THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 15, 1997 TAG: 9701150002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 63 lines
There's not much, in looking at them, that Michael Irvin and Richard Jewell have in common.
Irvin is a talented, troubled football star with the Dallas Cowboys, a man who has walked so far on the wild side that his reputation is in danger of being beyond redemption. Because of that reputation, a lot of heads bobbed in grave acknowledgment two weeks ago when he was accused of holding a gun to a woman's head while two other men, including a teammate, raped her.
Jewell is a beefy, sad-sack security guard who had no public profile at all until, through the summer and fall, he was held up before the world as the man most likely to have bombed a crowded public park during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
What they have in common is that both were accused publicly, by law-enforcement and news agencies, and both were cleared.
Each, as well, bears a permanent stain on his reputation.
There was a time when it was common practice to withhold the name of an accused person from the public until a police agency felt sufficiently confident of its evidence to file formal charges with a court of law. This was a convention born not of journalistic altruism but of fear on the part of small-town publishers that they might be sued into oblivion if the report proved false and the suspect was never charged.
Over the past 50 years, television's ability to provide news as it happens and First Amendment decisions that favor a free and vigorous press have combined to make news agencies less fearful of the consequences of unfairly sullying a person's reputation.
Worse, it takes publication by just one source to start an avalanche of coverage. That leaves the rest of the media - and the public - to rely on the fact-checking and journalistic standards of whoever tells the story first. In some recent instances, that avalanche has begun as far down the journalistic food chain as the supermarket tabloids.
The fierce competition brought on by instant-news capabilities of television was evident in the Jewell case. The Atlanta newspaper published an ``extra'' edition - virtually unheard of in modern newspapering - when it sensed it had an edge on the electronic competition. Sticking to normal publication schedules, the newspaper's editors reasoned, would be too risky.
In the Irvin case, the rape complainant actually called a television reporter before she called police - which, in itself, should have made the reporter suspicious.
When reporters and editors are prone to publish first and check their facts later, they place more and more of their credibility in the hands of the police. Clever investigators have learned that quick-draw media can be used to push an investigation in a certain direction, or, perhaps, to pressure a suspect to step forward and confess.
In Atlanta, it was the FBI that leaked information about Jewell. In Dallas, the police, incredibly, held a news conference linking Irvin and teammate Erik Williams to the investigation, by name, while lacking the evidence to be certain that a crime had indeed occurred.
Legislation is not the answer here. Tightening the screws on a free press does not work to the advantage of a free people. But news executives should remember that while it is a point of pride within the industry to scoop the competition, the public seldom recalls, or cares, whether it was ABC, NBC, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or the Dallas Morning News that got the story first.
But it does remember when everybody gets the story wrong.