Fired employee wipes out whole season of TV show

Re:Fired employee wipes out whole season of TV show by pbhjpbhj on Friday April 01, 2011 @09:10AM (#2396017)

>"According to a lawsuit that was filed last week in Hawaii District Court, a man named Michael Scott Jewson was terminated from CyberLynk. From his parents' residence, he allegedly accessed CyberLynk's data and intentionally wiped it out. Jewson is alleged to have been charged in February with a federal computer crime violation and admitted his guilt in a plea agreement.

The data breach allegedly knocked out 6,480 WER1 electronic files, or 300 gigabytes of data, comprising two years of work from hundreds of contributors globally, including animation artwork and live action video production."

These sort of reports often over do it with the use of "allegedly" as an attempt to mitigate any libel claim.

"Jewson is alleged to have been charged"

Surely it's a matter of record whether he was charged. If the reporter can't even confirm this then they don't have a story.

"The data breach allegedly knocked out 6,480 WER1 electronic files"

Again they don't need that "allegedly", it's presumably a reported fact, the allegation they have to be wary off is the one that says the person responsible.

This really annoys me, allegedly.

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Re:Fired employee wipes out whole season of TV show by ubuntuftw on Friday April 01, 2011 @06:16PM (#2398323)

Former TV news person here.

While I agree with you on your first point (that the reporter shouldn't have to use the word "allegedly" if he/she can confirm the man was charged), personally, I think using allegedly in the sentence about the files being knocked out is warranted. "The data breach" is referring to the data breach the man *allegedly carried out.

TV news reporters != attorneys. So when in doubt, attribution is your best friend.

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Re:Fired employee wipes out whole season of TV show by pbhjpbhj on Saturday April 02, 2011 @04:37AM (#2399543)

The data breach he allegedly carried out is reported as a known quantity. The only allegation that needs mitigating is that it was this person that carried it out. If one is unsure of the details then it would be "reportedly" or an "unconfirmed source stated" or similar, no?

Thanks for your viewpoint though.

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Re:Fired employee wipes out whole season of TV show by ubuntuftw on Saturday April 02, 2011 @11:10AM (#2400053)

The problem is that the reporter doesn't know that the details of the breach mentioned in this article are facts. The figures, that there were 6,480 files totaling 300 GB of data likely came from the prosecution. So the reporter needs to get himself off the hook and either attribute it ("the prosecution says") or use words like "allegedly," "reportedly," etc.

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