Emotional events can pull you in with the force of a tornado.
Just learning about a horrible wrong can make your blood boil, make you feel personally involved, make you want to do something to set things right.
That’s when journalists — who, like everyone else, feel outrage — must be particularly careful. Their responsibility is to observe, report, explain — but not to judge.
The jury recommendations last week for the fates of three men convicted in what has come to be known as the Deltona massacre put the Sentinel to that difficult test — one that a University of Central Florida assistant journalism professor thinks the newspaper failed.
I agree.
In the sixth paragraph of its front-page report, the Sentinel wrote, “If the jury’s will is carried out, [Troy] Victorino’s and [Jerone] Hunter’s deaths will come much more quickly and with more peace than the horror they bestowed on six people and a dog in a Telford Lane home nearly two years ago. Their skulls will not be crushed by baseball bats. Their bodies will not be bloodied or bruised.”
Rick Kenney, the UCF professor, read that and wrote, “The tone of the whole paragraph is overwrought . . . , moralistic and judgmental. . . . it reads like strongly opinionated, if weakly constructed, editorial writing.”
David Collins, the Sentinel’s Volusia County bureau chief, responded, “I think it was a pretty powerful contrast. Is it editorializing to point out the differences? Not to me. These are, after all, facts.”
From my perspective, that paragraph had an inappropriate just-deserts tone.
Sentinel Editor Charlotte Hall observed, “Our coverage of the trial was exemplary day after day. It was accomplished under tremendous deadline pressure, and this sentence, meant to convey the suffering of the victims but sensational in tone, slipped through.”
Kenney, too, saw it as standing in contrast to the newspaper’s normal performance, but to him the expression of opinion appeared deliberate: “Clearly, there was an agenda here that is beneath the excellent journalism the Sentinel usually practices.”
Collins assured, “The intent certainly was not to editorialize. Six people died on that night, and now two more will die because of it. The intent was to 1. contrast those deaths, 2. work in some of the basic facts . . . without it reading like . . . boilerplate.”
The reporter who covered the trial has written admirably about the killings for months, providing nearly daily coverage since early July, as the St. Augustine trial was about to begin. Wednesday’s article was reported late at night and edited, of necessity, quickly.
“The writer’s challenge in this story,” Collins explained, “was to restate the same basic facts every day for a month in a different way each time.”
Kenney also took issue with the next paragraph, which read, “A lethal dose of chemicals will surge through their veins and in an instant, they will be asleep.”
Having objected to the comparison of deaths, he wondered, too, how the Sentinel knew “that death by lethal injection would be more peaceful than the deaths the victims experienced.”
That seems to be in some dispute. In fact, researchers have found that the level of anesthesia administered in lethal injections can be less than that required to euthanize animals and that some people may have been painfully put to death that way in the past while fully aware but unable to talk or move.
The issue, though, isn’t whether the crimes committed in Deltona were horrific, nor whether they warrant the death penalty.
Neither is it whether lethal injection is more or less brutal than being beaten with an aluminum baseball bat or slashed to death.
The issue is whether the Sentinel got caught up in an emotional storm.
News reports differ from editorials — and columns, such as this — in that they convey facts, not the writer’s opinion. If an event is horrible — as this one clearly was — simple description, not emotive language, should make that apparent.
In this case, the writing went too far.
