WCMH: Bomb Scare Story and 911 Tape
On the 6pm, Candice Lee used the 911 tape from a downtown worker who spotted a suspicious briefcase, which was a fine idea. But I wonder about the choice of the edit from the tape. It went like this.
911: "911, what's your emergency?"
Caller: "Yes, I work at the Red Roof Inn and I am downtown on Nationwide between the Red Roof Inn Hotel and our support center, and there's a metal briefcase that's just sittiing out there in the corridor between two buildings."
It's a lengthy clip for one thing, but Lee did have the video of the hotel and the case to cover. But the caller wasn't excited, and really didn't reveal anything that hadn't already been said in the coverage or couldn't be said more succinctly by Lee.
And more frustrating, I got the feeling, listening to the clip, that the caller was about to say what most anybody would say in that situation: "I feel kind of silly calling, there's probably nothing suspicious about it, but I thought with everything going on these days, you know, maybe you ought to check it out." Something like that would have probably provoked a response from the 911 dispatcher that would provide the grist for a very interesting story. But if the caller actually said something like that, Lee didn't use it. Instead, he just told us where the story was taking place.
Now, you could actually justify using a clip like that if you used the 911 calls from all three suspicious packages in her story as a kind of montage, to illustrate the number of calls and the stress on the bomb squad. But she didn't.

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