Media may have been out of control in reporting on Secret Service 'crash' at White House

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."