The reports of
two Secret Service agents, possibly intoxicated, crashing their
government-issued car into a crime scene at the White House certainly sounded
like a titillating story.

But was it
close to the truth? A near miss?

The Huffington
Post reports that surveillance video of the highly publicized March 4 incident,
according to a source who has seen it, suggests the agents’ actions that night weren’t nearly as erratic as originally described in news reports and,
subsequently, by members of Congress relying on said news reports in TV
appearances.

Michael Calderone, a HuffPo media critic, wrote this:

“The source,
who was not authorized to speak publicly about the video, told The Huffington
Post that the footage shows two senior agents driving very slowly after
arriving at the scene, perhaps just 1 to 2 mph. The source said the agents’ car
nudged a traffic barrel and that the action appeared to be intentional rather
than reckless — in an effort to move the object out of the way.

“The source’s
reflections on the contents of the video echo reports from both CNN and Fox News. If proven true — and the video could be made
available to members of Congress in the coming days — the evidence would raise
questions about earlier reporting on the incident, the framing of which seemed
to fit neatly into a long-running narrative of Secret Service agents out of
control.”

Obviously, the
1 to 2 mph speed of the car, if close to the truth, should have made this a non-story from
the beginning. According to Calderone, reports that the agents ran over a suspicious
package at the scene, as Secret Service personnel tried to determine if it
might be a bomb, also may be false. And it now seems clear that the agents
showed their badges as they arrived at the scene and their car merely nudged a barrel in
order to squeeze into an entrance to the White House grounds.

Calderone
places a good deal of the blame for the apparent misinformation on The
Washington Post.

The Post broke
the story last Thursday reporting that the agents were “suspected of
driving under the influence” and “may have driven over the suspicious
package.”

The Post later
tweaked the
language of the headline and the story to report instead that the
agents “drove directly beside” the package, instead of possibly over
it.

But by the
time the updates were in place, the piece had already been tweeted by several
Post editors
and reporters
and retweeted widely by Twitter users, including members of the media. Several news
outlets published stories
citing the Post’s report that the agents may have driven over the package, even
though the language was later changed.

The official
who perhaps got burned the worst by this cascading story was Congressman Elijah
Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, who assumed the worst on national TV.
“When you look at what happened here,” Cummings told MSNBC’s
“The Rachel Maddow Show” on Thursday night, a few hours after the
Post’s report, “it is extremely alarming and shocking to the conscience
that two senior supervisory types in the Secret Service could come and crash a
barrier, basically tamper with a crime scene because they may have ran over the
very thing that they thought was a bomb, and to put other people in danger
because they appeared to have been impaired by alcohol.”

 

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