THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 10, 1996 TAG: 9603080031
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
I was in South Florida Tuesday, the day after a fourth terrorist explosion caused death and destruction in Israel. And I nearly spilled my coffee when I saw the front page of The Palm Beach Post.
Under a large lead headline, `` `It's blood, blood and more blood,' '' was one of the goriest photos I've ever seen in a newspaper. Taken at the scene of the blast in Tel Aviv, it showed (in color) the burnt body of a victim, clothes and leg partly blown off, blood pouring out in a thick red pool.
My first impulse, honest, was to call the public editor of The Post - not just as a reader but out of professional curiosity. We would have had scores, maybe hundreds, of calls. Did they, I wonder?
Several dozen, said C.B. Hanif. He is the newspaper's public editor, or ombudsman, but goes by the title Listening Post editor.
Hanif writes a Thursday column and, for it, asked the Florida newspaper's managing editor to explain why the photo was used.
``We rarely publish such a graphic photo and never do so without considerable debate among editors,'' Palm Beach Post managing editor Tom O'Hara told Hanif. ``In this instance, we decided that only an unsanitized photo could convey the horror of the event. . . ''
I'm mentioning all this because, from firsthand experience, I know readers are quick to cry ``gory'' or ``sensationalistic.'' O'Hara's comments are a reminder that, usually, editors play the role of self-censor.
The Israeli blast was also the A1 lead in Tuesday's Virginian-Pilot. Athough we have used quote headlines, this time the banner was straightforward - ``Blast rocks Israel again.''
And the photo was a close-up of a victim, her face reflecting pain and anguish, being carried by a medic.
Both that photo and the one that ran in The Post were distributed by The Associated Press.
Bill Kelley, a Pilot photo editor, saw the picture used by the Post but never considered running it. Too gory, he felt. He also thought the close-up of the victim was more powerful - it showed the human face of tragedy. Even that photo was cropped to eliminate some of the carnage.
So were we right and The Post wrong? Well, there is no right and no wrong, just opinion. I thought the Florida headline was a bit much.
But that photo - I can't get it out of my mind. The scene of the bombing, a Tel Aviv commercial district, looked like a battlefield, and it haunted me all day.
That's what makes journalism a challenge. As an editor, I would not have run the photo. As a reader, I was horrified. And as a person who would like to forget that violence rages near and far, I reacted just as O'Hara said: feeling the horror of the event.
MORE OF THOSE LITTLE THINGS. Good thing journalists aren't superstitious (knock on wood). Two weeks ago, I wrote about the little things that trip us up - and that day, the lead story in the Commentary section cited a famous John F. Kennedy quote from ``25 years'' ago.
No less than two dozen readers threw that back at us, with comments like: ``Was JFK speaking from the grave?'' ``How could you miss something every seventh grader knows?''
Then last Sunday, I did a Q&A with our Sports editors, which was followed by a losing streak on box scores. Thursday, our baseball agate scores listed the team errors instead of the scores, and there were two different sets of numbers for the Admirals' win over Mobile. And so on. . .
But it was also the week that The Pilot's sports writers did some hard-hitting coverage of the alleged gambling fix in high school athletics. And the week that Pilot education writers dug into the repercussions of the Virginia Beach School Board resignations. And so on. . .
I know what you're going to say: Tough ain't enough, the newspaper must be accurate, too. And, of course, you're right. . .
YESTERDAY'S NEWS TOMORROW. And finally, there was the complaint Wednesday - from a reader who did not want to leave his name - about our local election coverage.
The man was angry because our story, timed to the filing deadline for candidates, only touched on the highlights - it did not have a complete list of who was running for what office.
The information was available but, for a variety of technical reasons, it did not run until Thursday, filling almost an entire page in the MetroNews section. The list was well designed, broken into cities, superwards, etc. - easy to read.
But I'll have to agree with the caller, who said, ``I count on this to be a daily newspaper.'' It should have run a day earlier. MEMO: Call the public editor at 446-2475, or send a computer message to
lynn(AT)infi.net by CNB