The rumor mill is sometimes amazing. We have spent hours in the past few days telling callers that Tolly Carr, the newsman at WXII who has been charged in a vehicle accident involving the death of another young man, did NOT commit suicide. Good callers. Smart callers. People who don’t buy timeshares over the telephone or respond to email scams. Just astounding.
The callers take several varieties: The curious (a friend heard it from a doctor who was there...). The concerned (Lord, I hope he didn’t do anything rash). And the callous (Well, he should have.)
Like most of these deaths, this is a difficult story. I read the obituary on Casey Bokhoven. He seemed like a v. good person with a zest for life and my sort of wide-ranging palate for food (He was a cook.) And I met Carr last year on a panel at WSSU, where we gave student journalists advice on how to interview and write resumes. He was personable and spot on in his recommendations.
At times, we have half-seriously discussed posting a story on JournalNow that says “Carr still alive.”
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
My son, 14, came running in the door the other day yelling that the “news guy” had commited suicide. His source was his bus driver, who’d been called on her cell by a friend with the news. To her credit she said that he should take the info with a grain of salt given her source, but being 14 he quickly forgot that advice. Of course the first thing we adults did was jump online to see if there was a story about it.
Jim Laughrun, our former managing editor, sent this in:
The Tollie Carr rumor reminds me of one on the Sentinel several years ago about a child being either killed or castrated at a restroom at Hanes Mall (the severity depending upon the caller).
Callers swore they knew a policeman who was there, or a worker in the emergency room of the hospital, or a janitor at the mall, etc.
We did all the checking, as you did, with the police, the hospitals, the EMS, etc. We even tried tracing back the rumor from some of the callers: who did you hear it from, who did you hear it from, etc.
When all was said and done, we eventually did do a story (so did the Journal) saying we had checked it out thoroughly and could find no sign that anything happened. I had expected this to spark another round of calls, but we got surprisingly few, and the rumor died out quickly.
However, as best I remember, we didn’t use the original lead ...
“Did you hear the one about the Hanes mauler?”
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