Tim Rogers: Avoiding a media circus

Good morning.

There is no question that one of the main staples of any newspaper, TV news station, Internet blog site or radio news reader is crime.

You individually might not wish that was so, but collectively as a society Americans are far more likely to read a story about crime than just about any other topic.

And we aren’t alone in our prurient reading and viewing interests. This bent toward crime news exists in just about every society on the face of the earth and that has been true for as long as there has been a fourth estate.

So when you are in the news business, whether you like it or not, you have to become comfortable with covering and writing about crime. I am not saying you have to like covering it or ever become accepting of it, but the chances are you will become involved with writing or reporting about it because it is the single topic that most of your readers or viewers are interested in.

The biggest local story of my — so far — 22-year career in journalism was the massive police search in Wichita, Kan., for the serial killer BTK, who re-emerged after a story about the 25th anniversary of his disappearance appeared in my paper, The Wichita Eagle.

It was the biggest local story that I have ever been involved with because of the number of people who we had working on it and because of the reader interest in it.

There is crime news and then there are serial killers, who for some strange reason seem to develop a cult following all of their own. A Japanese TV crew came to Wichita to cover the search, even though there wasn’t a single Japanese connection in the entire story.

Our website suddenly had regular readers from every continent and every country in every continent and it is doubtful that they were interested in how well the Shockers baseball team was doing.

Everyone had an opinion about who the killer was (he turned out to be a middle aged dog catcher who was a fixture in his church and the Boy Scouts) and every time we thought the public had had enough coverage of the search and his capture and his court confessions and his being sent to prison, we were wrong.

Eventually, of course, something else happens that finally usurped that interest and moved the story off the front page and finally out of the paper. But it can take awhile it the event, or crime, is big enough.

I have been thinking about how we cover crime and justice issues this week because of one local story and one state story.

The local story is the gruesome double homicide that claimed the life of an older Westside resident and a 14-year-old Murray County High School freshman. Since I have been in Dalton, there have been several homicides, but nothing to compare to this.

Fortunately, the police quickly charged someone with the crime who apparently knew Wayne Smith, the older man who was shot and killed, so the community doesn’t have to see front page coverage day after day of the manhunt for a killer. But any thoughts that this case will quickly be usurped by the next one disappeared when the district attorney said it could be a death penalty case.

Death penalty cases are not uncommon anymore, but they still garner an outsized amount of media attention because of the ultimate stakes that are in play. And that, in many ways, is as it should be. The state is proposing to take the life of the accused killer, if he is convicted, so it had better have all of its proverbial ducks in a row.

If the case does go to trial as a capital case — and we won’t know that for a couple of months — it will be more heavily covered than would another murder case. In addition to the trial coverage, death penalty cases draw both supporters and opponents of capital punishment and they are very aggressive in getting their points of view across.

If you doubt this, all you have to do is look at all of the media coverage that surrounded last week’s execution of Troy Davis, who was convicted of killing a Savannah police officer in 1989. His case, when you look at it, is really no different, unfortunately, than probably thousands of other murders that have occurred in the 22 years since it happened. But it garnered international attention that seemed to just feed on itself.

I couldn’t begin to tell you whether Davis was guilty of the crime or innocent. I wasn’t there and neither were 99.9 percent of the people who set themselves up as experts about the case in the weeks leading up his death by lethal injection. But that didn’t stop them from weighing in publicly on the case, which in our society is their right to do.

You never know what cases will blow up into big media events and which ones won’t.

For my part, The Daily Citizen will cover last Saturday’s double homicide for you our readers whether anyone else does or not. Two of our neighbors’ lives were tragically snuffed out and another member of the community stands accused of killing them.

That is dramatic news. We will bring you all of the information that we can about it without sensationalizing it more than it is already. The public both demands and deserves a full accounting of the case and we will do that.

But more than that, I hope this case does not end up becoming a media circus. The families of the victims don’t deserve that nor does anyone else involved with the case deserve it.

I have seen crime coverage spiral out of control and I don’t want to be part of that again.

Crime may be the public’s No. 1 reading interest, but I hope even that interest has its limits.

Tim Rogers is editor of The Daily Citizen. He can be reached at timrogers@daltoncitizen or 706-272-7735.

Tim Rogers

Search Results

Discussion

Site Map

Contact Us