Posted on 04/08/2009 8:26:16 AM PDT by Robe
You said — Then WHY are you even on a BREAKING NEWS thread in the first place?? Why don’t you spend your time on the “48-hour Old News” threads and leave threads like this alone?
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Just because something is posted that is not the full story, or is totally wrong, or is bogus — is no reason for me to *not* be there. But, if it’s not “backed up”, it’s a very good reason to say it’s bogus. The internet is full of bogus stories and just because someone posts something here doesn’t make it reliable, at all. When something is backed up, then it becomes more reliable. The more it’s backed up and the more details which are “delivered” in the next few days, the more reliable it becomes.
Thus *initial* reports contain sometimes no truth, sometimes only a grain of truth, sometimes just a single solitary fact.
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And then you were saying — And regarding your statement that unless something has backup, it’s bogus: So if a FReeper is an eye-witness to a murder of 10 people and posts here from his Blackberry while hiding in the attic, you’re going to call him a liar, say he made it up, and that it’s a hoax, and tell the Admin Moderators to delete or lock the thread until YOU can read it on the CBS website, which will be 5 hours later, after the perpetrator has held law enforcement at bay for a few hours and after all of the next of kin of the dead have been notified...
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You’re assuming some kind of “paranormal knowledge” to be able to even say that, without verification (perhaps you contacted Miss Cleo to discover if it were true... LOL...). If you read a post where someone else does that very thing, and nothing is verified and they later call “hoax” just to show you that it can be done (which it can..., very easily) — you would have *absolutely no way* to know that, at the time it was posted. So, no..., here at Free Republic, it’s necessary to get verification, and that’s by way of other links to the stories. That’s standard practice. You may be gullible, and that’s too bad..., but for standard practice, no..., verification is needed if one wants to make sure something is not a hoax and bogus on Free Republic.
It’s one thing to post opinions and how one may interpret certain theories or hypotheses and so on. Those are not “hoaxes” but interpretations of theories. We’ve got a lot of that, here on Free Republic, too. BUT, when you post *hard news* — which is supposed to be *factual* and you have *no facts*, no links and you supply an old story from the year 2007, then, no..., that’s not factual...
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And then lastly — But even after YOU “verify” it by seeing it on the CBS website (which will not get the facts right anyway), you will still not apologize to the original poster, right? Of course not. You don’t have it in you.
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It’s bogus until such time as it becomes verified. At that time then it’s different. There’s nothing to apologize for, because absent any link (and there was none), along with another story from 2007 being given as “verification” — no, it remains bogus, at that time. And that’s the way it stands...
When something becomes verified, then you evaluate new information. Prior to that, it’s bogus...
You said — And it must be a hoax if it’s not on the internet, right?
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I operate on the principle that if something is posted on the Internet, and it’s not verified, then it’s most probably a hoax. That pertains to hard news and factual stuff.
Of course, there’s a lot of “opinion” here and that’s a different story, as opinion doesn’t come in the category of hoax or not, but rather whether it’s reasonable, or supportable or one can draw the conclusions that one is trying to do.
Here we are talking about straight facts and absent any verification, if something *is* on the Internet, and without verification, it’s a hoax or bogus or unverifiable or unverified — until such time that several sources of verification come in.
In this particular case, there was nothing verifying it, until a bit later when a 2007 story link was given — which made it even *more* unverifiable than it was before...
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And then, there is another aspect to “breaking news” on a big story. Almost always on something that *may* be true in the “broad aspect” of the story (like someone was killed, for example), the “details” are almost *always* wrong on the story. It could be half the story wrong, or a quarter of it wrong, but it’s always wrong enough to get the entire gist of the story way off kilter and not be able to understand what is going on. But, as *further verification* starts leaking in, on a breaking news story, you start to get patterns that repeat and certain facts that are verified. Other facts start *dropping out* and disappearing, that may have initially appeared. But, “now” you find that those facts are *no longer repeated* by anyone. They’ve just disappeared completely (because they were never true in the first place). That’s all typical of a breaking news story.
In the “long run” — and when the story is *completed* (assuming that it’s not an “on-going story”), then the details start to “sort out” eventually, in a few days.
But, here, the story is not completed and it’s not over. So, what that means is that there are going to be facts that are missing (basically because it’s an “ongoing operation” and typically officials don’t give all the details for an on-going operation). So, even now, the story is not going to be straight or complete and we won’t know all the details. Knowing all the details won’t happen until the whole thing is over, and people who were there (who may have been captured, but can’t talk now, of course) will be able to talk later, and of course *after* the authorities get done with them.
So, even now, even with so-called “verification” at this point in time, you can’t even count on the story being accurate and you or I having all the necessary details to figure out what happened, what is happening and what is being planned (and of course not for what is being planned). You’re probably not going to get the full details about “what is happening” even right now, because that would probably compromise a rescue operation that may be in progress.
Therefore, even right now, after it’s been all this time since it happened, I don’t think that all the details are correct for the story. It never is. But, I’ll still be watching and listening and reading, trying to “sort it out”...
And, as a last “note” on this and what you said — no, I don’t expect it to be “instant” — in fact, I don’t think even after two or three days it’s reliable news. So, no..., I have the opposite opinion, it can’t be verified properly, until *after* a sufficient amount of time has passed. I would say not until after a few days to a week or more — after any “operations” have ceased and everything is “over”...
Getting back to you on that story, as I said earlier...
After going over various different reports on this — one thing makes all the reports still questionable, in terms of understanding what is going on and what has gone on.
The one thing that makes everything questionable? Very simply..., it’s *still an on-going operation*....
That means you’re not going to have all the information to even make an intelligent assessment of what happened, what is going on, much less, what “might go on” (in the near future...). That’s because, since it’s an on-going operation, officials are going to “hold back” certain information that may interfere with or compromise their operations. It’s typical and you can expect it.
So, even now..., all these reports that I’ve read and others have read, I have to say that they’re all *suspect* and I seriously doubt that they’ve given us all the information for anyone here to make a real good assessment of the whole thing.
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