A few days before publication of the ombudsman’s annual you-be-the-editor column last month, Metro Editor Andy Taylor was involved in making one of those sudden decisions that become the basis for the column’s case studies. The cases challenge readers to judge news issues.
In a memo, Taylor reminded The Times-Dispatch news staff that publication of photos of criminal suspects can be “a tricky business. We’re torn between an obligation to alert the public to lurking danger and a duty to protect innocent people . . . from false accusations.”
Police had distributed to area media a news release reporting that a baby had been abandoned in a shopping cart in the parking lot of a suburban store. They also furnished a photo taken from a store camera and said it showed the woman who had abandoned the baby, a girl about 2 or 3 weeks old.
The picture, Taylor wrote, “showed a woman pushing a shopping cart that held a baby in the car seat. The [news] release said the woman then went outside and abandoned her baby.”
T-D editors debated whether to publish the picture and decided no. A short article was published.
The debate centered on the reliability of the police-furnished photo. Was the woman in the store camera picture really the one who left the baby outside the store?
Secondary to the primary concern, Taylor said, was that printing the picture could brand the woman forever in the public eye “as the person who dumped the child. We also decided that she did not pose a danger to other people.”
Kept in mind during the debate was a similar situation early last year when this newspaper was harshly criticized for not publishing a police-provided photo said to be a criminal suspect wanted for questioning. The picture was an automated teller machine photograph of a man using a credit card stolen from one of two women abducted from area shopping centers, then robbed and raped.
The photo did run on television and, it turned out, the man pictured and a second man were convicted in the crimes.
However, Taylor also recalled a recent wire service article from Indiana about police providing an ATM photo supposedly of a criminal suspect. The photo was published. The man in the picture, it turned out, was simply a customer and not the suspect.
In the abandoned baby situation, Taylor wrote, at least one television station did run the photo. The woman pictured called the station and said she hadn’t abandoned her child, a boy. Police sent an officer to her house and verified her story. The original police information about the photo was wrong.
Taylor said the abandoned baby incident re-emphasized the need for reporters and editors to be skeptical of information provided to the newspaper.
“It’s always good to question ourselves and others.”
As this was written, the woman who left the baby has not been found and the infant has been placed in foster care, police said.
The foster parents gave the baby a name: Angel.
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The Times-Dispatch published hundreds of headlines during the first half of May, but one made a special connection with this ombudsman.
Tucked among the advertisements on Page A10 of the May 9 editions was a brief article under a headline only three-eighths of an inch tall. The headline:
“War in Afghanistan ‘all but won.’”
The Associated Press article out of Bagram, Afghanistan, quoted the commander of British forces there as saying the war against al-Qaida and Taliban fighters was “all but won.”
Al-Qaida and the Taliban are “not showing a predisposition to reorganize and regroup,” he added. He repeated that view in another AP article last week in announcing that the British-led Operation Snipe had been successfully concluded.
The headline reminded me of a vastly different prediction expressed in an article in the January/February edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. The article, titled “Three Minutes from Death” and written in engaging narrative style with vivid description, was by Jim Wooten, senior correspondent for ABC News.
He told how just before Thanksgiving he and eight others in his ABC contingent loaded up an old bus with gear and food and set out to drive from Jalalabad to Kabul. Other reporters, photographers, technicians and translators “from all over the world” also took to the rough and rocky road alongside the Kabul River.
Wooten’s crew, he wrote, trailed most of the main media convoy but was ahead of some colleagues. He was pleased to be on the road – “The road is perfectly safe,” he had been told by the Afghan military commander of Jalalabad.
“We decided to join the crowd,” he wrote. Kabul, he knew, “was overflowing with stories.”
Meantime, there was local color that could be filmed. At one point, he stopped the bus so his cameraman could film several young girls “trying to persuade a half-dozen camels to move in a direction they clearly did not wish to go.”
They resumed the drive and were 50 miles from Kabul when “a car suddenly appeared heading toward us at high speed. The driver’s arm was out the window, waving frantically, apparently flagging us down.”
That driver was warning them of an ambush just ahead where four journalists in two cars had just been killed. If Wooten’s bus hadn’t paused three minutes for the camel pictures, his crew could have been caught in the ambush.
Killed were a Reuters news service cameraman from Australia, a Reuters photographer from Pakistan, and two reporters from major newspapers in Milan and Madrid.
Armed men had stopped the convoy on a bridge, ordered the Afghan drivers and translators in the parties to disappear, then stoned, beat and shot the journalists.
Three Afghan witnesses, wrote Wooten, repeated what one of the killers had said to them:
“If you think the Taliban are finished, you are wrong. No one can destroy the Taliban.”
Six months later, a report says the war in Afghanistan, diminished now in newspaper attention, is “all but won.”
“But” is a large three-letter word.
