| HOME : DOING JOURNALISM : RESOURCE CENTER : MEDIA ETHICS : JOURNALISTS AND JEWELL |
|
|
Posted
October 1996
Journalists
and Jewell:
Richard Jewell is no longer a "target" in the investigation of the bombing at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. The Justice Department wrote that to Jewell's attorney Oct. 26, three months after the bombing that led to the deaths of two people and injured 111 others. In a passionate press conference Oct. 28, Jewell called the intervening time "88 days of hell," and said the news media "cared nothing for my feelings as a human being." Jewell had never been charged in the July 27 bombing, but the Atlanta Journal declared the security guard "the focus of the federal investigation" on July 30. Jewell's name and face and background got intense news media scrutiny from that moment--until it dropped off suddenly in mid- August. The FBI hadn't charged him, and Jewell's attorneys began insisting then that Jewell be charged or formally cleared. Jewell ended his press conference Monday by insisting, "I am an innocent man." As the presumed certainty of the early coverage eroded, the news media began to look inward, providing fodder for columnists, talk shows and news groups for weeks. The word "frenzy" came up a lot. The main question--whether the media should have identified Jewell--was answered by most critics in the negative. When Jewell was dropped as a "target" of the investigation, three of us who teach journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute decided to reflect on the ethical implications by having an E-mail conversation. The three of us are Bob Steele, director of the Ethics program at Poynter; Keith Woods, associate in the program, and Joann Byrd, visiting professional. JOANN BYRD: I'd like to pose two questions, and take a first shot at them. First: What lessons can journalists draw from the coverage of this investigation and of Richard Jewell? Second: Next time, what alternatives could we consider? I think the main lesson is that law enforcement people may be wrong. This is only one of the recent cases where journalists went even farther than law enforcement in our presumption that police suspicions were right. To make the point, think of how different the coverage would have been if we had presumed from the start that the FBI's focus on Jewell was wrong: We would have pressed the FBI about other suspects every day. We would have gone to sources--including previous employers--who had good experiences with Jewell. We would have done our best to reconstruct his alibi, and to give attention to his lawyers and his mother and anyone else who would provide a different picture of him. (The lesson is not to presume that law enforcement is wrong--though I think we are always too reluctant to ask law enforcement officials to support what they're telling us. The lesson is to presume that law enforcement work is preliminary--more preliminary than all our disclaimers made it sound this time.) As for alternatives, I routinely lean toward telling readers more instead of less. But I always think we should figure out what our readers and viewers need to know, and look for ways to tell them that without causing harm. I doubt that our public would have us damage an innocent person's reputation in our rush to identify a specific suspect. In this case, I'd look for a way to describe the person without using the name, or so much detail that the person can be identified anyway. If there are enough security guards, the report could have been that the FBI was focusing on a security guard. I haven't heard a story yet that couldn't be told in different ways. We can, and should, keep the public informed. But we can do that in ways that are less harmful. In the future, I'd have us take a deep breath and make a list of all the options, and then choose one that gets people the most information at the lowest cost. BOB STEELE: You're right, Joann, in suggesting that journalists must guard against being manipulated by our sources, particularly those whose power is so great. I sure wish news organizations had applied a higher level of skepticism to those law enforcement sources who originally suggested Jewell had become the focus of the investigation. Given the seriousness of the allegations, journalists had a great responsibility to insure fairness to Mr. Jewell when his name surfaced as a suspect instead of as a hero. Journalists should have pushed their sources to offer more substance as to why Jewell was now being targeted as a bad guy instead of being praised as a hero. At the same time, I believe it was inevitable that news organizations would go with the story once law enforcement used a search warrant to investigate Jewell directly. While I respect the alternative you suggest of using the term "security guard" instead of Jewell's name, I don't believe that works in this case. First, since Richard Jewell already was a key figure in the bombing story, it was likely many people would put two and two together and presume an "unnamed security guard" was indeed Jewell. Secondly, leaving Jewell's name out could be unfair to other security guards at the Olympics who might become the suspect in the minds of some. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, this development of Jewell as a suspect demanded a high level of specificity to meet accuracy standards. The absence of specifics could create rumors that would only compound an already tense situation fueled by fears of terrorists on the loose. The public needed to know more rather than less in this case. Granted, Richard Jewell was never charged and believes himself to be a victim of law enforcement incompetence. That may prove to be the case, but it doesn't negate the role and responsibility of journalists to report meaningful information about significant events. News organizations had a responsibility, I believe, to report that Jewell was being investigated. They just did a poor job of reporting that story in the days and weeks that followed. Accuracy and fairness were shortchanged. Too many journalists were over-zealous in pursuing Jewell and exhuming his background. Too few journalists were aggressive in examining law enforcement officials and investigating the strength of their case against Richard Jewell. The watchdog was wearing blinders. KEITH WOODS: Bob, I agree that the release of Jewell's name was not only an inevitability, but a responsibility. The problem is that some of the watchdogs we unleashed turned out to be rabid. The Jewell case points up the distinction between journalism that we must do and journalism that is optional. Both may do harm, but only some of it is unavoidable. An anxious world needed to know as soon as we did that there was a suspect, a viable suspect, in the bombing case. Richard Jewell was that man. It was his misfortune that he had been elevated to hero status, creating the rich irony and drama that make a story sell. But no matter what the competitive or commercial motivations might have been for giving that information to the public, the media had to tell that story, name included, for reasons of truth-telling, fairness and accuracy. That is the mandate of a free press. Optional journalism is not covered in that mandate. Under the optional umbrella falls the placement of a story, the tone of the storyteller, the framing of the story. Declaring that Jewell "fit the profile" of a bomber went way beyond the media mandate. Describing him as all but a maladjusted mama's boy, as one print story did, is not what the First Amendment demands of journalists. Exploring, then exposing, his personal life through the lens of those searching for a murderer is an option that the media can employ at will. In the Jewell case, it was employed prematurely, recklessly and with disastrous and now embarrassing results. There might have come a time for any or all of those facts and stories. But not before Jewell was even arrested. Not before a shred of evidence had been uncovered. There is no public service in revealing that Jewell wrote more parking tickets than the average campus cop or once crashed his police car into another squad car. There's only inference. Innuendo. Insinuation. This new pseudo-psychology journalism that we have seen emerge in the past decade is anathema to informed, reasoned public discourse. It is sophisticated rumor-mongering. It encourages quick judgment and mob mentality. Worst of all, it happens every day in smaller, less dramatic ways, when the lives of "suspects" are investigated and explicated by journalists single-mindedly seeking facts to validate the accusations. We gnash our teeth and wring our hands over Richard Jewell, but I worry about those many less-public people who are bitten each day by rabid watchdogs. |
|||
|
|
|||