Make no mistake, kidnapping is a terrible crime, no matter where or when it happens.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart from her Salt Lake City home has caught the attention of hundreds of thousands of people in Utah, in the United States and in the world.
As the investigation grinds along day after day, emotions have become raw.
The story put together by Salt Lake Tribune reporters Kevin Cantera and Michael Vigh for Thursday’s edition (in which they reported that law enforcement officials had focused their investigation on the extended family of the kidnap victim) brought immediate and harsh response from a few readers. The newspaper was accused of printing sensationalized stories to sell papers. The reporters were accused of yellow journalism and muckraking. Several readers said The Tribune was “Mormon-bashing” again to sell newspapers. One woman, who made one of the milder calls, said, “They might be guilty, but you went on an assumption.”
Not true. The reporters and editors involved in the decision to run the story assumed nothing. As noted in the story, the article was based upon independent information from investigating officers in four different law enforcement agencies. Using unnamed sources did not break The Tribune’s rule on sources: Anonymous sources may not accuse a specific individual of specific wrongdoing. In the article, no specific individual is accused; instead the piece says that police are focusing on the teen’s extended family.
Once The Tribune posted its article on the Internet, news organizations across the United States began working on the same angle. Within several hours, NBC and MSNBC news had verified the story through their independent sources.
So, as much as people might not like the focus of the probe, the focus is real. The human inclination to kill the person who brings bad news is a part of history. If you do not like what the messenger says, then it’s appropriate to slay that messenger and look for one who will tell you what you want to hear.
That inclination may be human, but news reporters come into this business with an almost peculiar devotion to digging out the truth. If that devotion were not real, then newspapers would simply print news releases from companies and government agencies or print the transcriptions of news conferences presented by people with interests in certain events.
On Thursday morning, members of the Smart family apparently distributed fliers that discounted the report in The Tribune. By afternoon, two representatives of the extended Smart family went before TV cameras and again criticized The Tribune’s story.
Let’s take a look at how news coverage works. No media outlet wants to write single-source stories, so they usually seek out a variety of sources in any given piece. But reporters and editors are wise enough to judge the worthiness of a source — and oftentimes the motivations of a source.
In a difficult crime story like this, editors and reporters must struggle with some of the techniques police will use: The authorities will refuse to comment, they will ignore questions, they will even lie to the media if they believe it will help them in their investigation. They will speak to reporters they trust without allowing their names to be used.
Think back to the terrible case of Jon Benet Ramsey, the little beauty queen from Colorado who was found slain in the basement of the family home. At first, all of the media coverage was sympathetic. Then, as the investigation dragged on, a darker picture began to emerge. News organizations detailed how the crime scene investigation had been compromised — apparently by law enforcement officers without the proper experience to manage a scene. Then suspicions about the parents’ involvement in the little girl’s death bubbled to the surface.
Much of the coverage of the Ramsey case hinged on revelations from unnamed police sources. If reporters had ignored those sources, then the news released by the police department and the district attorney’s office would have allowed the case to slip into obscurity as simply an unsolved murder.
The process of gathering news often is adversarial — not just the result of reporters’ skepticism. But no matter what reporters learn, The Tribune will not expose prematurely the guts of a police case. Cantera and Vigh do not believe they have compromised the police investigation of the Smart case and do not intend to in the future.
The effort to obscure the truth is like waving a red flag at a bull; it always gets a response.
