From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, the terrorists who hate our freedom won by scaring us into a bunker.

That's largely because of what happened in Paris. You know what happened. At least you know by now. But last Friday, as it

unfolded on mainstream and social media, we were confronted with a tangle of truth and hysterics,

expertise and rumor with or without malice of forethought. Actually, we were in the studio when we first

learned about Paris. Our phones buzzed in unison, Twitter were in the studio when we first learned about Paris.

Our phones buzzed in unison, Twitter notifications that kept on buzzing

as we were putting the final touches on last week's show.

Turns out, people were retweeting the Breaking News Consumer's Handbook we wrote two years ago

after a mass shooting. It offers guidance on

how to evaluate initial reports after such a crime, the sources, the journalistic jargon,

general words to the wise. Point number four, there is almost never a second shooter. But acts

of terrorism, though similar in many respects, do not follow the

same arc of coverage as the rampages of deranged shooters in schools and shopping malls.

For one thing, there often is a second shooter. In other words, there are reporting errors

peculiar to terrorist attacks that, tragically,

you ought to know.

So we begin this show with yet another one of our breaking news consumer handbooks,

the Terrorism Edition.

And we'll begin with the frequent use of a misleading word.

In the days following an attack like this, there is an urgent need to find the

culprit, not just the group behind it, but the actual individual. We seem to crave a specific

...