Exploiting grief
Costello, Jan R.
parameters of behavior. How far did Waldheim side-step these pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I want to parameters? How accountable is he for atrocities committed see...
...intentionally or recklessly causing severe emotional distress, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis argued that the and defendants won three-fourths of them before they even got Constitution gives Americans "the right to be let alone - the to trial...
...The verdicts indicate that jurors are on the side of the alleged The media have special privileges based on the need for media victims...
...winning photographs exhibited a lack of respect for individual I'm no saint, but I have tried to be discreet in my attempts to privacy...
...He asked reportyour reaction to her death...
...Once, I was asked to interview a family whose teenage son had committed suicide...
...He said I should go door to door until I found a and employed, he has to capitalize on grief...
...Bauer was producing a news such questions as, "Did you know the victim well...
...the deep of night and tore down the swastika in a courageous After repeated denials, in an and memorable act of resistance, We would all want to have interview with the Belgrade the capacity to perform such acts of heroism...
...In fact, professional organideath...
...I'm appalled at how that he came to a city where maybe one-quarter of the popula- intrusive, insensitive, and downright arrogant many of the tion wore the yellow star and didn't notice they all disap- reporters are...
...Then there are ecumenical relations, planning liturgies...
...In September 1985, all three of the top powerful...
...Why, of the beast of prey...
...I had to find a way around such demands...
...Mark Bauer, an Atlanta televihim back...
...Fortunately, I had the time and good luck to find share with the media and with the general public...
...capture the human drama on videotapes...
...This needs to change now...
...When one reporter tried to view...
...Or so it seems...
...People are suing for "intentional infliction of emo- journalists who violate the code of ethics, suspend their memtional distress...
...ing officer, General Alexander As human beings, to a certain degree, we are all imitative Loehr, who was tried for war creatures...
...But plaintiffs won four out of five of the cases that were most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by heard by juries, and damages ranged from $10,000 to civilized man...
...One more apartment complex...
...Tears, anguish, publication of the National Press Photographers Association, and pain are what make photographs and television stories is a case in point...
...He end of the stick in a world where deadlines and sensationalism would have sung the Nazi anthem with its horrific lines, come first...
...I understand what motivates such ques- privacy and not to pander to morbid curiosity about sex, crime, tions...
...The next Perhaps nothing in American Catholic Three things, at least, have played bishops' synod, scheduled to history has been more astonishing than parts in this change...
...We are all vulnerable to the social mythologies of crimes and executed in 1947 as our times...
...I wouldn't do it...
...I felt such an angle exploited the fears and pains of the airport...
...United Nations War Crimes Commission gave him an "A" The most pitiable specter is a human being acting under orders, listing, meaning he should be with little feeling or thought, ignorant of the issues in which he tried as a war criminal, why was is involved, and totally oblivious to any call to the ethical, an he not extradited by the Yugo- Orwellian character who has "no dignity of emotion, or deep slavs along with his command- or complex sorrows...
...Are these award-winning pictures worth the pain edge...
...church and the world...
...few residents who would stand in front of a camera and answer One day, the tables turned...
...a rape victim who thought a television news need not be the courts...
...freedom to disregard the rights of everyone else...
...For example, while the Society of Professional Journalists, "Hurry dear-I think standards of taste are being broken Sigma Delta Chi, urges the news media to respect the right to down...
...doned (again, especially true in the field one national consultation has been Formal Catholic education, especially at of education...
...if, in his words, he was simply a decent man doing his duty as a The most charitable image rising from the cauldron of decent soldier, has he so vehemently denied the Balkan phase growing speculation about Waldheim is of a just man picked of his military service...
...the public's right to know of events of public importance and Why do reporters point the cameras at grieving families, interest...
...We have come a long way from the days in which the Catholic laity were expected only to "pray, pay, and WHAT IS the role of the laity in the planned by independent lay persons...
...Viewers should be told how to take their complaints in a refrigerator...
...The producer said I should at least get a shot of their house and interview their neighbors...
...The church in America has, in AS THE SYNOD NEARS I short, become dependent on the laity for THE LAITY'S RESPONSIBILITIES IN THE CHURCH its continuity and vitality as a community of believers...
...When Jewish blood spurts from the knife/Then things will I have brandished the microphone and asked, "How does it go twice as well...
...At times, he says, he felt like a who wanted me to "personalize" a story on the murder of an vulture...
...Common decency is given the short subjected to unrelenting propaganda and indoctrination...
...There are no ironclad rules or laws by which to decide ethical issues...
...Because that is the quick and dirty way to convey zations have a tendency to encourage such conduct by awardemotion, and emotion sells news...
...Yet I believe - unlike many of my colleagues - that and vice, the code also says the overriding mission is to satisfy the practice can and should be stopped...
...We have the capacity to be plummeted the issues raised today were not to the depths and to be no more than ignoble spirits in an raised in 1971 when Waldheim ignoble world, but we also have the capacity for heroism...
...It's not something you need to exploitation...
...Certainly we daily newspaper Vercernje should expect it of our leaders...
...They were all legitimate reason to ask such questions...
...That way at least, there would be a said...
...Why do and human misery is precisely the problem...
...It wouldn't be pure sharing that moment of grief...
...obey...
...Enrolling constituted, as Vatican II put it, as the belatedly given the scope and complexity and welcoming new parishioners, People of God...
...It would have been better for him to say, `Yes, I was The letter-writer had witnessed modern journalism's standthere, I know, but I could do nothing.' " ard fare - callous interviews with relatives of crash victims, Waldheim has acknowledged, after many repudiations, that photographs of suffering and grief, and maudlin detail of each he was enrolled in a Nazi youth group...
...First study groups, visiting the sick, comfort- priestly and religious vocations, the among them of course, are those spon- ing the grieving, aiding the poor, in- numbers of priests and religious leaving sored by the Bishops' Committee on the structing children and adults, furthering their original calling altogether or seekLaity and its secretariat...
...should uphold that trust by respecting the right to privacy as Noble attempts have been made...
...Freedom of the press does not give the press $40,000...
...He had forgotten that his wife, a Delta stewardess, was residents, but the news director insisted I bring back an inter- returning to the airport that night...
...It is impossible for him not to Dallas incensed one viewer, prompting him to complain have known...
...The media can open other channels of station should not have identified her...
...Academy, and as a member of the Brownshirts, the paramilit- As a television reporter for eight and a half years, I can tell ary organization also known as the S.A., he would have been you that the answer is no...
...peared...
...once too often...
...When relatives of The top prize was awarded for a series of photographs of a victims lost in the Delta plane crash gathered in Atlanta's desperate teenager threatening to jump off a bridge onto an Hartsfield Airport on their way to identify remains, I tried to interstate highway...
...As a member of a Nazi victim's life story...
...In 1947 the Commission carefully as they defend the right to know...
...Perhaps they wouldn't be so ready to condemn public enlightenment and extended by public trust...
...If, in 1948, the seventeen-member up by the scruff of his neck and thrown into an unwanted war...
...And finally, at least are lectors and eucharistic ministers...
...In most What the profession needs is a tough and enforceable code cases, news people deal with strangers whose feelings are of ethics...
...I want to parameters...
...This suggestion so many years until she brought up the issue of ethics in media outraged reporters, it never left the drawing board...
...And he would have been well-acquainted feel...
...It was the second teen suicide in the area that day, and for some reason, the news director decided to lead the newscast with the "teen suicide epidemic...
...The most fundamentake place in Fall, 1987, will address the the extent to which lay persons have tal is that there has been growth in the question...
...It recommended Hands Across America...
...He wanted to get close- carrying a charred - yet identifiable - body from a burning up shots just as the other photographers were doing...
...Leon Benmayor, leader of Salonika's small through a newspaper's "letters to the editor": "Where group of Holocaust survivors, says: "How can Waldheim say is your conscience and compassion...
...These consultations them- evangelizing, organizing prayer and A second factor is that the decline in selves have a' variety of sponsors...
...It occurred to me "It was a strange situation to suddenly find myself telling to try and find a neighborhood watch spokesman or public someone in the media, `Don't bother my family,' " Bauer safety committee chairman...
...I've called up grieving friends and relatives searching with Adolf Hitler's mandate: "Youth must be indifferent to for that gripping anecdote, preferably on camera,, that will 6 June 1986: 327 bring the story home...
...Violators should be taken before a professional more easily ignored than those of a loved one would be...
...He wondered, as many people do, whether student union in 1938, while studying at the Vienna Consular the media have any scruples left...
...sion news producer and formerly a newspaper and television Such a tactic won no kudos from the boss, but it beat reporter, often found himself in the position of turning other outright mutiny...
...The second place winner shows firemen hold our station's photographer back...
...Would he have been raised the swastika on the Acropolis, two young students, no elected Secretary-General if the older than Kurt Waldheim when Austria was forcibly annexed information now available had by Germany, climbed the steep hill leading to the Parthenon in been known...
...Lay persons are effective members, and no longer tokens, on institutional and diocesan boards...
...Are you taking special precau- ers to get reactions from Delta employees at the Atlanta tions...
...pictures and interviews...
...review board made up of experienced reporters, photoGradually, an area of law is developing that offers legal graphers, and news editors, as well as leaders in the commuremedy to victims of thoughtless, tasteless,' or insensitive nity...
...photojournalists and television news reporters go to such Sigma Delta Chi has no enforcement power and does little to lengths to capitalize on an unfortunate person's tragic and gory discourage sensational reporting...
...Since 1978, there mate grievance, or their representatives, should be allowed to have been at least thirty-four cases accusing the media of respond during prime-time news programs...
...Yet we must ask of our leaders no less than we a war criminal...
...ing new works, and the aging of those those sponsored by groups of clergy and all these are, in a truly living parish, the remaining, meant that some ministries laity loosely affiliated with religious or- tasks of parish lay workers...
...Yet the public's interest in gossip, grotesque events, heartbroken widows, and suffering accident victims...
...put her on camera, Bauer told him to leave her alone...
...tate her five-year-old niece who lost consciousness in a burnThe photographer believed he was losing the competitive ing house...
...I couldn't talk them out of the story, but we finally agreed on a new angle: we interviewed a psychiatrist who worked with depressed teens and who offered tips on detecting suicidal tendencies...
...She was a television journalist for setting up an unofficial review board...
...News Photographer, the official drama and misery unfold in their living rooms...
...the elementary level, is largely in the Of several minds: Abigail, McCarthy hands of lay teachers...
...Journalists and punish if the media policed itself...
...How accountable is he for atrocities committed see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence against Jews and non-Jews in Greece and Yugoslavia...
...before the professional review board, and those with a legitiThe cases, however, are, difficult to win...
...But Bauer believes that in order to remain competitive elderly woman...
...Then I argued for an hour with a news director peoples' misfortunes into news...
...I kept my distance and did not do any interviews...
...I was in the hills doing my work, rarely going to THE TELEVISION coverage of the crash of a Delta jet in Salonika, so I never knew...
...was seeking the United Nations In May 1941, shortly after the Nazis entered Athens and position...
...In response to the accusation that he was in Greece during the year that thousands of Greek Jews were deported to EXPLOITING GRIEF Auschwitz, and thousands of non-Jewish resistance fighters RESTRAINT & THE RIGHT TO KNOW suffered mercilessly, Waldheim has said he was merely serving as an interpreter: "I never had anything to do with such cruelties...
...The focus of the third place winner is a photographer would not make much of a difference to the hysterical woman who is watching paramedics try to resuscibesieged travelers, but I did not want to add to their pain...
...of the subject...
...But sometimes, I have had to stand my ground...
...To questions about earlier Ethics & the media disclaimers that• be had taken part in Yugoslav military maneuvers, Waldheim is quoted as saying, "Who can remember everything from the war period...
...I flatly refused to bother the family by telephone or in person...
...Among the plaintiffs: a woman who thought a bership in the organization, or expel repeat offenders from newspaper should not have published a picture of her clad only professional societies altogether...
...Even the codes of ethics appear contradictory...
...I was only partially successful in holding order to answer the question...
...What is program when the Delta jet crashed in Dallas...
...Lay people, better in6 June 1986: 329...
...one such person...
...Commonweal: 328 Experiences like Bauer's are few and far between...
...Plans for preliminary consulta- taken responsibility for the works of the Catholic consciousness that the church is tions are now in progress - somewhat church in the last twenty years...
...Kozara Mountains during the Kozara Operation, a brutal massacre in which the Germans killed thousands of civilians or sent them to concentration camps...
...on Freedom of the Press concluded that reporters "should JAN R. COSTELLO undoubtedly have more respect than many of them do now for (Jan R. Costello is currently working in public relations for the desire of private persons to be let alone...
...Lay persons had to be opened to lay persons or abanders and institutions...
...How is it that would ask of ourselves...
...BARBARA HARRISON Novosti, Waldheim finally ad- (Barbara Harrison is founding director of the Center for the mitted that in 1942 he was in the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College in Boston...
...and parents who were redress by inviting public criticism and participating in peer photographed upon discovering their children had suffocated review...
...But, I felt that it was a personal matter...
...He placed his job above the grieving Perhaps news reporters must put the shoe on the other foot in relatives' privacy...
...He, knew the news director wanted emotion-packed they may cause...
...The board should have the power to publicly reprimand reporting...
...People expect to see human ing prizes to the offenders...
...in a towel as she rushed from an apartment where she had been The only recourse against offensive journalistic behavior held hostage...
Vol. 113 • June 1986 • No. 11
