The Las Vegas Review Journal and one of its reporters were the targets of online threats and harassment over a story about a hit-and-run death before murder charges were filed.
In a week-old story published in The Las Vegas Review-Journal, social media users seized on a weeks-old story to falsely accuse it of lying about the death of a retired police chief who was killed by a hit-and-run driver.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal published a short story on Aug. 18 about a retired police chief who was killed by a hit-and-run driver while bicycling four days earlier. The headline was, The story, the sort of bread-and-butter journalism that local newspapers produce every day, hardly appeared the kind to ignite brutal online harassment, threats and antisemitism directed at the reporter and The Review-Journal. But that was exactly what happened this month - weeks after the story was published - when social media users seized on the words 'bike crash' to falsely accuse The Review-Journal and the reporter, Sabrina Schnur, of lying about the intentional killing of the retired chief, Andreas Probst, 64. The attack was caused by a video which began circulating widely on social media around Sept. 16. The video, taken by a passenger in the car, showed that the teenage driver had intentionally hit Mr. Probst and had then driven off, police said.
The harassment that followed shows risks can come out of nowhere, they're really hard to predict and you don't know which story is going to be explosive, said Joel Simon, the starting director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in the City University of New York. The Editor-in-Chief of the Review-Journal has sought to protect Ms. Schnur. At her request, Poynter said, the paper went through her email and phone messages. It didn't 'calm the mob,' said the editor-in-chief of New York's The New York Times. Mr. Cook wrote in his column that Mr. Schnur had not written the words 'bike crash,' which 'launched this whole mess. When she was given evidence of the video last month, she gave a source instructions on how to send it to police. The murder charges were soon followed by an apprehension. Ms Schnur and the Review-Journal have continued to cover the murder, reporting on Sept. 20 that the teenagers, 16 and 17 in their 20s, would be tried as adults. The teenagers, who were driving stolen cars, were not only killed but also also accidentally hit and injured another bicyclist and rammed a car that day. I have put in 110 percent on this case because the family has asked for it, because the family has been brave enough to come forward, because it's a ruthless case - but also because it's a case on my beat, Mr. Schnur said. 'I'm not going to stop writing,' she said, because some people on Twitter are upset.