Gene Foreman

March 2009

Penn State University

Interviewer: Russell Frank

Discussion about Pennsylvania State Treasurer Budd Dwyer’s very public suicide on January 22, 1987 during a televised press conference held in Harrisburg, PA.

Interviewer:  

Foreman:  …including video, thought that it would be vindicated; trying to vindicate himself in saying goodbye. He did that except as we know now, he …. and opened a manila envelope and drew out a pistol, waved people back who were rising, trying to; they were yelling Budd, stop! Don’t! He then shot himself; put the gun in his mouth, and of course he was killed instantly. All of this was captured on video and on still pictures and sold to television and radio stations around the state as well as around the country. We focused our case study on the stations and newspapers in Pennsylvania and what decisions they made. Only one station continued to use the unedited tape from beginning to end. I think two other stations had used parts of it, but nearly everybody else independently decided to stop it before the shot was fired. One station out of twenty in Pennsylvania that Penn State researchers checked at the time did not use any video at all.

In newspapers, which is where I was concerned; we had a variety of stills to work from. The most used, I think, was a picture of him with the pistol in his right hand, left hand waving people back. I call that the stand back picture and we used that at the Inquirer. We also used a picture of him with the gun in his mouth, and it was on the front and inside page.  Inside, we showed a picture of his body slumped on the floor. This was black and white, so there wasn’t gore. It was taken from a distance. That was not a particularly gory picture. So those are the three we used. There were a few others, including the moment of impact, where his head seems to explode. We never even considered using that. Our photo editors felt strongly that being that this is essentially a local story, and an extraordinary suicide, which generally is not a big news story, that we should use two pictures on the front; the stand back picture and the pistol in the mouth and inside, the body slumped. I do, in retrospect, regret that we used the picture of the gun in the mouth.

A lot of people told us the next day that when it’s on the front page of the paper, they can’t sensor this for their children. They probably were offended by the picture too, but most people were speaking about, our kids see that, and we don’t want them to see it. The same sort of reaction came to the station that showed the unexpurgated tape and the effect on children seeing it. So these were some of the things we were concerned about. Even though there was a snowstorm at the time, and a lot of papers didn’t get delivered promptly, we still got five hundred phone calls the next day, which was an unusual number. My opinion is that whether you agree with them or not, when the switchboard lights up you need to think about what you did and if you haven’t already, try to determine whether maybe that was the right course. A couple of people in our newsroom had expressed concern about the gun in the mouth, but I think our feeling at the time was that this was our (former) State Senator; it was in public; it’s a local story; it is a major story and we should use it. But I think that I would certainly not use it on the front page, and probably wouldn’t use that picture at all. I think that the virtue of the stand back picture, you get the feeling of impending violence, but without the actual scene itself. I think that sometimes we ought to spare our readers or viewers of the actual scene if we can suggest it in a way that is not itself offensive. That seems to be a better course.

Interviewer:   Parents’ concerns about their children seeing the paper come up a lot? How much should we really worry about that issue?

Foreman:  About people reacting?

Interviewer:   Parents wanting to shield their children from either graphic violence or graphic sex in the newspapers.

Foreman:  Well, another case study in the book is about the Spokane mayor and editor Steve Smith of the Spokesman Review, the paper that ran the story about the mayor’s sexual involvement with younger men. People complained to him about that, and we said we don’t edit the paper for children. We recognize that some children will see it, but I think that we would be really hamstrung in trying to tell the news today if it were written exclusively as if it were only going to be read by children. So we’re probably a PG on stories like that rather than G, but we do have to pull our punches, I think, the question is that you drive away the readers if you are too explicit, and we have to constantly balance our responsibility to our audience; not upsetting them, not offending them, or driving them away, vs. our responsibility of telling the news about what actually happened. So I think that what I advocate teaching is two things. One is learn to recognize what is likely to offend. So I try in writing the book to give the students the benefit of my experience; things that I learned from trial and error. Frankly, I didn’t realize how incendiary the picture of the gun in the mouth would be. I knew that some people would be bothered by it, but the degree surprised me. The second thing of course, would be now that you know, or you’re pretty sure it’s going to offend somebody, are we justified in running it or is there another way to tell the story? Sometimes the answer is we’re going to offend them, but we think It’s important. I think those are things that are carefully thought out in advance so that you anticipate the reaction and you feel confident that you are still doing the right thing.

Interviewer:   Placement seems to be a big issue when it comes to these kinds of photos, because I guess that a lot of parents feel like kids aren’t likely to go paging through the paper, but they will see what’s on the front page. I know it may be worthwhile talking about the American soldier who was dragged through the streets in Mogadishu—I remember reading that when that photo moved across the wires that editors were having a meeting at the time and they were quickly polled about how they would handle it. I think about one-third said front page in color. One-third said black and white inside, and one third said they wouldn’t use it at all. I always think about that. That sort of epitomizes what is so difficult about making ethical decisions is to have such a perfect split about how to handle a piece of news. If we could talk about the background of that case and how you think that one should be handled.

Foreman:  Yes, I’m with the group that thinks it should be run. There was a major local story at the time that dominated our front page. We did run it inside, and I think that on a normal day we probably would have run it somewhere on the front. That was a story that A, we knew it would offend; B, we thought it was extremely important.

Interviewer:   Maybe for the tape, if you could describe the background.

Foreman:  Yes, we were trying to help the people of Somalia through a drought and famine; sending supplies in there. The country had no functioning government and there was a constant battle between the warlords. In this context, our soldiers got caught up in a firefight and a Blackhawk helicopter was shot down and one of the soldiers in the helicopter was killed in the ensuing gun fight. His body was dragged through the street with people jeering in Mogadishu. Its influence, I think, the picture and of course the event itself, President Clinton decided that we would pull our troops out and that while we wanted to help in distributing the food, we also didn’t want our soldiers killed. There was tremendous hostility to our being there among certain groups. So the fact that it was later shown to have influenced policy only reinforces our belief that we did the right thing in running the picture. Sometimes people have to see things that are troubling to them in order for us to tell them here’s what’s going on. It’s a fine line and I think in the Dwyer case, we went over that line by retrospective. In the Mogadishu case I don’t think we did.

Interviewer:   What about the counter argument though that a photo like that is so inflammatory in a way, that as soon as people see it, maybe they stop looking at the bigger policy issue and just say no we don’t want that to happen to any of our soldiers. Let’s get them all out of there. So it’s kind of like if you show a photo of a plane crash, it obscures the fact that most planes land safely. You know what I mean? You’re seeing the very worst of it, and that’s what creates this deep impression in people’s minds. So it’s hard for them to retain a more nuanced, balanced, or complex view.

Foreman:  Well, I think that’s a judgment that people had to make. We’re giving them the information. I don’t think that we should shy from running that picture because people might be very, very angry about that and maybe Clinton should have stayed in Somalia; I don’t know. The fact is that there was a lot of public pressure to get out. Just as you said, that influenced policy. But I don’t think that’s manipulative on our part. If we say well we’re going to pull our punches because it may be a policy that we may not approve of. I think that we have to be neutral on that and say that we give them the information and let people decide hopefully what they want to do.

Interviewer:   So while we’re on this subject, I was also thinking about the difference between local upsetting photographs and ones from far away. One instance in particular that epitomizes this issue was when the Centre Daily Times ran an accident photo several years ago. A Penn State student was crossing Garner Street and Beaver Avenue and she got hit by a bus. The photo was not graphic at all. You could just see her legs and that was about it. The day before, they ran a really bloody photo from a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. There was no uproar. The switchboard did not light up about the suicide bombing photo, and it did light up about the Penn State student photo. So what does that tell us about how people respond to the newspaper and in terms of making decisions about those kinds of photos?

Foreman:  Yeah, I remember that photograph with the schoolbus and you could see rescue workers working over what presumably was the student’s body. I showed it to my ethics classes at Penn State as an example of how even though the picture was not particularly gory, it’s still offensive because it’s local. The point you made is absolutely true. Sherman Williams, the photo editor of the Milwaukie Journal Sentinel, speaks to that in my book about how local does make a difference. Often people, readers will know the person involved and will react personally to that. I think that the point you made about there being a very gory picture from Jerusalem attracted almost no reaction and then there’s a local picture, not gory, but symbolic. You can tell a tragedy occurred and it did attract a lot. So this is just one of many factors I think that journalists have to consider in making their decisions. It goes in the first part of that two step decision- making process as to what degree do you think people will be offended. Then you go on to the other question; do they really need to see this from a news point of view. My view on the bus thing anticipated the kind of reaction you’d get. There wasn’t a whole lot of argument for using that picture. It was simply not a remarkable picture under any circumstances.

Interviewer:   So is there a meaningful distinction to be made also between pictures that have to do with public policy issues and public tragedies vs. a private one? There are things we need to think about and decide when we come to the photo from Somalia as opposed to a car accident. There’s no really public policy issue there. Although I suppose you could always argue, and I know people do make this argument, that every photo of an accident is a reminder for people to be careful. So in that sense, it’s considered as useful.

Foreman:  Right; and there’s validity to that. I think it can be overused if you simply want to get a picture in because it’s a remarkable picture. This is not the way decisions ought to be made, but we’re human and if we really want to run this picture because it’s such a spectacular picture. Then we back up and try to justify it. It’s not good decision making. So while it can be argued that it does affect public policy for the better showing how accidents can happen and how they might have been prevented. I can recall the Stanley Forman picture of a fire escape collapse in Boston. It shows the two people; a nineteen-year-old woman and a three or four year old girl that she was babysitting plunging. The woman was killed and the girl fell on top of her. A lot of people, of course, objected to that. I think that the fact that it really showed the danger of fire escapes, that in this case that had not been inspected in a long time, that we need to tighten up laws in Boston, and they did indeed tighten it up and other cities followed suit. So there is validity to that.

I also say, to answer another part of your question, that if something is a private as opposed to a public person; an ordinary person involved in a tragedy, people are going to react very strongly. So local and private versus somewhere else and in public are two distinctive factors that journalists need to learn to factor in when making their determination of whether people will be offended or not. I can recall at the Inquirer we had a dramatic picture of a little girl who had been in a car wreck being extricated by the firefighters. It was a heroic thing, and she was alive, but that night she died. Our night crew was alert to check on her condition and get the fact that she died, but unfortunately they should have reconsidered the photograph at the time. We caught a lot of flak for running that picture because the girl died. If she had lived, I think people would have agreed that it was a great picture, but since she died, in their view, and again something you have to be concerned about is that this changes the situation. So the dramatic picture of the firefighter with the mangled, dead body of a child in Oklahoma City defied all of those rules except that in most cases it was not local; we ran it in Philadelphia. People understood. We got virtually no complaints about running that picture. I do not see myself as a hero in this thing, but the news desk was saying that we’re not going to run this picture and I said we are. This is really a good picture. It encapsulates the entire story right here. You look at the fireman’s face; it was just disgusted or forlorn that this happened and he was not able to do anything. So occasionally there are situations like that. When I asked Sherman Williams at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about that, and he said it was the enormity of the thing that people understood. Now if it was just a single death, they might not have accepted that picture in my opinion.

Interviewer:   So what about this? I got a complaint one year after Oklahoma City when we ran the same photo on the one year anniversary. People said; the person who called - an interesting point – she said I understand why it was important and newsworthy right when it happened, but why do we need to see it again a year later? Do you have a response to that?

Foreman:  Yes, I think that it ought to be a part of our process to think about what we do on anniversaries. If it’s a local event, the family is still here, and we have to consider the effect on that family, saying this notorious automobile accident in which say five kids were killed after their senior prom, there are going to be five families that are going to be seared once again by this. I think that we have to be very careful on anniversary pictures and stories. You know I can recall the planes, the second plane crashing into the tower on 9/11. Did they have to show it over and over that day? I mean surely not everybody would have seen it live, but I think that they really learned a lot from that, the television networks. You don’t show something like that over and over and over.

Interviewer:   Well, speaking of 9/11, if you had been making decisions in the newsroom about the photos of people jumping out of the windows at the World Trade Center. How would you have handled those, because one thing I remember is first those did run on inside pages and pretty much only ran once and not again? The European papers ran those photos much more liberally than the American papers did. Again it’s this issue of distance.

Foreman:  Distance and culture probably, but I don’t want to presume to be an expert on that. But they were reading their customers differently than maybe we read ours. I would have run that picture inside of the New York Times and it is in my book in Chapter 18 or 19 about would you run this picture, and I remember Tom Brokaw saying afterwards we should have covered that aspect of it. And indeed they should have. This is an aspect, as horrific as it is, people making a choice to die by jumping rather than by burning. It simply told a story that was horrific from the beginning. There’s no way to spare the people what happened that day. But I don’t think it needed to be on the front page because there were other images that were more descriptive of the whole event. But somewhere that’s an aspect of the story that had to be covered.

Interviewer:   How much should we worry about the reactions of specific families to a tragic piece of news when we’re trying to communicate with this large mass audience? I think of the recent controversy over the photo of the soldier killed in Iraq where the AP went to the family to tell them that they were going to run this photo and the family asked them not to and they went ahead and ran it any way. Then there’s this debate about why this photo was important. What do you think about that issue?

Foreman:  Well, I think that sometimes, not in a callous way, but we do disregard what the family said. Back up and say you were a local paper the size of the Centre Daily Times and on the one year anniversary you want to show the car wreck that killed five local young people, then I think you do worry about the families a lot more than you would in this particular case where they were trying to let the family know that we’re going to run the picture. In the process they had gotten the request please don’t run it, and they ultimately decide to run it any way. I can see where they could make that decision, and I can see where it would be unpopular, but I think that sometimes that happens.

Interviewer:   Well, maybe we should leave the world of a photo-journalism discussion. The Budd Dwyer case also calls to mind changing standards when it comes to covering suicides. In your experience, how has coverage of suicides changed over the decade that you’ve been involved and where do you think we are now?

Foreman:  I think that suicide is a very difficult question, and it’s on several levels. I think that I can flatly say that it’s generally not a big story. It’s tragic, but rarely is it made a big deal over. The Dwyer case, leaving aside the question about that particular picture, certainly met all the requirements for being an exception to the rules. It was public; it involved a public official; one who had been convicted; everything said that this is outside the normal restraint about suicide. So unless the person is extraordinarily important that he’s passing from this earth and needs to be noted for its news value, and unless the suicide is public, or both, generally suicide is not a story, much at all. So the question that comes up is that I don’t think you should glamorize the suicide. A person stands on a building for an hour and draws a crowd and then jumps. I think we have to be very subdued about it; we don’t want to have copycats. There’s a good report out by experts on how the media can help and they are very concerned if we make the committing of suicide appear to be glamorous or a reaction to a single bad event. As an example they use, boy 10 killed himself over bad grades. Their point is that nearly everybody who commits suicide has a mental illness that is either undiagnosed or untreated or both. They also don’t think we should run a lot of details about how a suicide took place. I have no trouble accepting the restraint on suicide. There’s one that I continue to debate among myself and talking with other journalists about it and that is in running a routine obituary that happens to be a suicide, do you put the cause of death in there? A lot of papers don’t and I worry about that because a lot of people know the person shot himself and they may figure the paper suppresses other news as well. A group of community newspapers in New England years ago decided they would say cause of death: suicide. What they found in hearing the wishes of the family, the medical examiner would not include the cause of death. So, they were foiled by the authorities, and nobody seemed to appreciate what they were trying to do, which is to simply be honest. They give other causes of death so they should give this one as well. There is no answer to that that I’ve found because I know from personal experience how traumatizing it is for a person in the family to have it in the paper even though friends already know. Having in the paper that their son or daughter committed suicide makes a big difference.

Interviewer:   What about the argument that not reporting suicide as cause of death kind of perpetuates the stigma in the same way that not reporting sex crimes, victims of sex crimes, perpetuates the stigma and that conversely reporting a suicide as cause of death promotes awareness and may prevent suicides down the road?

Foreman:  The experts that I consulted in writing my book feel that we are right about the phenomenon of suicide; how to recognize warning signs, and what to do if you think someone close to you is suicidal—that we ought to write about the problem rather than about specific individuals. Again this causes us to kind of shift gears; it’s not the usual way we think we focus on an event, but I think there’s a lot of merit up to that.

Interviewer:   So what about sex crimes? I know Michael Gartner famously argues that we should break with the tradition of withholding names of victims of sex crimes and Gena Overholser had made that argument as well. How do you feel about that?

Foreman:  Well, Gena’s paper, the Des Moines Register Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for telling its story about a woman who had been raped, but she gave her permission. It wouldn’t have been written if she hadn’t have given her permission. I think that there are exceptions that most of us would make if the person involved, the victim, wants to go public. We would not be bothered by reporting it. We’re not going to deny. Now, if the victim is under age and the parents are not in agreement, and that comes up in a case study in the book, I think you’d have to think twice about that. I think they’re not making the decision about themselves, but about another party. They may not be aware of the affects of publicity that we in the business might be aware of. So I think that generally speaking, though, I’m on the side, and say so in my textbook that while I see merit in the argument to the contrary, I think that I would continue not to routinely run victims of sex crimes because of the stigma and because I think as a matter of public policy to the extent that a lot of us don’t think about is that it would only cause more rapes to not be reported. I think that’s intuitive. You can figure that out for yourself. You don’t need empirical evidence. But I certainly think we have an obligation to those accused of rape to follow their cases through and be very clear that if they’re acquitted to make sure that gets prominently reported as well. Again, it is not a perfect world, and the sex crime identification is one that has no perfect answer.

Interviewer:   Well, let’s turn to Nancy Phillips and the case famously known as the ‘Reporter and the Hit Man’. I think there’s a case where my students don’t seem terribly sympathetic to the idea that keeping a promise to a source who is a murderer seems all that compelling and that this is a potentially dangerous person and that therefore she should have gone to the cops as soon as she confessed to her. Could you provide some of the background on that case and then talk about what the issues are?

Foreman:  Well, Nancy Phillips is a very good reporter who followed the case of the bludgeoning death of a Rabbi’s wife in Cherry Hill. She, like police, expected that the Rabbi may have arranged the murder of his wife, but like the police, she did not have proof of it. But for five years, she followed the story and one of the people she pursued was Len Jenoff.  She had interviewed him many times and he told her off the record that he and another man had committed the crime and that they were acting at the request of the Rabbi who had paid them to do it. She did not report it immediately to authorities. For four and a half months she kept this to herself. She also told her editor, which is part of our policy at the Inquirer that you inform the editor about off the record conversations that might be pertinent, and this certainly was. In consultation with her editors, they concurred with her feeling that A, it was off the record; B is that Jenoff, who had already been shown to be a notorious habitual liar. If she reported to the police, he then would of course probably deny it and maybe the police would not do anything, then she would be in jeopardy; retribution from him. So she then stepped out of her role as reporter and actively lobbied him to go to the authorities. She saw that as the only way really to solve the problem. She wanted the authorities to know what she had, but she didn’t feel that she could tell the story herself.

So finally he relented. He also allowed her to tell the whole story and she wrote a first person story. She was now a participant in the story she uncovered and explained everything from A to Z as it happened and then she and her editor decided that she would never cover that story again. I think all those decisions were right. But a lot of people feel, though, as you mentioned, that she should have told authorities immediately and I think that the dangers that I saw in that, quite aside from the fact that we want people to continue telling us things that they may or may not want to tell the police, that we’re not an arm of the police. We’re not opposed to what the police do, but we don’t think it’s our job to do their work for them and that we should report on them independently, part of that is being seen by everyone as our own people are acting independently. I think the public is much better off because we are able to gather information like that, but it does present a situation. I think that there would have been an exception if he said I’m going to kill the Rabbi or somebody. Now we would have a situation where a crime was about to be committed and she has information. I think that you’ve got to go to the police then. I have not asked Nancy about that, but I feel confident that she would agree. I would also refer that in legally recognized, confidential relationships like a priest or a doctor, they would be obliged to try to head off a crime that is likely to occur as opposed to one that had already occurred, which applied in this case.

Interviewer:   What if he had just gone ahead and killed somebody else just during those four months? The outcry against the newspaper would have been fierce.

Foreman:  Probably; although he didn’t say that. He didn’t say I’m going to kill some more people. There was no reason for her to think that he was going to kill more people.

Interviewer:   Although if a guy would commit a murder for hire, why wouldn’t he do it again? It’s not like it was a crime of passion.

Foreman:  Well, it is a fairly complex case, but he had a longtime relationship with the Rabbi and there’s no evidence that she saw that he had a similar relationship with somebody else who might want him to do a crime. That’s an eventuality that fortunately we didn’t have to face, but I would agree that we would have got a bad press if that had happened.

Interviewer:   What about the Richard Jewell case? That’s one where I think the lesson my students get from this—I’m not sure it’s the correct one, is that we should just not name people as suspects until they have been arrested because you damage their reputations and for all you know, as with the case with Richard Jewell, they are totally innocent of the crime. Could you provide some background on that case and the issues surrounding that?

Foreman:  OK, in 1996, the summer Olympics, which were in Atlanta, there was a crowd at a party in a park and Richard Jewell was a private security guard stationed at the park. Authorities received a call saying that in I think, twenty minutes a bomb would go off in that park. Richard Jewell is actually helping move people away from that. He spotted, pointed out a satchel to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation people. The bomb did go off and one person was killed and over one hundred were injured in one degree or another. A couple days later numerous police sources told the police reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution that Richard was now a suspect. The first one who told said you can’t use it. The reporter wisely said but if I get it corroborated from other sources then I’m free to write, and he said yes. Well later on it was estimated by the F.B.I. that about five hundred law enforcement people in Atlanta knew about Richard Jewell being looked at, so it’s not surprising that she got two or three other people confirming it. So they decided to do a story. Ultimately, they did a story two days later that said that Jewell, “hero guard” is now a suspect. I admire the coverage of the Olympics by the Atlanta Journal Constitution and also the years running up to it. They did a tremendous job, but they were under great pressure not to be scooped. I think that they ran this maybe a day or two early, but I don’t disagree with their using it before Jewell was charged. He was never charged. He was ultimately cleared, and a bomber later confessed to having done it. He is now serving a life sentence. So Jewell went through three months of hell because people thought that he did it and of course even after he was cleared by the F.B.I. that fall, a lot of people still believed he did it. You and I went to a public appearance by Jewell here at Penn State in which he told, in a poignant way, that he was sitting with his mother and they were watching Tom Brokaw and Tom Brokaw was saying that I believe they have enough on Jewell to arrest him right now. Richard said his mother turned to him and believed that maybe he did. It’s made quite an impact on all of us. To consider whether we should ever run a story about a suspect who is not named, I think, is something you have to be very, very careful about. First thought would be you’re harming this person if indeed the person was not guilty as Jewell was not. Second is, and now we get into an area of law, it could be libelous. So you’d want to protect yourself and you certainly would want to protect innocent people. But there are going to be rare occasions where it’s a high profile case and it’s quite evident that someone is a suspect and that you would only be putting your head in the sand if you pretend that the person has not been identified.

Interviewer:   Like O.J. Simpson, for example.

Foreman:  Yes, so the next day the F. B. I., with a search warrant, would search his home and that’s a public spectacle. I think that you would have a story then no matter what. The problem with the Jewell story is that you can’t read it without assuming that the editor and reporter involved, reporters plural, thought that Jewell was guilty. That’s something that we should not do. The story never said Jewell is not charged. The story never said that police did not produce any physical evidence to link him to the crime. There are innumerable other passages of the story that reveal a bias in saying that police had now gotten the right man. They say that Jewell is a former deputy sheriff at such and such county in Georgia, where he had bomb training. I tell my students that he probably also had first-aid training.  Why don’t they mention that? Well the answer is they want you to connect the dots. These are good journalists, but in my view, from the standpoint of retrospect, they made a number of mistakes in that story. The problem, in my opinion, was not naming Jewell, perhaps naming before they should, but certainly not being careful to point out the arguments against him being the guy, too.

Interviewer:   You make a nice distinction in the book, I think, between values and ethical values, and that ethical values should just trump other values. A value in the journalism profession is getting the scoop, beating the competition, being the first with a story, and it’s often the case when we screw up that the public’s reaction is well, what’s the rush? Tell us that progress is being made in the investigation and if and when someone is arrested, tell us then. Why do we need to know before? It’s important to you guys to beat each other. I think my students see it as a case where the value of getting the scoop is trumping a concern for the privacy of this individual and the damage to his reputation and that really the public would have been happy to wait until we had something more substantial like an arrest.

Foreman:  Well, I think that it’s a matter of degree. I think that if they’d waited one more day that most everybody would agree that a lot of people know now that Jewell is a suspect and there’s not a whole lot to gain by waiting. But I do think that what I call the book of borrow and return, for Michael Jonason, the ethicist, of non-ethical values, not unethical, but simply non-ethical. Getting a story first, beating the competition, selling papers, are all things that in this business we need to do or we don’t survive. But the question is, as Jonason makes it very clear, if you achieve those at the expense of violating an ethical value, respecting privacy, respecting fairness of justice in the Jewell case, then that falls short. It’s not a good decision. It’s not even considered an ethical dilemma that if you analyze the values involved, which is getting a story first vs. respecting justice and fairness, justice and fairness win because it’s an ethical value and this is non-ethical. So that was the case that I would argue that I would like to see more journalists try to think things through using the formula we talk about in the book, stopping to think and putting yourself (the golden rule) in Jewell’s place. Do you think you’re being treated fairly in this? You may not want the story about you written, but if the story were written, would you think that they have treated you fairly and that you had every opportunity to defend yourself and so forth. That didn’t happen unfortunately in the Jewell case in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Interviewer:   So my students are also very protective of people’s privacy in general, and I think they think that reporters are routinely poking their noses where they don’t belong and they don’t see what the compelling public interest is in knowing the details of people’s private lives and this brings us to the Arthur Ashe case. I’ve been teaching that case for twelve years now and I still think that’s a really hard one. I was wondering if you could talk about that one and what the issues are and where you come down on that case. Maybe you’ll convince me of one way at last after all this time.

Foreman:  I don’t know if I can do that. But, yeah, I included that in the book even though it is a dated case study because I think it’s a classic, and as you say, we still battle over it. I had an opportunity to correspond emails back and forth with two of the editors involved, Peter Pritchard, who is the editor of USA Today, and Gene Policinski, who is A&E’s assistant managing editor for sports, who made the decisions. They feel that they made it very clear to Ashe that while they think it’s a story, they would not republish it unless they got It from an authoritative source. An authoritative source would be someone who is family or his doctors. Ashe, nevertheless, went public and he may have, and it’s totally speculation, now he may have felt that USA Today has set very high standards and I don’t think my doctor or my wife are going to tell USA Today or the next paper. This just shows that it’s now being talked about and it’s a matter of time until somebody breaks the story. So I think that USA Today had certain standards for their sources and probably would not have broken the story first, even though they wanted to. But we go back then; should we want to? Clearly it’s a story that everybody would read. This is a non-ethical value.

Ashe was one of the premier athletes of his time and we teach students now, who were very little when Ashe was around, so they don’t really remember him. But they can relate hypothetically with somebody who’s a prominent athlete today or former athlete, retired athlete. If they did the same, had AIDS, would that be a story? They could understand, yes, but they think that is something that people would be interested in. That’s just the threshold. Are people going to be interested in reading it? That’s the non-ethical value. We can give them something that they will see us as a good source, maybe come back every day for more information about whatever. So we need to deliver stories like that, but conversely, though, Ashe is asking for privacy and here is a dying man who is making kind of a last request of his time on earth to live in peace and quiet and to not have everybody knowing about his illness. Remember that Ashe contracted H.I.V. through a blood transfusion and he got the blood transfusion before they started checking for H.I.V. Since they have been checking for H.I.V., there have been almost no cases in which people have contracted H.I.V. through the blood supply. So was there a practical reason for saying there maybe problems with blood supply? That seemed to me that you would lead readers down the wrong path.

So it only comes down to, in my opinion, does Ashe have, as a celebrity, any area of privacy? I think he does, but I think a lot of people in my newsroom said are you crazy? This is a story. This is what we do—a story. I think I would have had a hard time explaining even to other journalists, because this is clearly a story that people would be interested in. If you don’t run it, we say you’re going to be beat. I don’t think that’s a good ethical argument, but I do think that if we’re ethical, we ought to be in it for a time we’re going to lose good stories because we’re following the ethics and not just the ethical when it’s convenient to be ethical. There are benefits to being perceived as ethical but occasionally you’re going to lose a story. I think this is one that we’ve lost. I also think that it would have come out, but that does not justify it. I don’t rob a bank because somebody else might rob a bank. So I shouldn’t run a story just because someone else might. When we talk in class, this would be to lower yourself to your least ethical competitor making that your standard in this case, and that can’t be defended on logical ethical ground.

So I would not have run it and Peter Pritchard points out, absolutely right, it seems almost quaint now that we were discussing this and the Internet and the blogs such as Sarah Palin’s daughter being pregnant coming out almost, what ,a couple of days after she becomes the vice presidential nominee? Whether we like it or not, if we decide the public doesn’t need to know this, we honor Arthur’s request, that it will come out a lot sooner. I think we still owe it to our readers to try to be responsible and in the book there’s a point of view about how the Internet does these things, but if you read what you see in the blogs about Sarah Palin’s daughter and what you read in newspapers and see on broadcasts, there is on our side, the mainstream media, responsibility and sticking to facts, not speculating, and so there’s a difference.

Interviewer:   I guess it makes newspapers look sort of ponderous, slow, overcautious, and worse, maybe protective of the reputations of newsmakers. Why aren’t they telling us this? They must be trying to protect themselves. I think many of them came up around here when this Penn State running back, Austin Scott, this was a really striking day in the Collegian when the two stories, same size, headlines on the two separate stories; one that had to do with an unnamed suspect in a rape case, and the other that Austin Scott was suspended from the team. I remember going into one of my classes and a couple of students who were Collegian sports staffers, and they said those two stories are connected, that Scott is the rape suspect. So there was all this admirable restraint by not overtly stating that, but of course as you’re saying out in the blogosphere, there is just whispering going on and if everyone’s talking about it, well the reason he’s suspended from the team, is that he’s the rape suspect in this other case. So it’s the issue of what do you do about rumors? When everybody’s talking about something, how do you keep it quiet? It’s a tough one.

Foreman:  Yeah, it is. I think that you have to be very careful and I think that if Scott is suspended from the team, that is a news story. If he’s not charged with the rape, I think it’s harmful to him and dangerous to you as a business to risk naming him without more evidence, or in absence of any kind of statement from the prosecutor that I’m going to charge Austin Scott tomorrow with this rape. My lawyers have told me that that’s OK, even though they haven’t charged. But I think that we’re at a disadvantage, but a disadvantage of our own choosing. We want to be responsible, and I think that ultimately we’re going to lose some stories. We’re not going to be able to tell stories immediately as well as we would like. But I think that that restraint is a good idea. So I think that rumors you have to limit to what kind of effect do the rumors have, but also being careful not to rationalize it. We really want to report the rumor, but we’re saying that because something has happened, that we can now say that it’s a story, even though the rumor remains unproven. It’s about as difficult as any decisions that we have to make. I think the overriding factors ought to be that we want to be fair. We want to balance, minimize harm with truth telling. We want to be actually sure of truth in what we report.

Interviewer:   What about sex scandals involving politicians? There has just been one after another—an endless stream of them going back several decades. It seems like we still don’t really know how to handle them and we still haven’t decided how much is it the public’s business if people are messing around outside their marriages. Where do you stand on that issue? Is it the public’s business? Is this Americans being overly puritanical? Every time this comes up it is pointed out that the French know that people in public life routinely have mistresses and nobody thinks a thing of it—it’s just the way of the world and that we’re silly that we get so exorcised about these kinds of things. What should the standard be when it comes to politicians who get caught?

Foreman:  Well the old standard, it will go back to pre-Gary Hart in 1987, which is fairly easy to understand, was that it’s not a story about what a person does in his private life even though he’s a public official as long as it doesn’t affect that person’s public performance. That meant that a congressman from Ohio who put his mistress on the public payroll in his office—that was a story because he abused public funds, not that he had an extramarital affair. But it also meant that we tend to overlook things like John F. Kennedy’s multiple affairs while he was president. This was ignored when even by the old standard it can be argued that it had an effect on his public performance. Of course, a couple of people that he had affairs with, one a mobster’s girlfriend, and another one who possibly was an East German spy, could have been real big stories had he lived. Also I think there’s the fact as Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia points out, that the press created an opposite image of Kennedy as the dutiful family man, when in fact he was anything but. So it should not give us license to draw a picture that we know is false, which is what I think happened. Although I hear from some of the people and read some of the people who say we didn’t know about Kennedy, which is kind of hard to understand. Other people say they were aware of it, but it was not a story.

So then we move forward to the Gary Hart case in 1987 where the Miami Herald gets tipped that a woman, who turns up as Donna Rice, is flying from Florida to Washington for a tryst with the possible democratic candidate in 1988, Gary Hart.  I think he was leading in the polls at the time. They spied on him and even stopped between editions on Saturday night for the Sunday morning paper and put a story in there about this woman being in his apartment in Washington. They didn’t even know who the person was. I did not agree with that at the time and have trouble with it now. I remember Gene Roberts, the editor of our paper, the Inquirer, felt so strongly there wasn’t any follow-up story.  Then finally on Monday, the Hart campaign was falling apart. We said we’ve got to cover that, how can we cover that?  But that changed things and of course we’ve had a number of stories since then.

I am back and forth on that, I think, for example, in the case of the congressman from Wilkes-Barre, who turned out to have had an affair, and the two local papers treated it in very different ways. Initially the one paper, the Citizen’s Voice, didn’t cover it. The other paper, the Times Leader did. But the Times Leader felt compelled to lead the story with, “Congressman denies choking woman.” It’s clear to me, in my speculation, that she had a falling out with him and called the police. They got there and she just wanted it on record that they came out and found them together at his apartment in Washington on a Sunday afternoon. Then later the papers all get copies of the report anonymously. In the choking thing, she never pursued it. The police said that she didn’t appear to be hurt. I see it as a red herring, but yet the paper did not feel, and I challenged our class, who was studying that, why didn’t they just run a story saying that police were called to his apartment and found him with this young woman in circumstances that suggested that they were having an affair? Well, it’s kind of like why the Atlanta Journal Constitution, in my opinion, didn’t say he learned as deputy sheriff how to build a bomb that might have been used last night. You don’t want to say things like that, but you can lead people to that conclusion. They just ran a lot of stories, the Times Leader, and ultimately the Citizen’s Voice said in an effort, what I saw as having his cake and eating it too—ran a column and said we know all about the congressman or the politician and his girlfriend, but, and we’re not running this, this, and this. I mean, if you’re not going to run it, don’t run it at all.

But that raises questions that were dealt with and were raised again by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post after it came out that John Edwards had had an affair with the videographer on his staff. PBS did not run a story when he confessed to ABC, which had been pursuing Edwards. Edwards finally decided to tell about it, so it was a confirmed story, but PBS did not run it. Then on Monday, after the weekend, this was Friday, after the weekend they ran a story in which they interviewed other journalists about why they did or did not run the story. Michael Getler, the ombudsman for PBS, raised the question in why didn’t we cover it and why we then did it postmortem. Isn’t that contradictory? And their answer was that he was not a candidate for anything and we think that it’s not a story. Well, he was rumored as someone who would go to the convention and to make a speech on behalf of Obama, and there was a lot of talk since this is in the National Inquirer and all kinds of blogs that Obama was going to shy away from inviting him. He clearly would have been there if it would not have been for that. Getler then, which I quote in the book, lists about 12 reasons why it was a story and they were all very convincing.

[end of interview]