Philip Seib and Kathy Fitzpatrick framed this journalist’s dilemma in their book Journalism Ethics:
The “good citizen” response might be: “Sure; use our tapes. We’re not pro‐looter here. If we can help you lock up criminals, we’ll be glad to do so.” That reply sounds noble, but it contains a significant problem. Journalists were able to do their reporting after police had left the riot area because the rioters were angry with the police but not with the news media. If, however, the news gatherers turn out to have been evidence gatherers, the next time a similar event occurs the public may not treat police and reporters differently. The journalists might not be able to cover the event from the vantage points they previously enjoyed, and they may even find themselves in danger.11
In his book Don’t Shoot the Messenger, media lawyer Bruce W. Sanford wrote:
The media have long opposed these attempts to press them into service as a sort of litigation resource or video library for the prosecution or defense. Reporters fear that they seem to take sides when their testimony or work product becomes the subject of a trial. And when confidential sources are involved, compelling reporters to testify or to surrender their notes, video‐ or audiotapes may reveal identities and dry up important sources of information.12
Giving media access to criminals
Even so, when law enforcement asks for help, the choice can be difficult. Journalists at KKTV in Colorado Springs, Colorado, helped authorities in January 2001 because they thought their cooperation could defuse a threat of lethal violence.
Two heavily armed Texas prison escapees were holed up in a Colorado Springs hotel room. They told negotiators they would surrender if they could be interviewed on live television and were allowed to vent their complaints about the Texas prison system. The negotiators agreed to ask the station to give them five minutes each.
The station went along, and the interviews were carried live with the video showing anchor Eric Singer at a desk talking with the men on a telephone. Singer allowed them to make opening statements and then asked questions. An FBI agent sat off‐camera and kept time. 13
Singer said that, before the interviews began, he briefed officers on the questions he planned to ask. He said he agreed to “stay away from hot‐button words,” so he did not ask the fugitives what happened when they allegedly shot a police officer in Texas. The limitations on his interview did not disturb Singer. In his experience, he said, it is not uncommon for people being interviewed to “dictate how they want it done.” He said interview subjects frequently specify “what questions will be on or off limits.”
Singer said the viewers were told what was happening before the interviews were aired. Afterward, he said, the station made sure that the viewers “were clear about the questions that I came up with and the ones that weren’t asked. … There was nothing hidden.”14 After the interviews, at about 3:45 a.m., the fugitives surrendered.15
Singer expressed satisfaction with the station’s role in the event. “We are in the business to know things and report on them,” he said. “These two men were the hottest stories of the day. We got to interview them and also helped keep the community safe.”16
The episode ended well, but ethical questions remain – questions that other broadcasters should consider before they face similar requests.
The situation faced by the Colorado Springs station replicated the issues that the publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post faced in 1995. A person known only as the Unabomber had been mailing bombs that in the previous 17 years had killed three people and injured 23. Now he demanded that the two newspapers publish his 35,000‐word manifesto denouncing “the industrial system” and advocating a revolution to wreck that system. If the publishers refused, he wrote, he would resume bombing.
The newspapers complied, even though some in journalism warned that they were setting a precedent and leaving the media open to further blackmail. “You print and he doesn’t kill anybody else, that’s a pretty good deal,” Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in a message to his staff. “You print it, and he continues to kill people, what have you lost? The cost of newsprint?”
The publication of the manifesto led to the arrest and conviction of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. His brother David recognized the writing style and informed authorities, who tracked down Theodore Kaczynski in a mountain cabin in Montana. 17
Intervention at Central High
September 4, 1957, was to have been the day that 15‐year‐old Elizabeth Eckford would be among the first African American students admitted to the previously all‐white Central High School in Little Rock. But when Eckford arrived by bus at Central High that morning, she found herself the only African American in a sea of angry white people. Her path to the school was quickly blocked by the raised rifles of National Guardsmen, who had been sent by Governor Orval E. Faubus ostensibly to prevent disorder.
Eckford and the eight other African American students turned away later that morning would earn a place in history as the Little Rock Nine. Because her family did not have a telephone, she had failed to receive instructions to go to Central with the others. So, she was terrified and alone as she sat on a bench awaiting a bus to take her away from a jeering crowd that appeared to be on the verge of a riot.
In different ways and for very different reasons, two journalists intervened in the event they were covering.
Robert Schakne, a CBS News television and radio reporter, discovered that his network’s cameras had not captured the yelling and Confederate flag‐waving as Eckford walked the distance of a city block to the bus stop. What Schakne did next was described by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in The Race Beat, the Pulitzer Prize‐winning history of the news media’s coverage of the civil rights movement:
He did something that revealed the raw immaturity of this relatively new medium of newsgathering: he ordered up an artificial retake. He urged the crowd, which had fallen quieter, to demonstrate its anger again, this time for the cameras. “Yell again,” Schakne implored as his cameraman started filming.The television reporter had carried journalism across a sacrosanct line. … [H]ere in Little Rock, where a domestic confrontation of unsurpassable importance was unfolding, where journalistic propriety and lack of it were being put on public display, reporters who were inches from the drama found themselves making up the rules as they went along and doing it in front of everyone in a volatile situation with a hot, erratic new technology.18
The second journalist to intervene was reporter Benjamin Fine of The New York Times. Roberts and Klibanoff wrote that, as Fine observed tears stream down Eckford’s cheeks behind her sunglasses, he
began thinking about his own fifteen‐year‐old daughter. His emotions carried him beyond the traditional journalistic role of detached observer. He moved toward Eckford and sat beside her. He put his arm around her, gently lifted her chin, and said, “Don’t let them see you cry.”
Soon afterward, a white woman named Grace Lorch, whose husband was a teacher at a local college for African Americans, joined Fine and Eckford. When the girl boarded a bus a few minutes later, Lorch went with her.
Fine’s effort to comfort Eckford, the authors of The Race Beat wrote,
was seen by many around him as humane but completely inappropriate and probably provocative. [Fine] had inserted himself into a live story – only to remove himself from it when he wrote
