriend. This is incorrect. What happened was that the police thought that the original killer was the girl's boyfriend, but that boyfriend isn't Cho.
Posted by: mahathir_fan | April 20, 2007 at 01:50 AM
JESUS PEOPLE... It was a mistake!
What are you going on about?
Do you want her head, or what?
Honestly, we have ALL made mistakes, or mis-spoke at some point in life!
It's all been cleared up & you got the real story! GET OVER IT!
Posted by: Kathy | May 01, 2007 at 01:27 AM