Mike Royko of
the Chicago Tribune often makes me smile with approval
as he takes on the error-prone in our society.
Occasionally he hits a sour note, as happened when he offended
125 million PC users in America by advising readers to save a
lot of computer grief and buy a Mac.
Royko has a ``street sense'' about America, and it comes out frequently
in his assessments of how government and journalists work.
Sometimes, however, he can be irritatingly wrong.
Royko's a throw-back to the era when most reporters were cigar-smoking,
fedora-wearing, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed noseybodies who knew
more about police work than the police and more about city hall
than the mayor and practiced a damn-the-torpedoes (and often the
truth) approach to getting the story.
Not that Royko fits that mold; he just likes to affect the caricature.
When Royko wrote what amounts to an open letter to Richard Jewell,
the security guard whose name has been dragged through investigations
of the bombing at Centennial Park during the Olympic Games in
Atlanta, the columnist hit the nail on the head in describing
news leaks and information gathering.
But he went astray trying to be cute and in his de facto conclusions
regarding journalists and their ethics.
Jewell, Royko recalled for us, says he's not guilty of planting
the bomb and that he wants the FBI to apologize for bringing him
into the media limelight as a primary suspect.
Not likely, Royko writes, ``The FBI has always made a practice
of dealing only with a handful of reporters they trust, and only
when it is to the FBI's advantage.''
More likely,
Royko concludes, a local cop privy to FBI information blabbed
``to a pal on a local paper.''
Score one for Mike; he knows the system.
The media limelight around this case, by the way, has become what
Jewell's mother in Smyrna, Ga., calls a nightmare: ``Now my son
has no real life,'' Mrs. Jewell told the Associated Press. ``He
is a prisoner in my home. He cannot work. He cannot know any kind
of a normal life. He can only sit and wait for this nightmare
to end.''
Jewell's mother made an emotional plea to the White House and
the FBI to charge her son or clear his name.
As if to confirm Royko's observation about FBI operations, a Justice
Department spokesman said of the investigation: ``You can never
set timetables. It's a matter of following the evidence and the
law and taking that where it leads.''
Royko turns attention to the Atlanta Journal, the newspaper that
broke the story that Jewell was under investigation -- even though
he'd never been charged with any wrongdoing.
According to Royko's version of the newspaper's explanation, ``editors
at the paper figured that if it didn't do the story, some other
news shop would.''
Sad to say, we have to score another for Mike.
Here, however, motives and sense get a little grayer.
Who hasn't said to a child who followed the lead of a friend,
``If he told you to jump off the roof, would you do it?''
Editors who expediently run controversial stories because they
fear being beaten by competitors need to be asked the same question.
Every day in the Stripes news room, editors have electronic access
to the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington
Post and other Stateside newspapers. There's a temptation
to fall in behind these industry leaders and play up the same
stories, but that's not responsible journalism.
Stripes' editors work hard at making independent decisions on
the news based on the merits of the stories and readership demographics
and not on how big-time editors have decided to play the story.
Royko goes another step.
The networks argued, he writes, that once the Atlanta newspaper
had broken the story and it was picked up by wire services, it
couldn't be ignored.
Royko implicitly
condones this snowballing effect and chides any journalists who
might disagree as being ``journalistic goody-goodies.''
Score one for Mike on observation; score one against him for conviction.
Royko's argument is that the goody-goodies will say ``every news
organization violated professional ethics by identifying Jewell
as a suspect before he had been charged with a crime.''
This, Royko says, isn't realistic because there is no standard
code of journalistic ethics. ``Every news shop has its own,''
Royko writes.
Well, Royko's premises may be correct. I've often thought there's
no such thing as ethics for a newspaper, but there's certainly
ethics for a news person.
Royko's premises don't aim at the proper conclusion.
Identifying Jewell as a suspect before he'd been charged with
a crime has less to do with journalistic ethics than with constitutional
rights. Some official up the line, local or national, violated
Jewell's constitutional right.
That was the discussion among editors at Pacific Stars and
Stripes when first confronted with The Associated Press version
of the Richard Jewell-as-suspect story. We had deep concerns about
a story attributed to "a government official.''
Perhaps we erred in running the story. We did so because of the
compelling nature of the tragedy in Atlanta; we did so cautiously
and with a commitment to follow up if the man named was eventually
cleared.
Responsible
newspapers went out of their way, even if they named Jewell, to
note that he was not charged, not formally a suspect and was innocent
until proven guilty.
Royko concludes with a suggestion that Jewell turn his unwanted
notoriety into a profit-making life on the talk-show tour; Jewell's
constitutional complaint is disregarded for the sake of humor.
Ethics and principles be damned; go for the gold.
Royko is wrong in his judgment. Jewell -- despite his penchant
for publicity seeking -- didn't deserve the media abuse he and
his mother withstood, and he certainly doesn't deserve Royko's
trivializing of his complaint.
My point is that editors worry about ethics and responsibility.
Of course, there are bad editors who scoff at such concerns, but
experience tells me the ethical and responsible outnumber the
bad seeds.
Contrary to Royko's convictions, the ethically responsible are
not mere goody-goodies; they are trained to understand the nature
of law and justice in the United States.
Royko has said before that ``Americans have an inalienable right
to say dumb things.''
Give him his right, and score a major one against Mike.