ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 28, 1996 TAG: 9603280015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID R. FINE
A WEEK AGO, officials of the British Broadcasting Corp. announced that they had decided to postpone airing a quickly produced documentary on the horrible massacre of schoolchildren at the Dunblane Primary School in Scotland. Tony Hall, the managing director of BBC News and Current Affairs, told other reporters, ``We are all acutely conscious of the need to show real sensitivity at a time like this.''
At the same time, a great many news agencies pulled their reporters and camera crews from Dunblane in response to a request from community leaders. As a result, the world saw no videotape and heard little about the funerals of two 5-year-old girls, Emma Crozier and Joanna Ross, the first to be buried.
It was a great day for restraint. And there are few of them in the journalism business. I suspect that few of us either needed or wanted to see the families of little Emma and Joanna gathered at the church, huddled in unimaginable grief.
You would be hard-pressed to find many such acts of restraint in this country. Too many in our press corps would regard it as a betrayal of the First Amendment or would fear competitive disadvantage. Nearly a year ago, when the bomb wiped out the Oklahoma City federal building and its day-care center, parents who had to bury their toddlers were haunted by television cameras. When Susan Smith sent her boys careening to the bottom of John D. Long Lake, we watched as the car was pulled from the lake, we watched as the boys were buried and, when prosecutors re-created the crime with a videotape camera in the car, we even watched from the perspective from which the boys saw the water envelop the car.
Although we may disagree about the precise contours, most Americans recognize the inherent value of our First Amendment. But we have become a society so mired in what we have a right to do that we rarely give a thought to what we ought to do. And the press and electronic media are at the extreme.
As a onetime television reporter, I risk the enmity of my former colleagues by writing this, but the greatest problem in American newsrooms these days is not political bias but lack of judgment or self-censorship.
The British press, which has its own considerable problems of excess, understood the value of discretion in Dunblane. Our appreciation of the enormity of the evil inflicted by Thomas Hamilton would hardly have been enhanced by the sight of little coffins and grief-stricken parents. The kindergarten class photograph published around the world the day after the killings showing the teacher and her 28 little pupils - more than half of whom would die - was, perhaps, a definitive statement of the loss. We could relate to it. I thought of the Whiteford Elementary School kindergarten class of 1971 and my classmates; I thought as well of the Eisenhower Elementary School class of 1999 and my little boy's classmates. We didn't need more.
In Dunblane, community leaders asked the press to respect the privacy of the stunned little town; most of the media people did just that. Had it happened in this country, there would have been an outraged cry of censorship and at least some of the reporters would have trotted out the ``public's right to know.'' My old colleagues would have explained that our First Amendment is an unusual thing in the world; even the British press operates under a more restrictive regime than does ours.
From a First Amendment perspective, those offended reporters would have been absolutely correct. But they would have missed the point that rights define the outer boundaries of what we may do; there remains our need to exercise sound judgment about what we should do.
The public does have a right to know about events in the world, and our society is a better one because of it. The examples are too numerous to even begin the list. But we know what happened in that Scottish gymnasium. Watching the funerals and observing the town in its grief would not have told us more. It would only have proved a further intrusion on parents who have already felt the ultimate intrusion.
There is a lesson here. Few in our newsrooms will even notice it, but it was a poignant lesson. When the world's press turned the klieg lights away from Dunblane, it did not make the coverage any the less complete. It did not make the public less informed. It showed respect.
David R. Fine is an attorney in Harrisburg, Pa.
- The Washington Post
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