It would appear not, if this country’s news outlets are anything to go by. Sky News, in particular, in their desperate bid to fill airtime and webspace in the absence of actual facts will apparently happily run anything, no matter how unfounded or inconsistent (for example, their reports about the windows being blown out on the bus in Hackney were accompanied by… a photograph of the bus in Hackney with its windows intact).
Most of yesterday’s “reports” consisted of highly reliable “eyewitness accounts”, but sometimes Sky resorted to second hand accounts. For much of yesterday their website had something along the lines of “an eyewitness said that an Italian man who was on the train told her…” Well, that’s clearly a conclusive and reliable report, then. (I think this was the same person to utter the classic statement–later removed from the site–about there having been a small blast. Apparently it wasn’t enough to hurt anybody, but was enough to blow open the rucksack in which the device was located, and as a result “the man holding the rucksack looked rather dismayed”.)
By the time I got home, the networks had endured several hours of coverage with no new information, and as such were deep in the realms of speculation, reporting the news they wanted to report without letting anything as silly as the facts (or lack of them) get in the way.
Today the police seem to have shot a man dead on the tube at Stockwell. Bearing in mind the fact that they managed to arrest several people yesterday who weren’t in any way connected to the (attempted) bombings, you’d want to hope that they were mighty sure that they were shooting dead (five times) the right person on the tube at Stockwell, and not just targetting anyone with the wrong colour skin and heavy luggage in the wrong place at the wrong time.
(According to the BBC: “They brought in the air ambulance. They did everything they can to revive him. He died at the scene.” I dunno. Wouldn’t doing “everything [you] can to revive him” perhaps include not shooting him five times?)