From ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ to ‘drive, baby, drive’
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
I’m not asking anyone to treat AI as an oracle — only to notice what happens when the slowed audio and the spectrogram don’t match the confident captioning. Perhaps ChatGPT and I are both wrong. But I don’t think so. After repeated playback, I could not hear anything resembling the word “baby.” And if the argument is that the audio portion of the video recording is too ambiguous for a definitive conclusion, then that point should have been made to the hundreds of media outlets that ran with the “drive, baby, drive” narrative — not with me for questioning it.
Deciding whether Officer Ross was justified in shooting Renee Good does not hinge on what Becca Good said in a moment of panic. But public judgment — and calls for criminal punishment — clearly have. When journalists and commentators repeat an unverified transcription as fact, they do more than simplify a complex event. They create a moral narrative that can endanger real people.
If the audio is ambiguous, that ambiguity should have been reported as such from the beginning. If it is not, then the words attributed to Becca Good deserve correction. Even if I’m wrong about the exact words, the larger point stands: If the audio is ambiguous, it should never have been presented as a definitive quote — and certainly not used to justify calls for prosecution.
In cases like this, restraint is not just appropriate. It is the responsibility that journalists owe their readers. And readers should demand the same restraint from those who claim to inform them.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
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