The photograph was studied closely by editors gathered for the day’s first Page One meeting.
The image was the most gripping one passed among the group, and it was immediately rejected for publication.
“I don’t think our readers need [to see] that,” said Louise Seals, managing editor of The Times-Dispatch. Perk Gormus, photography director, agreed.
“That” was the body of sniper victim Linda Franklin, lying face down on the parking area pavement between a laden shopping cart and the Franklins’ red convertible. She had been shot to death Monday night near the entrance to a Home Depot store in Falls Church.
She appeared to be wearing blue jeans. Her head and upper body were covered by what looked to be a raincoat or a sheet of yellow plastic. One hand, the fingers curled upward as if in supplication, rested at her side.
While the press often hauls out the weary phrase, “the public’s right to know,” to justify coverage, more often it is guided by what the public needs to know and what it wants to know. Experience told the editors that the public did not want to see that photo.
Readers have said they don’t want such a graphic photo in their homes. They don’t want to explain such an image to their children. They want editors to know photos of bodies are insensitive and intrusive. They don’t want newspapers to add to the suffering of a victim’s family.
Community standards and attitudes can affect what or how news is presented. Critics of the news operations may forget that reporters, photographers and editors are part of the community, too. I wouldn’t argue for publication. Yet, more than columns of type and pictures of police stopping white vans, the image of the body brought home the reality of the series of murders in Washington, Maryland and Virginia this October.
The picture was taken by Gerald Herbert, a photographer for The Washington Times. Photographers on the T-D staff in examining the photo cited its clarity and vivid color and that it was taken at night without a flash. The parking area was well lighted.
The Associated Press transmitted the photo to its members, but Dorothy Abernathy, Virginia bureau chief, said AP has no process for determining how many or what newspapers published the picture.
In its final of three editions Tuesday, The Washington Times published the photo in color above the fold on Page A1.
Alan Zlotky, photo director of the Times, told me that to his knowledge, the picture drew “very little” public complaint. “I had one phone call,” he said.
Other photographers, including ones from the Reuters news agency and The Washington Post, took similar pictures of the body. Newspaper ombudsmen across the country who responded to my query disclosed that the body was pictured in newspapers in New York (the Times), Boston, Atlanta, Detroit and San Francisco as well as in Washington.
Newspapers in San Diego, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., Spokane, Wash., Fort Worth, Texas, and Orlando, Fla., passed.
A few ombudsmen said their newspapers had a policy never to use a photo of a dead body. The Times-Dispatch has no such policy but judges whether to publish on a case-by-case basis.
For this one, the answer was “no.”
. . .
A bizarre episode in the coverage of the sniper shootings was reported last week by The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg.
On Oct. 11, Kenneth H. Bridges of Philadelphia was shot to death at an Exxon station near Massaponax in Spotsylvania County. A few hours later, at midday, Geraldo Rivera of Fox News arrived in Fredericksburg to report on the situation.
The Free Lance-Star’s Michael Zitz wrote that Rivera was “strutting around in a black leather jacket and blue jeans.”
About 6 p.m. the same day, Zitz recounted, “Rivera was autographing the seats of Fredericksburg Hooters waitresses’ skimpy orange shorts – while the women were in them.”
The Hooters restaurant, the article noted, “is only about 50 yards away from the crime scene.” An observer called the action “pretty tasteless.”
Said a Fox News employee quoted in the story, “He was all over the place. He was giving autographs at the Waffle House next to the gas station, he was giving autographs to Spotsylvania sheriff’s deputies, he was giving autographs to truck drivers.”
One Hooters waitress admitted she got an autograph.
“I don’t like him,” she was quoted as saying, “but I got it for my mother.”
. . .
What is it about quoting experts that brings out other experts to contradict the experts?
Last week’s column included a few paragraphs correcting an Associated Press article about pressurized aircraft flown in World War II. For the column, experts from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington said the B-29 was the first production combat plane to be pressurized but that only the cockpit was pressurized.
Henry Almond, a former delegate to the General Assembly who now resides in Mathews County, phoned to say that was wrong. Don Murray, retired news director of WDBJ-TV in Roanoke and now at home in Powhatan County, wrote and gently suggested I was “misinformed.”
Almond was a B-29 pilot flying “the hump” and Murray was a B-29 gunner during the war. Three sections of the bomber – the flight deck up forward, the gunners’ and radar navigator’s midsection area and the tail gunner’s compartment, were pressurized for high-altitude flights, they said.
This ombudsman job has more pressures than I anticipated.
