In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, witnesses described the chaos at the finish line, where thousands of bystanders fled away from the blasts as first responders did the opposite—running toward the smoke and destruction with brave determination. Several people compared the police and medics to salmon swimming upstream, against the tide of the crowds. This is what public service and leadership looks like—and it is a lesson the news media would be wise to learn.

It’s trendy to praise the democratization of media via the Internet as harnessing “the wisdom of crowds.” But this time, the crowds were dumb. Clouded by biases, CSI-wannabes deluged the Internet with pictures from the marathon marked up with theories about suspects. Those theories were too often based on pernicious assumptions about race and ethnicity. In one of the most widely circulated collection of images, a young man was singled out as a suspect because he was wearing a backpack, alone and brown. On the image, posted on 4chan, “alone” and “brown” were written in all caps. Subsequently, the website Reddit wrongly fingered a missing South Asian student from Brown University as the suspect—for which they, rightfully, later apologized.

We Americans all swim in centuries of racial bias only made more acute by 9/11 and its aftermath. Unchecked, such bias can take over. This is why we have public servants in the professional news media, to resist the rushing crowds of assumptions, to swim upstream by responding to biases and fear with context and insight. But in the wake of the Boston bombings, far too often, news media got caught downstream.

Like Reddit, the New York Post jumped on the amateur sleuth bandwagon and put a picture of a 17-year-old Arab American student on its cover, naming him as a suspect. Unlike Reddit, the New York Post did not apologize—but simply posted a story that the kid and his friend were “cleared” by authorities. Yet while the New York Post was by far the worst offender in piling onto and perpetuating bias-tinged information, they were by no means alone within the professional news community. Many in the media contributed reason and restraint, but too many did not.

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