THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 29, 1997 TAG: 9701290033
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: 79 lines
JOURNALISM is a trade much like Don Quixote's windmill: casting those who engage it down into the mud or up among the stars.
Those flung upward include Winston Churchill, Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken.
It was Mencken, you may recall, who defined journalists as a ``gang of pecksniffs.''
A wonderful word, ``pecksniff.'' It summons the image of a vulture at a keyboard sniffing the air for something, hoping it to be suffiently putrid for his/her journalistic diet.
In the past few months much has happened to justify the Mencken definition. There are few of us among the stars, and the public has every reason to think of us as mud-dwellers of the lowest sort.
First there was Richard Jewell, hounded for two months by the press as a suspect in the bombing at Atlanta's Olympic Centennial Park. His name and photograph were seen around the world in a disgraceful breach of ethics - it is a longstanding policy of reputable papers not to print names, let alone photos, of suspects until they are charged.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first revealed Jewell's identity and branded him a suspect. Then the world media, including this newspaper, had no qualms about doing the same and displaying his photo.
Then, less than two weeks ago in Los Angeles, Ennis Cosby, son of entertainer Bill Cosby, was shot to death, apparently while changing a tire.
Within days of the shooting his father had to beg the news media to stop hounding the family and let them grieve privately.
His statement read: ``We do not accept people coming to our homes because this is a time we want to ourselves to find solutions to questions in our hearts.''
He was too charitable to add that some members of the media would do well to question whether they had hearts, period.
To its credit, CNN apologized for showing a gruesome, close-up shot of Ennis Cosby's body immediately after his death and did not use it thereafter. But no one at CNN, prior to the broadcast of the sensational death-scene footage, seems to have asked the question: What public interest is served by the ghastly scene we are about to project on millions of viewer screens?
It should be no surprise that while the media was obsessed with the Cosby slaying the Globe - a supermarket tabloid - was publishing crime-scene photos of JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old Colorado girl who was found strangled in her home.
But one rightly or wrongly expects better of mainstream newspapers. Yet one of the most heinous examples of a breach of public trust has been the San Jose Mercury News story that CIA spooks in California collaborated with Nicaraguan Contras to finance illegal activities by selling crack cocaine in American cities. Although the story has been discredited, militia members marching in the woods doubtless quote it regularly.
One could almost hear the cheers erupt across the nation when a jury last week ordered ABC to pay Food Lion more than $5.5 million for sending two reporters undercover with cameras in their wigs for an expose accusing the supermarket chain of selling spoiled meat.
The trial was not about the truth of ABC's allegation that Food Lion had sold spoiled meat. That caused one of the ABC producers, who had used fake references and backgrounds to get jobs at Food Lion to say, after the verdict:
``What frightens me most about all this is what Food Lion tried to punish us as journalists without ever challenging the truth of the broadcast. I think that should concern anyone who cares about a free press in this country.''
What frightens me is the producer's assumption that his deceit is somehow superior to that of Food Lion in marketing spoiled meat - if it did. Immediately after the verdict, network camera crews surrounded the jurors in Greensboro, N.C. A juror was asked whether the jury had considered the first amendment.
Oh, yes, he said. ``But what we said was that when you are on the playing field you have to stay within the boundaries,'' he replied. A U.S. Supreme Court justice could not have said it better.
What frightens me most is the demonstrated inability of the media to set standards of conduct and stick to them. Without our self-imposed discipline, the boundaries will, in time, be drawn by government.
And that prospect should concern those who care about a free press in this country. ILLUSTRATION: Richard Jewell was hounded by the press for two
months.