ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, October 30, 1996 TAG: 9610300022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK JURKOWITZ
IN SOME ways, Richard Jewell is a lucky man. Now that a federal judge has all but cleared him in last summer's Olympic bombing by officially declaring him a``former'' suspect, the media will not only spread that news, but also engage in a serious mea culpa for splashing the name of this hero-turned-villain all over in the first place.
Truth is, the news industry's gnashing of teeth for destroying Jewell's privacy and turning him into Public Enemy No. 1 has been under way for some time. Barely a week after the Atlanta Journal broke the July 30 story that the security guard was ``the focus of a federal investigation'' into the bombing, Newsweek warned that Jewell could prove to be the ``bomb's 114th innocent victim.''
At a September convention of the Society of Professional Journalists, there was an effort - albeit unsuccessful - to pass a resolution apologizing to him. The October issue of the American Journalism Review features a story headlined ``Going to Extremes'' in which journalists chew over the hard lessons of the case.
``Jewell's getting a real break because we're so fixated on him that we're going to to apologize in public,'' says Jay Black, chair of the SPJ's ethics committee. ``But what about all the other people?''
Lost in these post-mortems is the fact that the Jewell case is symptomatic of a common journalistic practice - the aggressive and sometimes reckless reporting on someone under suspicion but not yet charged with a crime. And for every Richard Jewell, there are plenty of ``other people'' given an unwelcome, and often undeserved, 15 minutes of infamy. If the apologies to Jewell don't lead to a reassessment of media coverage of the criminal-justice system, we'll be doomed to repeat the mistake.
Certainly, Jewell is entitled to ask the same question posed by former Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan after his 1987 acquittal on criminal charges: ``Which office do I go to to get back my reputation?'' In the immediate aftermath of the Journal story, Jewell was pelted with such headlines as ``From Fame to Infamy'' and ``Hero Now Bomb Suspect.'' Everything from his job record to his character was scrutinized. He became the lead story on the evening news.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution managing editor John Walter notes that the media often don't follow up on basic trial reporting. ``We don't see the story six months later that the charges got dropped or that he got found not guilty,'' Walter says.
Discussing his paper's handling of the Jewell story, Walter says, ``In this particular case, tell us the alternative.'' Considering the circumstances - world attention focused on the Summer Games in Atlanta, widespread fears of a terrorist attack, Jewell's growing celebrity status, and the fact that he was under active investigation - most editors would have bent under the competitive pressure and acted similarly. (Just look at how many of them, with the notable exception of The New York Times, put the story on Page 1 the next day.) As Black notes, journalism's ``fundamental job is to tell the news.''
The problem occurs when aggressively telling the news conflicts with another journalistic commandment - minimizing harm.
The SPJ's new code of ethics says ``be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.'' But the word ``judicious'' leaves a yawning chasm for ambiguity, subjectivity and situational ethics. The resultant judgment calls illustrate why it's best to consider journalism ``more as an art than a science,'' says Robert Steele, director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
The broad rule of thumb, enunciated by Steele, is that ``we should already have a very high threshold standard for those who are named suspects before they are charged.''
``We, like everybody else, rarely print the names of suspects before they are charged, but some circumstances occur where this does happen,'' Walter says, stating the painfully obvious.
At the Boston Globe, managing editor Greg Moore says, ``The basic rule is we don't identify a person as a suspect in the paper unless the police officially do.'' But he acknowledges that ``in reporting the day-to-day details [of an investigation], you can get caught in an awkward situation.''
``We do have a policy that says we generally don't name people that haven't been charged,'' says Mike Stanton, news editor of The Seattle Times. ``If there's any doubt that the person did it, we don't name him.'' Even so, the Times did name Jewell in connection with the Atlanta bombing in apparent contradiction of that policy.
So what steps can be taken to avoid a future Jewell debacle? Within journalism, there is little appetite for - nor likelihood of - adhering to hard and fast rules about waiting for a formal charge before naming a suspect. Some observers suggest the answer lies not in abstinence but moderation, asserting that the problem wasn't identifying Jewell, but the spate of speculative character-dissecting stories that followed.
``If the Journal had a very high level of confidence in its sources and a high level of confidence in the authenticity of what the sources were saying, that's OK,'' says Steele. ``The coverage after that reflected that quality of pack journalism. The overly intense scrutiny of his past went beyond the logic of that particular story.''
``Is it healthy for the media to have a case like this to re-examine'' pack journalism, asks Walter. ``I think the answer is yes.''
But an orgy of media introspection isn't likely to produce meaningful change, particularly when the pressures of deadline often overwhelm ethics and theory. That's why some serious rethinking of the media's impatient and often uncritical acceptance of law-enforcement leaks is called for.
``When we start to be used as a public-relations branch of law enforcement, we're giving up our fundamental duties,'' says Black, who criticizes the publishing of the Unabomber's manifesto on those same grounds.
``It's incestuous,'' says defense lawyer Harvey Silverglate, a vocal critic of the symbiosis between journalists and the law-enforcement community. ``The reason the wrong thing was done [in the Jewell case] is because in their frenzy to get the inside information on what the feds had, the media were willing to do the feds' bidding by making it look like Jewell did it.''
Mark Jurkowitz is the ombudsman for the Boston Globe.
- New York Times News Service
LENGTH: Long : 110 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: CATHERINE KANNER/Los Angeles Timesby CNB