Last Updated: August 02, 2001
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X-rated
Kinky sex & Bizarre murders...
What’s a family newspaper to do?
By Marilyn Greenwald
It was the day after the Star Beacon in Ashtabula, Ohio, ran an AP transcript
of the sexually explicit and now famous Starr Report that city editor Joel Barrett
had an epiphany of sorts. He realized with regret how jaded he and his staff
had become and how removed they were from their readers.
“The phone rang early and often (the next day),” he recalled. “Oral sex, cunnilingus,
semen stains, oh, boy. We’d become so desensitized that as editors we’d forgotten
our readers’ sensibilities.”
Barrett, now managing editor of the weekly Gazette Newspapers in Jefferson,
Ohio, stammered his apologies to the first caller, an angry father of a 15-year-old
girl who wanted to know how to explain to her what it all meant. Other angry
readers had similar questions.
Certainly Barrett was not alone, in publishing the report and in having to
explain to readers the next day why he did. He and other editors explained events
to thousands of readers in terms they would be too embarrassed to use with friends
at dinner. The dissemination of the Starr Report to the media only drove home
many bigger issues to Barrett and other editors. “I began thinking about what
the media had done with its handling of sex acts and descriptive details,” he
said. “The issue had been a nagging topic for years in the newsroom.”
The current generation of editors is of course not the first to have to make
tough decisions about how much detail to publish when sex is involved in a story,
but many recent and dramatic changes in society have made it increasingly difficult
to make those decisions.
Advanced technology, in particular, has forced many previously complacent
editors to rethink what to publish. If, for instance, the local newspaper will
not publish the graphic details of a local story, what do editors do when explicit
stories roll off the wire?
If the newspaper withholds details from a national story because of what it
deems inappropriate content, readers can certainly go to online sources, 24-hour
cable and magazines to find what they’re missing. And newspaper editors who
are used to shielding “innocent” youngsters from adult content know that these
youngsters probably are more adept than their parents at getting such information
over their home computers.
Other changes in culture and society affect these decisions. New generations
of diseases and advances in their treatment raise questions about how explicit
to get in conveying how these diseases are spread and treated. Home video cameras
cast a new dimension on crimes that are captured on video.
Too much information
Every day, newspaper editors balance their readers’ right to know with what
is humorously known in the vernacular as “too much information.” Many newspapers
have policies outlining what is acceptable, but these policies offer little
help when it comes to offbeat or bizarre stories. They can serve only as general
and often vague guidelines.
Of course, editors who worry too much about offending readers run the risk
of letting a small but vocal minority among their readers edit their papers.
And they sometimes underestimate their readers. Rosemary Armao, managing editor
of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and veteran newspaper and wire service reporter,
warns against failing to appreciate the sophistication of readers. “Between
MTV and soap operas, who has not in our culture heard of and discussed openly
everything from kinky sex to bizarre murders?” she said. “I think we underestimate
our readers to assume they will be shocked, horrified and unable to handle adult
material. I don’t believe in editing a newspaper for children.”
Armao can remember a time when readers were misled because of squeamishness
on the part of editors. She offers as an example the 1992 case of former Judge
Sol Wachtler of the New York Court of Appeals, who stalked his former girlfriend
and her young daughter, adopting a variety of strange disguises and identities.
The details of the case pointed to a sick and troubled man. But many readers
got the idea that this was someone who was simply angry at his girlfriend and
who had acted in an inappropriate way.
Armao, who was working at the Cleveland Plain Dealer at that time, said she
remembers reading AP copy that sanitized some of the events of the case that
“did not begin to suggest the weirdness going on and the enormity of the fall
of such a powerful man.”
Further, the news service stories were often underplayed in newspapers because
editors were uncomfortable about the subject matter, Armao said.
Erring on the side of caution
Even in the 21st century, amid cries of sensationalism and exploitation in
the media, newspaper editors may be over-conservative when it comes to sexually
explicit material. In a recent story in the American Journalism Review, Sandra
Mims Rowe, the editor of the Portland Oregonian, said that paper ran at least
70 stories about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal before the term “oral sex” was
used. The reason? Reports about the events had not been substantiated.
Earlier this year, Carl Sessions Stepp, an AJR Senior Editor, visited a handful
of newspapers to try to gauge how the industry is changing to meet new challenges.
At many of those newspapers, the papers tended to “err on the side of caution
rather than aggressiveness in rejecting stories for reasons of taste, compassion
or community sensitivity.”
To Allen Parsons, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Publisher of the 45,000-circulation
News-Press in Santa Barbara, Parsons firmly believes his readers have no desire
for graphic content or language in their community newspaper. “It’s the newspaper’s
responsibility to keep a level of civil discourse,” he said. Readers want to
avoid such content out of respect for victims of crimes or subjects of stories,
he believes.
But he also acknowledged that graphic details or profane language can be printed
if they are necessary to the full understanding of a story. The paper has a
written policy about what is considered appropriate content of the paper, but
Parsons thinks it is vital that news managers and reporters and photographers
openly discuss potentially controversial content to avoid self-censorship.
He does not want them to avoid keeping details out of unedited copy, or avoid
taking pictures they feel will never see the light of day “We want to have discussions
(pro and con),” he said.
Parsons is quick to admit that no policy can cover every situation. For example,
when he was managing editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, he initiated a controversial
policy that prohibited the use of hyphens to blank out profane language in a
quote. If the profanity was a key detail of the story, it was spelled out in
full, and if not, it was avoided completely.
Like many other editors, Parsons believes that what is appropriate content
for one paper may be inappropriate for another. Readers of a mid-sized daily
like the News-Press do not want graphic details in their newspaper, he believes,
and those who do should go to other sources for it. The boundaries for what
is acceptable may be widened in bigger papers in larger, urban areas, he said.
It is likely that not very many editors would disagree. But as Bill Steiden
has learned, it is impossible to generalize about what material is appropriate
for which newspapers. Steiden is deputy metro editor for state news of the Atlanta
Journal- Constitution, a major metro, but one that serves the South, considered
by some a conservative region of the country.
Steiden has found that publishing what is relevant to a story without offending
readers is sometimes a delicate balancing act. Atlanta is home to LaFace Records,
which produces profanity-laced hip-hop music. “Pop culture is by its nature
very full of profanity,” he said, and that often provides challenges to editors.
The musical group Butthole Surfers is called just that in his newspaper, he
said, and is not referred euphemistically as the “Surfers.” Similarly, the Athens,
Ga., band Nashville Pussy is called by its proper name in the newspaper.
Steiden is adamant, however, that profanity is never used for laughs only,
and he points to an example of the paper’s food writer once including in a story
the pun, “no shittake, Sherlock.” The section editor was not amused, and it
is likely that in the future the paper will leave such puns to Jay Leno.
Telling the story without titillation
While standardized guidelines cover some situations, Mike Perkins, editor
of the 7,000-circulation Herald-Press in Huntington, Indiana, learned that they
certainly cannot cover every scenario. A man in his community was arrested for
performing castrations (on willing men) at home — and videotapes of the procedure
were part of court proceedings. Perkins’ predicament was to decide how much
of the procedure to describe, and in what terms. “You have to treat the audience
as adults,” he said, explaining that the paper used the term “castration” without
explaining details of the procedure, assuming mature adult readers know what
the term means. “We weren’t going to describe the clinical procedure,” he said.
“You have to set a bottom line.”
His main goal as an editor, he said, was to provide enough information to
tell readers the story without including details to provoke titillation or snickers.
Perkins did think it necessary as part of the story, for example, to spell out
who, specifically, buys such videos — that they are sold to people who deal
in homoerotica.
For full nudity, just go to www...
While many editors worry their readers may turn to more explicit and bolder
online news sources to get the “real” story, at least one newspaper decided
that it could beat the Internet at it own game. It determined that while it
would not run nudity on its news pages, where everyone could see it, it would
run it on its web site, where only people with access to a computer could.
The incident, in Athens, Ohio, prompted many community members to debate journalism
ethics and what is appropriate content for newspapers and web sites. In the
spring of 1999, the twice-weekly Athens News reported that the executive director
of a respected mental health and substance abuse agency was being sued by two
former employees. The employees said they were fired after going public with
his on-the-job drinking and sexual activity with an employee. The agency was
private, but received some funding from local government sources.
The evidence in the suit included a sex-and-bondage videotape of the man with
the agency’s nursing director. Both were nude. The nursing director, not identified
in the photo, was bound at the wrists and hanging from the ceiling.
The story was big news in the small Athens community, and the News published
a photo of the scene from the videotape, with a black band covering the woman’s
breasts and a refer line that the unedited photo could be found on the paper’s
Web site.
The story took an even stranger – and tragic — turn when, a month later, the
nursing director was found dead in her home, apparently the victim of a suicide.
She had agonized about the photo in her diary and told her daughter she wanted
to sue the paper.
Top editors at the News said the publication of the photos in the paper and
on the Web site were pivotal for readers to get the full understanding of the
story and its details. Publisher Bruce Mitchell was quoted in the Columbus Dispatch
as saying the decision to post the unedited photo on the Web site caused controversy
in his own newsroom; some staff members argued against it. Both photos, Mitchell
said, illustrated the serious allegations made in the case against the agency
executive director.
The Web site drew 3,000 hits in 72 hours, about 10 times more than the normal
number, Mitchell told the Dispatch.
Readers who believe papers have gone too far when covering stories about sex
often complain editors do it to sell papers. That may seem like an antiquated
notion to most editors, whose primary goal is to cover stories completely and
accurately without alienating readers. In today’s competitive media environment,
however, editors do have to be sure to take the high road, Armao said. “We talk
about wanting to increase circulation,” she said. “Here’s the perfect excuse
to run salacious, titillating stuff.” Barrett agrees: “Conflict is news,” he
said. “A sex scandal is going to beat out a sewer story on page placement almost
every time. But what’s to be gained by going extreme on detail?”
Greenwald, a former reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, is a professor
of journalism at Ohio University.
