“Could you please tell me the date that the Beacon Journal ran the front page article of the Red Cross having to destroy all the blood because of the expiration date?”
Akron resident Shirley Williams asked me that in an e-mail a week after the story appeared that said 10 units of the thousands collected Sept. 11 would be destroyed because they expired. The story didn’t say “all” of the blood would be destroyed, but that’s how Williams remembered it.
It points out an ongoing problem in the news business. Readers sometimes are selective about what they read in stories, they sometimes read more into stories than is actually written, and they sometimes make assumptions about stories based solely on the headline.
In this case, the story, its headline and its placement on the front page had local Red Cross officials seeing red.
“We’re getting our teeth kicked in for all the wrong reasons,” said one official.
“Lives hang in the balance,” said another.
For the record, the story had three headlines on the front page: Sept. 11 donations not used; Red Cross to destroy expired blood supply; Terrorist attacks resulted in unprecedented donations. Organization kept collecting despite lack of survivors.
The long story contained information from several blood organizations and quotes from a variety of medical experts, both local and national.
Even the Red Cross admits there were no actual errors of fact. Therefore, the question really becomes: Were readers left with the impression that their blood donations were wasted and, as a result, will blood-giving suffer?
David Plate, executive director of the Northern Ohio region of the Red Cross, says yes on both counts.
In an open letter to readers, he says, “This article may have given some of you the impression that the American Red Cross is needlessly wasting precious blood. Let me assure you that nothing is further from the truth.”
The local Red Cross said it received numerous calls and e-mails from people angry about the story. Some canceled appointments. Blood donations dropped the day the story appeared, officials say, and remained lower than expected for the remainder of the month.
Plate said the Northern Ohio region missed its goal for October, though he acknowledged that media attention to the resignation of the national Red Cross director and a national controversy about cash donations also hurt the cause. He admits that so many people gave blood in September that some regular donors may have skipped October.
The Northern Ohio region of the Red Cross supplies 12,000 transfusions every week to 61 hospitals in 19 counties, Plate said.
“With 12,000 transfusions a week, if I lost enough donors because I’d lost credibility through an article, even if it was misunderstood, then lives hang in the balance.”
Plate said the act of giving blood requires trust. “When they begin to think that maybe they can’t trust us, that’s the bond that I’m afraid will be broken.”
When Mark Fairhurst saw the article he sent an e-mail to 800 business, religious and civic groups. He is the director of public support for the Summit County Chapter of the American Red Cross.
Fairhurst said he was concerned that donors wouldn’t read past the headline. “Some of my donors, when they saw the headline, said you were sensationalizing something that happens on an everyday basis.”
Both Plate and Fairhurst emphasized that discarding a small percentage of donated blood products happens routinely.
Fairhurst’s e-mail called the story “damaging and confusing.”
Beacon Journal editors disagreed.
“The story clearly explained what the problem was, why it happened and what the Red Cross did,” said Bruce Winges, night managing editor and the person responsible for putting it on the front page. “The fact is you cannot keep blood in storage forever. The story explained that well.”
Ann Sheldon Mezger, the deputy metro editor who assigned the story, said it was no different from other stories about donations to charities.
“We wrote a number of stories after Sept. 11 about all the Red Cross blood drives to help the victims of the terrorists,” she said. “However, when it became clear that there were relatively few survivors of the attacks, that raised the question of what was going to happen to that blood. That was the question we set about to answer.”
The story resulted in about a dozen calls and e-mails to the Beacon Journal, with about half angry with the Red Cross and half upset with the newspaper.
Vicki Porter of Visual Marking Systems in Twinsburg said she was organizing a blood drive at her company and got upset when she read the story. “When you read something like that, you get discouraged.”
Now she has approached 3,190 companies in and around Twinsburg to participate in a blood drive and silent auction for the Red Cross on Jan. 2, 2002. Her goal is to organize the largest blood drive in Summit County history, with an equally ambitious goal for next Sept. 11 and every year afterward.
“Instead of having people remember what they were doing when the planes hit the World Trade Center, I want them to remember what they did to help.”
There’s nothing unclear about that.
