One of the things I’ve always liked about blogging is that it’s a medium that allows one to express their thoughts fully fleshed out.  As the heir apparent (if not already the successor) to the old paper diaries people used to keep, blogs are great places to go for insight into issues that might not find anywhere else.  However, blogging is also fast becoming a contemporary of the corporate news media, and in some areas, it’s also perhaps becoming the successor to that as well.  To be a good blog, I feel that you need to keep a mix of the well thought out analysis posts and the quick paced commentary of what’s happening in the world.  That is what we try to do here at Poligazette, and over the past several months, have gone to great lengths to achieve that goal.

However, in becoming another source of news, blogs have inherited a problem that is all too present in today’s corporate media.  In the need to gain prominence (ratings for television media, page hits for blogs), blogs and the media often find themselves sometimes commenting or reporting on something before all the facts are in.  It happens often enough that it’s become accepted by modern day media consumers.  They’ll watch the initial report and then wait to see if there are later additions or changes.  They do this because they’ve become accustomed to getting their news right now.  I think the rise of the 24-hour news networks pushed it, but even the local stations do it (and perhaps did it before the likes of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox).

This is not normally a problem in major stories.  They’ll be reported on rather continuously, whether it’s the death of Michael Jackson, a prominent political story (looking at you Mark Sanford), or something else that’s major.  However, for less prominent stories, or ones that may fade away quickly in favor of something else, the final details can lost in the mix of all the news we see daily.  Such is the case in the recent situation of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who was arrested at his house this week for disorderly conduct.

Reportedly, Gates got mouthy with a police officer, and accusations of racism flew.  In this situation, there are two stories.  One in the official police report, and the ones Gates is giving.  The story has produced some predictable reactions.  Liberals have hounded the Cambridge police department for being racist at worst, or, in the words of President Barack Obama, having acted “stupidly” at best.  Conservatives have cited Gates’ actions as justification for his arrest, and some of them have accused him of racebaiting.  Then there is a third line of thought, the libertarian position, which focuses on the legality of the arrest on someone’s own property.  By the way, all three positions are rather scripted, in my opinion.  All sides acting at their stereotypical best.

All sides are, of course, acting on whichever information best suits their ideological positions.  For the liberals, they accept what Gates is saying as gospel.  The conservatives meanwhile are acting on what the police report says.  Well, they can’t both be completely right.  Gates can’t have calmly shown the police officer his ID and also be raging on about racist police at the same time.  Worse, all the facts (or at least what has been said) have not been compiled into a coherent report.  There are missing pieces to it.  How can anyone effectively comment on what happened without knowing everything?  You can try, but you end up looking pretty silly if it turns out something else happened.

What is (supposedly) well known is what happened after police arrived to Gates’ house.  You can read the police report for that.  What is not as well known is what happened before they came on the scene.  And for that we can really only trust in Gates’ account, which at the time I have no reason to disbelieve.  So here it is:

We flew back on a direct flight from Beijing to Newark. We arrived on Wednesday, and on Thursday I flew back to Cambridge. I was using my regular driver and my regular car service. And went to my home arriving at about 12:30 in the afternoon. My driver and I carried several bags up to the porch, and we fiddled with the door and it was jammed. I thought, well, maybe the door’s latched. So I walked back to the kitchen porch, unlocked the door and came into the house. And I unlatched the door, but it was still jammed.

My driver is a large black man. But from afar you and I would not have seen he was black. He has black hair and was dressed in a two-piece black suit, and I was dressed in a navy blue blazer with gray trousers and, you know, my shoes. And I love that the 911 report said that two big black men were trying to break in with backpacks on. Now that is the worst racial profiling I’ve ever heard of in my life. (Laughs.) I’m not exactly a big black man. I thought that was hilarious when I found that out, which was yesterday.

It looked like someone’s footprint was there. So it’s possible that the door had been jimmied, that someone had tried to get in while I was in China. But for whatever reason, the lock was damaged. My driver hit the door with his shoulder and the door popped open. But the lock was permanently disfigured. My home is owned by Harvard University, and so any kind of repair work that’s needed, Harvard will come and do it.  I called this person, and she was, in fact, on the line while all of this was going on.   I’m saying ‘You need to send someone to fix my lock.’

Next, and generally accepted is the fact that a neighbor had seen the struggle with the door going and saw what she thought were two men trying to break into a house.  So she called 911.  The story gets a little murkier from this point, and it all depends on whether or not you believe Gates or the police report.  However, what is clear, and even admitted by Gates in the above linked interview, is that he started accusing the police of racism.  Now, accusations of racism do not necessary make for disorderly conduct, but I do think Gates was wrong to start accusing an officer of racism, as it was not this at all.  It was about never about racism.  Not on the part of the police officers, anyway.

Now, where are all the facts not gathered in this story?  The part about Gates’ door being jammed as well as what really happened after the police arrived.  Has nobody contacted the university to confirm Gates’ call to the facilities department?  If someone asks a question about that and gets a response in the affirmative, it all but confirms Gates’ story before the police arrived.  Of course, some investigation has been done.  For example, the Chicago Tribune has talked to a black police officer who was involved in the scene, and supports the arrest because he says Gates was acting strangely.  That gives more support to the police report which, coupled with Gates’ own admitted accusations of racism, makes for a clearer picture.  Also, the police report notes that a maintenance person arrived at the house after Gates was placed under arrest, which would seem to definitely confirm Gates’ story of a broken door.

There are other, unanswered, questions.  Did Gates initially refuse to give his state ID to the officer as the report says?  Did the officer refuse to give his name and badge number as Gates says?  And did Gates act disorderly enough to warrant an arrest?  These things can only be answered with further investigation.  I haven’t been able to find any interviews with the onlookers that stopped to see what was going on at Gates’ house.  If their stories corroborate the police report, it’ll look bad for Gates.  However, if they more closely match what Gates has said, it will look bad for the police department.  We won’t be able to find out the true response to Gates’ request for a badge number, as that discussion appears to have been done completely within Gates’ foyer.  That one we can only accept either the police report’s account, or Gates’.

Lets be clear.  The only pertinent question here are legal ones.  Suffice it to say I don’t think raising your voice a little qualified as disorderly conduct, but if Gates was shouting and shouting, that’s another story.  Still, we know it wasn’t about racism, and only the liberals are still claiming this.  Even the libertarians, who I think are taking a lot of stock in Gates’ account, are only questioning the arrest on legal grounds.  I just think we need to know more about the scene, and trying to interview some of the locals who stopped to watch the altercation would go a long way in determining an appropriate answer to this question.  It does nobody any good to give a knee-jerk response to something for a situation where we don’t have all the facts.  In the case of Gates, some people may be satisfied with all that has been reported thus far, but I am not.  There are still some things I’d like to know before making up my mind about whether the arrest was justified.

So, as we can see with the arrest of Professor Gates, there are several unanswered questions.  The news media and some of the blogosphere has the “gotta know the news now” bug, but it is often beneficial to wait.  On several occasions I have found that waiting lets me know more about a scenario before writing about it.  I feel that I am more thorough in my writing when I do.  I may have come late to the game, but I’m also better prepared.

That said, there is a place for fast-paced news reporting.  I work in the television industry, and a majority of my experience is with television news.  I’ve seen how newsrooms work, so I know why they operate on the “need to report now” basis.  I get it.  Yet, I think it would be better if all news organizations did their utmost best to gather all the facts, report them as a complete package, and recognize any previous errors (newspapers still do this, but TV news rarely does).  Blogs are a different matter.  They may find themselves now competing with the mainstream media for prominence in news reporting, but on commentary, I would prefer that those authors look at all the facts before coming to a conclusion.  You may still have the same opinion if had you given a knee-jerk response but at least you’ll have a better case behind it.

You may have to wait a little longer to get your thoughts out, but I think the end result is worth it.