By Alicia C. Shepard |
This case details local and
national television coverage of shootings by two students in 1999 at Columbine
High School in Littleton, Colorado. The shooting was the third most closely
followed news story of the 1990s, according to the Pew Research Center for
People and the Press, which looked at 600 stories of the decade.[1] The case addresses how a local station chooses to
cover a sensitive community event as it is happening in real time. This raises
such questions as:
What should be shown live and
what, if anything, should be withheld until the outcome is known? What issues
should a journalist consider when making that decision?
How should a station handle
live interviews with traumatized, sometimes hysterical eyewitnesses, almost all
of whom are children.
Secondarily, students can
debate how the dynamic of the coverage changed when the national media entered.
On April 20, 1999, News
Director Patti Dennis walks in late to the 8:30 a.m. meeting. The room is full.
Her executive producer at NBC affiliate KUSA-TV fills her in. Looks like a slow
ne[2]ws
day. For no particular reason, Dennis glances around the room, and unwittingly
gives her staff a heads up. “I don’t know why,” she says,
wriggling her hands, “but, oooh, I feel spot news coming in my
fingers.”
Her instincts were
prescient. Around 11:20 a.m., the newsroom police scanner crackles something
odd. Dennis is in her office when she hears an assignment editor yell:
“There’s a kid at a school with a gun.” Probably no big deal,
she thinks. Teen brings gun to school, adult wrestles teen to ground, gun is
confiscated. Nonetheless, a KUSA reporter calls the Jefferson County
Sheriff’s Department.
“You already know more
than I do,” the media spokesman says, explaining that officers are
dashing out to Columbine High School, a suburban school with 2,000 students
about a half-hour south of Denver.
Suddenly telephones erupt in
the newsroom. Callers want to know what’s going on.
Quickly, it becomes apparent
to Dennis that this isn’t some kid brandishing a gun to impress friends.
This is real. KUSA has limited information, but Dennis still feels a
responsibility to go on air.
At 11:35 a.m., KUSA breaks
into “Leeza,” a daytime talk show, alerting viewers of a
“possible shooting” at Columbine High School. “Grenades may
be involved,” says an anchor voice over a map of the school’s
location. There are no pictures. It’s too soon. Within four minutes, they
switch back to “Leeza.”
At Denver’s other
network-affiliate television stations, KCNC-TV and KMGH-TV, reporters get the
same news from police scanners. By 11:45 a.m., every newsroom in Denver is
lurching into a Big Story mode. Adrenaline pumping, assignment editors order crews
to the school, to local hospitals, to nearby neighborhoods. Reporters grab
notebooks and maps; photographers reach for gear. They run to their cars.
Assignment editors page all crews in the field telling them to get to Columbine
High. Fast.
At 11:55 a.m., KUSA
officials push “Leeza,” off the air and stay live for the next 10
hours. Their competitors follow; CBS affiliate KCNC at noon, then ABC-affiliate
KMGH. “Breaking News” flashes across TV screens on all channels.
Telephones continue ringing.
It’s the same in every Denver newsroom. Ring. “We don’t know anything yet.” Hang
up. Ring. The ringing heightens
the confusion. “What’s happening,” frantic callers demand.
Are children dead? Where’s Columbine High School?
Dennis is stunned. In 20
years at KUSA, she’s never had a story generate so many calls so quickly.
At about noon she and her executive producer, David Kaplar, head for the
control room to monitor live feeds that soon start coming in from the field.
KUSA’s business
reporter, Gregg Moss, is first on the scene and begins reporting via cell
phone. At 12:07 p.m., he interviews a girl who’d been inside the school.
“I heard they had guns and grenades,” she says. “We thought
it was a fight.”
Twenty minutes later,
KUSA’s microwave satellite truck is in place, and live video of Moss is
beaming to viewers. The first time Dennis sees feeds of children on stretchers,
she reacts as a parent might. She wouldn’t want to see her daughter on a
stretcher on TV. She tells field crews: “No tight shots. Parents don’t
know. I don’t want to see any faces. It’s not appropriate. Too many
parents are wondering what’s happening. I don’t think it’s
right to show anyone injured seriously. That compromises their privacy.”
Police and ambulances arrive
at Columbine High from all over the Denver area. Ambulances, earsplitting
sirens blaring, race down Main Street in Littleton, the closest town to the
school. The noise alerts the weekly paper. Several reporters rush to the scene.
Denver radio, print and TV reporters descend on Columbine High. Police are
closing one street after another, making it impossible to drive near the
school. Reporters abandon cars and run toward the modern 250,000-square-foot
school. Hundreds of people—parents, neighbors, friends, the
curious—rush toward Columbine, halted by police tying yellow tape to
trees to mark off the scene.
Chaos prevails.
Photographers arrive ready to capture live a potential hostage situation.
Reporters stand outside the yellow police tape screaming questions at police.
Are the killers alive? Are they holding hostages? Inside the school, fire
alarms clang, tripped by detonated bombs. Water gushes from sprinkler systems.
Shortly after 1 p.m.,
students begin escaping from the high school. Some are wounded and bleeding.
Many are crying. Students give police and reporters wildly varying accounts of
the shooting spree inside the cafeteria and library. Some are eyewitnesses;
others report information heard from friends. Police share nothing with the
expanding crowd.
The afternoon wears on. 1
p.m. 2 p.m. 3 p.m. Still no word on the gunmen. Still no announcements from the
sheriff’s department. Television time is filled with live footage from
the scene but no answers.
Heart-ripping footage is captured of police dragging a limp body across
the schoolyard. Police offer no explanation. Calls continue to pour into KUSA.
But most information collected over the phone or from the field is only
speculation.
At 4:04 p.m., almost five
hours after the first shots, Jefferson County sheriff’s spokesman Steve
Davis holds a press conference with Sheriff John Stone. “We do have some
fatalities,” says Davis. “The number isn’t known. It’s
not known whether they are teachers or students. We think the suspects have
been found inside the building and are dead.”
Stone confuses the situation
by giving numbers. He tells reporters 20 are wounded and there are
“possibly 25 fatalities.” He concludes, “It appears to be a
suicide mission.”
This is the kind of day for
which journalists spend careers training: It is authentically a Big Story: One
that changes a community, and how people feel about being journalists. As it is
happening, however, there will be no time for thoughtful discussion among
colleagues about journalistic ethics. Instead, instinct and judgment honed by
years in the profession will guide the snap decisions television journalists
make in covering one of the worst school shootings in history while the country
watches live.
The story stays
strong for at least 10 days. But the first day is unquestionably the most
intense. Covering Columbine for television challenged every resource each
station had. Yet no aspect of journalistic training would be tested more than
the ability to make decisions about what to air that first day under enormous
emotional and psychological pressure.
This case looks, in
particular, at two of the complex decisions each newsroom faced:
Under what circumstances
should you withhold information or pictures once you have them, and what issues
should be factored into that decision? In other words, which news value should
take priority: providing full, timely, accurate news coverage to viewers or
attempting to minimize harm?
How does a newsroom handle
interviewing live eyewitnesses on TV or cell phones—especially
juveniles—who may spontaneously say something wrong or may put others,
including themselves, in danger?
The first curve ball comes
at KUSA shortly after noon. Columbine student Jonathan Ladd calls. He’s
transferred to Executive Producer Kaplar in the control room. Kaplar invokes
KUSA’s normal procedure for dealing with kids: “What’s your
name? How old are you? Where are you? What have you seen? Would you be willing
to tell us live on TV?”
Dennis is a little edgy
about putting a student no one has met or spoken to at length on the air. But
they need new information. The locator map is getting old, and co-anchors Kyle
Dyer and Gary Shapiro are repeating the same stuff. They decide to go with the
kid.
Ladd is switched over to the
anchors. He tells them he heard an explosion but didn’t see anything.
Dyer, an anchorwoman who joined KUSA four years ago, is winging it. She and
Shapiro were getting ready for the noon report when the news broke. “We
ran out to the set with the plan to go on right away and say what we heard and
how we had crews on the way to the school,” says Dyer. “We had no
idea that it was that big of a deal.”
Dyer, 31, had graduated from
journalism school less than ten tears earlier, in December 1989. Her first job
was as a field producer and assignment editor at a TV station in Washington,
D.C. She went on to report for an Indiana TV station and then was anchor in
Louisville, Kentucky. With seven nieces and nephews, she is particularly upset
by any story in which a child is hurt. She’s about to experience the
worst day of her career.
At 12:15 p.m. KUSA puts
another student on air live via telephone after Kaplar quickly screens him. His
name is Bob Sapin and he says he’s calling from his hiding place at
school. He talks for three minutes. He’s breathing hard; he sounds
scared.
“They were all in
black. They had submachine guns. I’m hiding behind the school in the
bushes,” he tells anchors Dyer and Shapiro. “I’m praying to
the Lord that they don’t come out the back door.” Dyer reassures him
police are at the school.
Forty-five-year-old
co-anchor Shapiro, a native Nebraskan and a 17-year veteran at KUSA, calmly
urges Sapin to get to the police. By 12:38 p.m., KUSA’s helicopter
arrives, piloted by weatherman Tony Lamonica, who broadcasts the pandemonium of
the school scene.
At 12:45 p.m. Sapin, the
student hiding in bushes, calls back. “I saw two killers,” he tells
viewers. “They had black masks and black trench coats. Needless to say, I
was scared.”
Sapin says he was in Mr.
Connor’s math class when the shooting began. “My math class
ran,” he says. “They got away. My curiosity got the best of me. I
wanted to see if I could help in any way. But when I saw the men from outside
where I was hiding in the bushes, I was afraid. I chickened out.”
“No, you didn’t
Bob,” reassures Dyer, who, although not a parent, feels protective of
Sapin. She’s has never covered a story of this magnitude.
By 1 p.m., another student
inside the school, James, is on air live via a cell phone. His last name is
never mentioned. “I’m in a class room with locked doors,”
James says. “It’s really noisy outside. I hear a lot of screaming.
I’m all by myself.” He didn’t hear any gunshots, he admits,
just a “bunch of threats.”
Dyer steps in. “You
need to get off the phone right now and call 911 immediately,” she
instructs.
At 1:09 p.m., James calls
again saying telephone lines are jammed. He can’t get through to police.
“People are running up and down the hall yelling: “They’re
inside the cafeteria,” he says. “I’m just staying underneath
the desk. I just hope they don’t know where I am.”
Dyer promises to get James
help. “Don’t tell us where you are,” she orders.
At 1:23 p.m., student
Jonathan Ladd is again live via telephone. “I’ve calmed down
some,” Ladd says. “One of my friends called his mother (from the
school). She said he’s hiding in the choir room.”
Confusion at the triage site
Out in the field, KUSA
cameraman Brad Houston and reporter Ginger Delgado team up at the makeshift
triage site in a residential cul de sac. Delgado and other TV reporters
initially speak live via telephones to anchors, describing the confusion.
When Delgado, age 34,
arrives, she’s overwhelmed. In ten years as a reporter, she’d never
seen anything like what was unfolding. “Kids were crying. Bleeding.
Screaming. They were in complete shock,” says Delgado, who joined KUSA
three years before. “The majority had blood spattered on their
clothing.”
She’s frazzled. She
barely knows where to begin. She turns to Houston, and asks: “What do you
shoot first?” They wonder how
best to interview kids and how to tastefully shoot the bloody scene before
them.
“Cruisers would pull
up with bloody kids spilling out,” says Delgado. “I needed to talk
to some kids to see what they saw or heard. But you didn’t know how to
approach them. I tried to be really sensitive and understanding. I meticulously
approached the kids, asking nicely: ‘Do you mind if I ask you some
questions?’ Surprisingly, most of them agreed. Most of the kids were
willing to go on camera and say what had happened. Most of the kids at the
triage site had been close to the scene.”
Interviewing juveniles is
tricky. They are often emotional
and less circumspect than their elders in what they might say on the air. So
television reporters customarily pre-interview kids before putting them on TV.
“It’s one way of weeding out kids that might say something that you
will regret letting get on the air,” says Delgado.
But things are happening too
fast for pre-interviews. Delgado starts speaking to students while Houston
shoots the scene and transmits video back to KUSA’s control room for
Dennis to decide what to air.
Houston comes up with a way
to give Dennis an option: He shoots two different ways. Since neither Houston
or Delgado knows exactly what has happened or whether anyone is dead, Houston
shoots so viewers can’t see faces well enough to identify teens.
“When we pulled up, I
saw kids lying on the grass; I saw blood on the driveway,” says Houston.
“I went to the truck, pulled out my tripod and knew that I had to stay
back from the people. I stayed away from the families and victims. What was
important to me as a member of the community was to stay away from becoming a
part of the story and just capture what was happening—as opposed to
putting my camera on my shoulder and walking into it”
But he also shoots tight
footage of kids’ faces. If it isn’t aired then, it might work later
when emotions aren’t as raw.
But it turns out the gory
footage airs almost immediately. KUSA has a partnership with CNN under which
they swap video regularly. Houston’s footage is fed back to the station
raw, which means CNN has access to it. When it’s fed raw, KUSA loses all
control. The only way the “bloody stuff” won’t be aired
nationally is if KUSA doesn’t send it. Or if Houston edits out the blood
before sending. But they have decided there’s no time for that.
Once tape gets outside the
newsroom, it is extremely difficult to pull it back in. Days later, KUSA sends
out a photo that causes it endless trouble. The station runs a yearbook photo
of Eric Harris. Only it isn’t Harris. It’s a fellow student named
Ryan Snyder. His family is not amused. The station quickly apologizes. But
it’s too late to prevent others from using it. NBC, of which KUSA is an
affiliate, runs the incorrect photo on “Dateline” on Friday, April
23. The photo also appears on KUSA’s own website. “Journalists from
all over the globe wanted to partner with us and use our tapes,” said
Dennis. “Tapes were duplicated and the mistake was sent around the world.”
Despite internal memos and a
picture of the “wrong” Harris posted around the newsroom with a
bold sign: “DO NOT USE THIS PHOTOGRAPH,” KUSA rebroadcasts the
“Snyder as Harris” photo again over the weekend. The station runs
eight corrections. “Using a yearbook put together by students as a
reference can be dangerous,” says Dennis. “Our photographer used
the photo based on the reference in the back of the book. It was wrong. We
spent the entire weekend calling, making sure we blocked out the wrong photo.
We did a lot of work to try to mitigate one image that didn’t belong on a
very sensitive story.”
KCNC’s news director
Angie Kucharski is in her office when she starts hearing a buzz in the
newsroom. She walks out, hears the news and her adrenaline takes off. She
joined the CBS-affiliate only two weeks ago. She’s held one staff meeting
and still checks the newsroom picture photo board to match names with faces.
Kucharski doesn’t even know where Littleton is. But she knows a random shooting inside a high school is a
huge story.
“At some very basic
level, spot news is spot news,” says Kucharski, who came from WBNS-TV in
Columbus, Ohio.
She can’t do much to
help the assignment desk. Instead, she acts more as a coach than hands-on
manager. She reasons that she has a room full of veterans. “When I
started realizing their talent, their compassion and ability, I decided to
leave it to them,” says Kucharski, who has ten years experience managing
newsrooms. “I don’t know everything, but sometimes being a good
leader is knowing when to get out of the way.”
KCNC General Manager Marv
Rockford is an 18-year veteran whose time included a stint as news director. He
comes to the newsroom to help. Kucharski knows he’s a valuable resource,
so both head for the control room after crews are dispatched. Kucharski says
she tries to weigh every decision in terms of “safety issues, sensitivity
to parents and families and informing the public.” She repeatedly asks
editors, “Are the pictures and sound compatible with community
values?” Kucharski knows viewers do not expect to see dead bodies on
their screens.
KCNC, too, gets calls from
kids. At 12:03 p.m., they put a student on the air that one anchor calls
“Jenine.” She is crying hysterically and is difficult to decipher.
“They started shooting
people,” Jenine gasps during a three-minute call. “At first, I
didn’t think it was real. Then we saw blood. We saw these two kids. They
were white. Eric Harris and we didn’t know the other one’s name. But
they had black trench coats on. They were shooting people and throwing
grenades. We saw three people get shot. They were just shooting. They
didn’t care who they were shooting.”
KCNC then reports that the
school is being evacuated, according to its police radio.
Blanket coverage is just
beginning, and KCNC has already named an alleged murderer—Eric
Harris—on the air, without any confirmation from law enforcement or other
sources.
As the day continues,
details eke out—often from overwrought students and parents. Reporters
try to prevent students from speculating or repeating third-hand information.
But it’s tough. KCNC reporter Mike Fierberg is live at 12:25 p.m. with
two teenage girls. Before they can say a word, Fierberg spits out: “We
don’t want you to tell us rumors or conjectures. I just want to know what
you saw. Not what you heard.” It is one way local TV reporters try to
control what is said over the air.
Despite his protestations to viewers about trying to be responsible, at
12:53 p.m., Fierberg volunteers the kind of detail that drives police and FBI
agents crazy. He tells viewers that a SWAT group has entered the school.
“They were fired at,” reports Fierberg, “and the SWAT team
did indeed return the fire.”
Soon after local stations
report SWAT team maneuvers live, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s
Department asks for help:
“Please don’t show live helicopter coverage or tell what the
SWAT team is doing. It could tip off the gunmen.” At 1 p.m., police still
don’t know if gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are dead.
“We did talk to one parent who has been in contact with
his kid who called on a cell phone,” reports Fierberg. “A student
and others locked themselves in one of the rooms. We won’t tell you which
room.”
KCNC anchor Kattie Kiefer
also explains at one point: “We don’t want to give away too much in
case the gunmen are watching.”
Overall, the three stations
try to respect the sheriff’s request. By 2 p.m., television journalists
are taking care to speculate less and avoid disclosing details that might
endanger police or students still trapped inside Columbine High. Journalists
still don’t know if there are dead children.
At 2 p.m., KCNC gives them a
hint. The station airs a live interview with a hysterical, sobbing student
named Bree Pasquale in blood-soaked clothing. “Every one around me got
shot,” says Pasquale, gulping for air. “I pleaded for him not to
shoot me. So he shot another girl. It was all because people were mean to him
last year. There are at least 10 people dead.”
Almost an hour
later, KCNC, albeit inadvertently, confirms by video a death. At 2:51 p.m., a
KCNC camera catches and airs a shot of police dragging an obviously dead body
from school. Within in seconds, the station cuts away, prompting reporter Paul
Day to say: “I’m very reluctant to characterize what that
was.”
Anchor
Amy Spolar is stunned and blurts out: “We need to go back to that
picture.” But the station never does. Kucharski makes sure of that.
“I think for the most
part, we all put the competitive part behind,” Kucharski will agree
later. “We were genuinely concerned that we wanted this to turn out
okay.”
On the morning of April 20,
News Director Diane Mulligan and Planning Director Gail O’Brien are
driving to Boulder, Colorado. There, the grand jury investigating the death of
6-year-old beauty pageant contestant will soon announce which, if any, arrests
will be made. The public has a morbid fascination with JonBenét Ramsey,
who turned up dead Christmas morning in 1997. Mulligan and O’Brien are
checking out the logistics for covering the outcome.
KMGH is Denver’s
third-ranked station, and has been for 20 years. Mulligan is its eighth news
director in ten years. Not surprisingly, the station has a chip on its
shoulder. Six months ago, KMGH revamped its format and began trying to rebuild
its reputation. Since it’s also Mulligan’s first job as a news
director after working as a network assignment editor, she is determined that
her station excel on the Ramsey story.
Halfway there, O’Brien’s pager goes off. She calls
in to hear vague details about a school shooting. Since O’Brien handles
daily coverage, Mulligan drives 15 minutes back to Denver and drops
O’Brien off. She heads back to Boulder, flipping on her car radio. She
hears that bombs are exploding at a local high school. Again, she turns around
and races back to the station. On the way, she calls the assignment desk and
orders an “All Page.” Rarely used, it means all staffers must call
or come to the newsroom.
“I’m an
assignment editor by trade,” confesses Mulligan, “and I really
wanted to be on the desk. But Gail is really good at moving people, and after
we got most people out, I had to begin dealing with the networks. It was just
nuts. Every station wanted our video.”
At noon, the sheriff’s
command post asks KMGH’s helicopter, flying overhead, to land in Clement
Park and pick up a sheriff’s deputy to get an aerial view of the school.
The station agrees.
Meanwhile, on the ground
KMGH runs into trouble. Its microwave truck gets to the scene almost as quickly
as police. By the time the first crew arrives, they can’t reach their
truck. Police have secured the scene and refuse to let the KMGH crews past the
yellow tape.
“We did a lot of
reporter cell phone calls and helicopter video until we could get other microwave
trucks there,” says Mulligan. “We were last from the ground, but
first from the air.” In addition, Mulligan’s station received many
cell phone calls from students inside the school. But, unlike the other
stations, Mulligan decided against using them because they could not be sure of
the callers’ identities. “We’re clean,” she says later.
As the day progresses, KMGH
explains coverage decisions to the public. About 2:30 p.m. anchor Bertha Lynn
tells viewers that the footage the station is about to show of students fleeing
the school was shot earlier. The station is airing it after it knows the
students were safe.
“You may on occasion
see video of people being given cover by SWAT teams holding up weapons,”
says Lynn. “One of those will show about a dozen students running for
cover with SWAT team members. This happened about two hours after the initial
shooting.”
By 2 p.m., KGMH knows kids
are dead. It even knows some names. Students who were in the cafeteria or
library, tell reporters names of some killed before their eyes. But KGMH is
reluctant to broadcast any names. What if, by some chance, they are wrong? The
competitors, too, know names, but they don’t air a single dead
child’s name.
“We knew kids were
dead at about 2 p.m.,” recalls Mulligan. “But we didn’t know
if the shooters were dead or how many more students were inside. So we
didn’t report it. If you report people are dead and there are hostage
negotiations going on, that may be something police don’t want out there.
We wanted the police to report any deaths. We could take no chances on being
wrong about kids dying.”
Taping the drama and showing
it later is an approach each network station uses to varying degrees. The
approach satisfies law enforcement officers, who generally want TV to tape-delay
coverage during a crisis situation. But such delay tends to run up against
journalistic instinct. What about
the public’s right to know? How do you ensure that police and other
officials are responsible?
Mulligan answers that although delaying tape may put the station at a
competitive disadvantage, she cared more about being sensitive to the community
than being first.
Since arriving in March of
1998, Mulligan’s been trying to establish the “ethical line”
she wants her staff to not cross. She watches 90 percent of the main shows and
then discusses them afterward and posts her concerns. “This absolutely
made a difference,” she said later. “Your newsroom has to know
where the ethical line and the sensitive line are before something like this
happens or else you have terrible problems.”
At 2:38 p.m. KMGH’s
helicopter zooms in on the school library with riveting live video of a
student. “Look, you can see a bloody student in the window,” gasps
anchor Lynn.
The camera catches an
armored vehicle creeping toward the library window. SWAT team members,
crouching behind it, inch toward the school. The vehicle stops under a
second-story window. A dazed Patrick Ireland, 16, his left arm dangling
unnaturally, appears ready to jump. “That poor person,” says Lynn.
Minutes before, Mulligan was
sitting in her office talking with the general manager. After spending the
first hours in the control room, things appear to have calmed down. She
reflexively looks up at a television in her office and hears Lynn talking about
the bloody student. Mulligan dashes to the control room.
She’s thinking:
“I don’t know if he’s dead. Who is watching? I don’t
want to see the body hit the truck. It would have been just too much.”
Officers reach up and pull
Ireland down. Just as he’s about to slam into the truck, Mulligan orders
her producer to cut away. The outcome isn’t shown. Is Ireland dead? Is he
critically injured?
“You have to decide
what’s appropriate for viewers at that time,” says Mulligan.
“You know friends and family are watching and that they are getting their
information as it happens.”
No explanation of what
happened to Ireland is given within the next half-hour by KMGH. Later the
country will learn that three bullets in Ireland’s head paralyzed his
right side.
Competitor KCNC too captures
the Ireland drama. But it holds the video until 5:26 p.m., after the school
siege is over and Ireland is safe. KCNC shows Ireland crashing onto the truck
and then viewers watch Ireland trying feebly to sit up.
It was a coup for KCNC and
KMGH to get the shots. KUSA didn’t. Earlier KCNC reporter Paul Day and
photojournalist Bill Masure had talked their way into a home with a third-floor
vantage. There they capture Ireland’s climactic rescue. They use an old
rattan hammock as a blind to keep police from spotting them. But they
can’t go live. They aren’t near their microwave truck.
The Ireland video is shown
over and over—locally and nationally—until it’s seared into
the public’s collective memory of Columbine. At one point, ABC’s
“20/20” replays the Ireland footage four times within 20 minutes.
That night, Mulligan sleeps
in her office. An aide drives to her house for clean clothes. “I have
never had a story that impacted me like this,” she says. “We were
all crying at some point in the newsroom. It was so unbelievable. The magnitude
of it just went on and on. It lasted for 10 days. “
What motivated the killers in the Columbine case, Eric Harris
and Dylan Klebold, may never be fully understood. A self-made videotape
released eight months after the shooting reveals the boys’ level of
self-loathing and hate for popular, athletic or minority classmates. But there
had to be more. Psychologists, educators and historians will study the worst
school bloodbath in history for years.
By day one’s close,
reporters, photographers, managers and assistants involved in Columbine
coverage left work emotionally and physically wasted. KUSA’s Ginger
Delgado put in 16 hours, getting to her apartment at 1 a.m. Many others worked that long, going
home to sleep and to return early the next morning.
“I literally walked in
my apartment, slammed the door and started crying and couldn’t
stop,” says Delgado. “It was the images that were haunting me and
the people I talked to. The somberness. You couldn’t help but feel the
pain and sorrow even though I didn’t even know anyone involved.”
An adrenaline rush kept
journalists going the first few days. But by days three and four, some begged
to be taken off the story. It was too painful, day after day, covering grieving
families, funerals, distraught teens and witnessing an endless river of tears.
Psychologists came to newsrooms to help staffers.
“We didn’t have
tears the first few days,” recalls KCNC’s Kucharski. “They
came after three days, a week. Don’t underestimate how horribly shaken
people are to see bloody bodies and crying parents.”
Taking care of the staff
with food, warm jackets, heaters in station tents (on day two it snowed) and
even hugs, became a critical assignment for the three news directors.
“Something I was not
prepared for at all,” admits Mulligan, “was the impact on the
newsroom. You have to take care of the people in the field. My general manager
and I went to Starbucks to get thermoses of coffee and cookies for my people in
the field and gave people hugs.”
Onslaught of national media
By day two, the national
media had descended. Network crews began arriving Tuesday afternoon. Every
satellite truck within an 8-to-12-hour drive from Denver was rented. Overnight,
television crews increased from about 20 on the scene to between 100 and
150. Whatever restraint or
excesses the local TV stations were responsible for, things were about to get
worse. One reason was the sheer
size of the press horde that now was swarming over the story.
“For the national
electronic media, coverage of the ongoing story at Columbine High School is
just beginning,” warned Rocky Mountain News television columnist Dusty Saunders. “Get used
to it, Colorado.”
Wednesday morning Denver
awoke to NBC “Today” show host Katie Couric broadcasting live from
the school. CNN, Fox News and the networks each flew in scores of people. So
did such major newspapers as the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Journalists came from Japan, England and France to
capture the horrendous tragedy.
Smaller newspapers—the
New Orleans Times Picayune, the Philadelphia
Daily News and the Cleveland
Plain Dealer—also sent
reporters. The scene quickly became a sea of wall-to-wall media.
“I went to Clement
Park and felt sickened and upset,” says KUSA photojournalist Eric Kehe.
“When I turned on my camera, suddenly about 20 cameras showed up behind
me. If I swung another direction and started taking pictures, everyone would
see what I was doing and swarm those people.”
KUSA’s Brad Houston
found the out-of-town media scene equally disturbing. “From the moment,
we realized how big a story this was and the magnitude of it,” adds
Houston, “we started thinking how to cover the story sensitively without
intruding on people’s grief. If somebody doesn’t want to talk,
somebody else will. We didn’t have to badger people. But not everybody
took that tack.”
At first, it appeared those
connected to Columbine warmed to the attention. But that didn’t last. As
desperate outside journalists heckled families, police, neighbors and
camera-shy students for interviews, the community grew angry and began
resenting the media intrusion. “Some members of the national media were
chasing food workers at the school down to their cars,” recalls Gail
O’Brien. “A lot of times, our guys said it was the national media
stalking people, and so they told them: ‘Hey, we have to live here. Cut
it out’. ”
The onslaught was hard on
local journalists who tried to be sensitive to their community. They felt they
paid a price for the aggressive insensitivity displayed by some national
colleagues. Months later, when local television crews were covering any story
related to Columbine, they found high school students and others still angry at
the media. One time, Kehe drove to the high school to cover a class reunion.
When he returned to his KUSA-marked car, “Media Sucks,” and a skull
and cross bones were painted on the car.
“The scary thing is
this is our community,” says KUSA’s Kehe. “Our neighbors. Our
friends. We pray at the same church. Our kids go to the same schools. We are
going to be very sensitive to how we approach people. When (journalists) are
flying in from 1,000 miles away, they are there just to get the stories. They
don’t have to consider how they treat people. We are left to mend fences.”
Denver journalists agree
that regaining the community’s trust will take a long time.
In October 1999, six months
after the Littleton shooting, CBS News broadcast a chilling surveillance video
obtained by its Albuquerque affiliate, KRQE-TV. The 90-second segment shows a
grainy, black and white image of Klebold and Harris shooting at a homemade
propane-tank bomb in the cafeteria, students running for cover under tables,
and the bomb exploding.
Worried that such graphic
images might re-victimize survivors and their families and saying the video
didn’t advance the story, the three Denver stations opted to not show it,
including Denver’s CBS affiliate, KCNC. In its defense, CBS and
Albuquerque’s KRQE-TV said the news value outweighed any negative impact.
The video was widely shown around the rest of the country.
The Columbine school
massacre took a toll on everyone involved, peripherally or directly. The whole
metropolitan Denver area went into mourning. Few were left unscathed by the
ruthless, random slaughtering of 12 students and a teacher. Later, KCNC anchor
Bill Stuart would publicly admit being treated for depression after covering
the Columbine massacre.
Columbine High School opened
on time for the 1999-2000 academic year. A year later, Denver citizens passed
the anniversary without any significant trauma. But the story will be with the
community for a long time. Again and again, as with any major heart-breaking
story, the tragedy returns to the national spotlight when certain events
transpire: Columbine football championships, graduation, an injured
student’s first steps, a mother’s book about her daughter’s
death, a mother’s suicide, and anniversaries. The First. The Fifth. The
Tenth and so on. Each time, Denver television stations will face how to report
the news and minimize harm to those victimized by two highly troubled teenage
boys.
The Author
Alicia Shepard is a frequent
contributor to the American Journalism Review.
Columbine School Shooting: |
By Alicia C. Shepard |
At 11:19 a.m. on April 20, 1999, two high school seniors
began a shooting spree inside Columbine High School that killed 12 students and
a teacher and seriously wounded 23 teenagers. Forty-nine minutes later, Dylan
Klebold and Eric Harris turned their 9-mm semi-automatic weapons on themselves.
That much is known now. But at the time, few details were known. No deaths or
injuries were confirmed by law enforcement officers until 4 o’clock that
afternoon.
For nearly four and a half hours, local television stations
struggled to find any information for the 1.5 million in the Denver metro area
desperate for details. This case examines the problems television stations
encounter covering a major story as it unfolds in real time.
The Columbine tragedy
wasn’t your typical news story where the press shows up after an event
and reports what happened. Covering Columbine for TV would test the physical,
emotional and psychological resources each station possessed. But no aspect of
journalistic training would be more critically tested than the ability to make
snap decisions about what to air under the enormous pressure of that first day.
No television reporter,
producer or cameraman had time to ponder ramifications of airing a particular
scene or an interview with a distraught child or a live shot of police moving
toward hostages. None had time to check details or names spilling from
students. Instead, each felt enormous pressure to get something on the air as
fast as possible.
“There was so much
information in the beginning and so much coming from different ways and
different people that you didn’t know what was right,” says KUSA
reporter Ginger Delgado. “So you were left to describe what you saw.
Believe me there was a lot to talk about, but you had to be very careful about
what you said and how you attributed it.”
The toughest decisions in
covering the Columbine tragedy involved what to air and when to air it.
“The most difficult
decision that day was how much live to put on the air because the story was
unfolding,” says Diane Mulligan, KMGH news director since March 1998.
“And because we didn’t know all the facts or even whether the
shooters were in the school, the most important thing was being in the control
room deciding what shots to put on the air because the carnage was fairly
massive. “
This case study raises
several complex issues. For the
purpose of teaching this case in one 90-minute class period, we are focusing on
two:
1. Under what circumstances
should you withhold information or pictures once you have them and what issues
should be weighed in that decision? In other words, which competing news value
should take priority: providing full, timely, accurate news coverage to viewers
or attempting to minimize harm to those directly involved?
2. How does a newsroom handle
interviewing live eyewitnesses on TV or on cell phones—especially
juveniles—who may spontaneously say something that’s wrong or could
put others, including themselves, in danger?
The issues for journalists
to consider in deciding whether to withhold information include the following:
•
the safety of the victim.
•
sensitivity to the victims’ families.
•
the public’s right to know versus privacy of victim and their families.
•
the community’s values and tastes.
•
a newsroom’s responsibility to understand the context, significance and
outcome of an event before broadcasting it.
•
jeopardizing law enforcement officers’ handling of a dangerous situation.
•
creating an impression that your station is exploiting a tragedy for ratings.
The questions and analyses
that follow try to direct students into realizing the importance of these
issues. Some issues will likely require more lead-in from the professor than
others.
After the students have read
the narrative, ask them to discuss what they think is a broadcaster’s
primary responsibility, in general. Note that viewers were desperate for
information. Parents would hear snippets on the radio or get a panicked phone
call alerting them to the shootings. Even local police were affected. Several
arriving Denver police officers had children at the high school.
Considering all this, what
is the station’s responsibility?
Let the students openly debate. If necessary, you can probe them by
asking whether:
•
to give viewers minute-by-minute shots of a local drama unfolding?
•
to ensure the safety of students and police?
•
to get word out quickly about a dangerous situation?
•
to help the police during a tense situation?
•
to provide live coverage for the gunmen who might be watching?
•
to simply broadcast barebones relevant information for frantic friends and
relatives, and wait until the outcome is clear before providing details?
This is a significant debate
because of the valid competing interests in similar situations. In this case,
the competing interests are:
•
police responsibility to protect the public,
•
the media’s need to provide information,
•
the victims and their families’ desire for sensitivity and privacy.
After the massacre, KUSA
General Manager Roger Ogden told the Denver Post, his staff's “primary
responsibility is to report news factually, accurately and timely. Of equal
import is ‘that we don't jeopardize the safety of any
individuals’.” In the same article, KCNC General Manager Marv
Rockford said: “It’s our responsibility to report the news. By not
reporting it, we do not solve problems that clearly run much deeper in
society.”
Before getting to specific
questions about what students think should be aired live, remind them that
every decision KCNC and other stations made before 4 p.m. was based on not
knowing whether the gunmen were dead. Police learned the two were dead sometime
between 2:30 and 3 p.m., according to Steve Davis of Jefferson County’s
Sheriff Department, so live coverage wasn’t actually dangerous. But the
news media didn’t know this until the sheriff’s 4 p.m. press
conference reporting that Klebold and Harris had killed themselves. By 3 p.m.,
each station knew kids were dead but none broadcast the details until the
Sheriff’s Department made it official.
Under intense pressure,
experience plays a key role in deciding what to air, says KMGH editor Gail
O’Brien. “What do we show and what not is really common
sense,” says O’Brien, who has been in TV news for 30 years.
“If you have time to think, then you are more likely to do a better job.
But in breaking news, you don’t have the time to think. You have to use
commonsense on what makes air.”
Denver television stations
decided early on to take a conservative approach to the story. No tight shots.
Show no gore. Don’t use victim names until police release them even if
you know.
Discuss those decisions.
Were they denying viewers the
whole story?
Were they deciding for
adults, who can turn off the TV, what they should and shouldn’t see?
Why should they wait until
police release a victim’s name if they have already confirmed it?
When KUSA photojournalist
Brad Houston arrived at the makeshift triage site, he found bloody, wounded
teenagers lying on the ground. Houston made a personal decision not to show any
close-ups or blood that first day. The triage site was a sickening scene, and,
as a parent, he knew he would not want to see his child on television in shock
and covered with blood.
“I knew we
didn’t want to show victims on the air when their parents didn’t
know,” says Houston. “I did the same thing with blood. I shot the
scene with blood and with no blood. We didn’t put the blood shots on
locally at first. But unfortunately, it went out on a live feed and then
it’s fair game.”
Houston also saw his work on
MTV, “E” and the networks, even though he played no role in the
distribution. Once cable and broadcast network stations got explicit footage
shot by local camera operators, it was fed for the world to watch live, or at
least to see the same gruesome scene over and over.
If Houston shot footage
showing no blood, is that a form of censoring the news?
Or simply common sense
restraint?
Or does the public have a
right to see things exactly as they appear?
KMGH’s high-tech
helicopter was able to photograph a bleeding student, Patrick Ireland, hanging
from the second-story library window as a SWAT team was moving to rescue him.
The footage was dramatic. Officers crouched behind a slow-moving armored
vehicle as it headed for Ireland, who looked as if he were ready to jump. The
camera stayed on the rescue as officers climbed on top of the armored truck and
pulled Ireland down to safety. Just as Ireland, in a free fall, was about to
slam into the truck, KMGH cut away.
Should KMGH have shown any of
this footage live?
Should they have shown that
video at all, even after Ireland was rescued?
What if he died after
smashing into the truck?
Gail O’Brien, KMGH
planning director and a television news veteran, talks about what she calls the
“Splattering Theory” of television.
“Someone falls from
the top of a building and you’ve got it all on video,” said
O’Brien. “What do you show? Young people usually say show it all.
But if you have a conscience about you, you are always aware not to show the
splattering. I always know if it’s hard for me to watch, then I
don’t want viewers to watch. If you are good in the business, you go a
lot by your gut.”
KMGH News Director Diane
Mulligan was criticized for running the Ireland story live. By airing it as it
happens, say critics, KGMH potentially endangered the lives of Ireland and his
rescuers. Her station also aired live pictures of about a dozen students
running from the school and piling into police cars at 2:43 p.m., again when it
wasn’t publicly known the killers were dead.
“No one else had the
Ireland footage live,” says Mulligan. “We got a lot of coverage in Time,
Newsweek, Broadcasting magazine. When I saw the Patrick Ireland visual. I
knew we had won. But in this type of situation, competition takes a back seat,
and ethics become the biggest thing you deal with. This station has been No. 3
for 20 years. We are a year into our rebuild and only six months into having a
new revamped product on air. An event of this nature can change the direction
of the station. It can change how viewers can see you.”
What do you think of
Mulligan’s logic?
KCNC captured the same
Ireland footage. But it aired Ireland splattering on the truck after the siege
ended, and it was known that Ireland was alive. Deni Elliott, a newsroom ethics
coach, said in the American Journalism Review that just because footage is
available doesn’t mean stations must air it.
“The public
doesn’t need to see pictures of a boy with gunshot wounds to his head
dangling from a school window, or hear frantic calls for help on police tapes,
or read about a dying man’s last hours in minute detail,” said
Elliott, director of the Practical Ethics Center at the University of Montana.
“The Littleton story in and of itself was compelling enough. The rest of
the drama makes it pornography.”
Should KCNC have aired such
gruesome pictures at all?
(After extensive physical
therapy, Ireland, with one bullet still lodged in his brain, walks with a limp.
)
KCNC was the first Denver
station officially to report the names of the suspected killers. At 6:53 p.m.,
it released Harris and Klebold’s names after its lead investigative
reporter had triple checked the information. KUSA, however, didn’t report
the suspects’ names for almost two hours after that, waiting until KUSA
own reporters could confirm the names.
Why shouldn’t KUSA air
the names if they already been reported on another channel?
A KMGH reporter said live at
3:38 p.m.: “This is off the police radio and it’s not confirmed.
Shots are being fired right now in the gym.”
How reliable it is to report
information off a police scanner?
KUSA mistakenly ran a
Columbine High School yearbook picture of Ryan Snyder, who had nothing to do
with the massacre, and labeled it as gunman Eric Harris. This was devastating
to Snyder and his family. The error occurred when a KUSA photographer relied
solely on a reference in the back of the student-produced yearbook, which
wrongly identified Snyder as Harris.
“The photo went on the
web Friday and on the air after that,” explained News Director Patti
Dennis. “Late Friday night, I realized I had a problem. When you identify
a person in a news story you have to be more than sure you have the right name.
We normally don’t identify minors. This for us broke the standard rule of
not identifying minors. … Using a yearbook, you’ve just got to be
really careful. It was just sloppy despite everything we have in place. It
can’t just look right or feel right; it has to be right when you are
identifying a human being. I had a conversation with the individuals involved
with the photo. It was severe enough that they got the message that this was
clearly a potentially career-ending mistake. But there was no
suspension.”
Should they have run the
picture based only on the yearbook reference?
Should the person responsible
for the mistake have been fired or reprimanded?
After discussion, you might
inform the students of the conclusions other journalists intimately familiar
with Columbine coverage reached about the three Denver TV stations. Former columnist
and Wall Street Journal editor Dean Rotbart spent April 20 at KCNC observing
how a television station responded to the Big Story.
His conclusion:
“KCNC’s news coverage, which I witnessed firsthand, defies many of
the most common negative stereotypes concerning broadcast journalism in general
and local TV in particular,” Rotbart wrote. “The station
didn’t rush to air with its scoop (gunmen’s names) until staff
members could get double and triple confirmations, which took several hours.
Nor did the station opt to show gore. KCNC editors had plenty of film to
exploit had they wanted. In the heat of the story chase, newsroom editors
talked about their responsibility to decency and community values. No one
dissented.”
Similar views could be
offered about coverage at the two other network stations, KUSA and KMGH . In
their shops, rather than using the shootings to rope in new viewers, each
station chose to respect the Denver population’s community values. Each
news director concluded during coverage that first day that in such an
emotionally catastrophic story, being right mattered far more than who got a
particular piece of the story first.
“I’m sure I
could find a lot of mistakes and questionable judgment calls in what we did and
things I would have done differently,” said Kucharski. “But you do
the best you can. We are humans having to make journalistic decisions second by
second. There is no magical handbook.”
Nor was it necessary to be
melodramatic. Such a horrendous news story begged for understatement. “When
video came in with really raw emotions, it didn’t go on the air
raw,” says KMGH News Director Mulligan. “You got the moment but we
didn’t need to sensationalize it. The story itself is sensational. The
key is to not sensationalize what you have in this market. It’s very
conservative.”
Now come full circle and
ask:
As a rule, what factors
should stations consider in any decisions on what to air?
“Overreact in the
newsroom, under react on the air.” That was KUSA’s motto, says News
Director Patti Dennis. That meant playing it conservatively because Denver in
many ways is a small town. All three stations showed remarkable restraint in a
situation in which crises came at news directors like hardballs out of a
high-speed batting machine. In interviews the three female news directors each
suggested that the story would have been handled differently in Los Angeles or
New York.
Was the story handled with surprising restraint and
sensitivity because the news directors are female? Although all three knew
early on the names of the student murderers, they didn’t air them until
after 6:30 p.m. Neither did any station air the names of any wounded until
names were released by the hospital. Although Denver is a highly competitive
market, reporters and news managers appeared to be more concerned with being
sensitive than getting a scoop.
“I had one news
director from Los Angeles call me and say: ‘What the hell were you doing
when you broke away as Ireland was about to hit the ground?,’ said KMGH
News Director Diane Mulligan.
Do you have to give up
competing in a situation like Columbine where tens of thousands of viewers are
directly or indirectly affected by what’s unfolding because they live
nearby?
Is it possible in a dicey,
emotionally charged situation involving children, such as Columbine, to be
aggressive and thorough in your reporting and still be respectful to those
caught in the tragedy? How could you best do that?
Since the three news
directors were women, what role, if any, do you think gender played in
coverage? Is that even a fair question?
[NOTE: Included are
guidelines on interviewing juveniles provided by the Radio-Television News
Directors Foundation. Pass out copies for discussion. Can students think of any
other guidelines?]
In the Columbine massacre,
children played a key role. Nearly 2,000 teens were involved, making those who
saw the shootings or those who were near the shooters or trapped inside the
school obvious candidates for television interviews. However, children and
teens, especially in breaking news situations, are not always aware of the
ramifications of appearing on television. There is no time to consult their
parents in breaking news. A journalist must weigh competing values of a duty to
seek truth and a duty to minimize harm to anyone being interviewed. Television
journalists at Columbine had to be particularly careful in putting teens on
live television since it is far more difficult to control what they say while
cameras are running. This is a ripe area for discussion, not only with covering
Columbine, but covering children in general.
Ask students, in general, to
discuss the following questions:
Should juveniles even be
interviewed?
Should you pre-record the
interview before airing? Or is
live OK?
Some television reporters
put aside microphones and talked with kids first and then asked if they would
go on camera. Some journalists asked kids’ parents, if available, for
permission to interview the teenagers. Some reporters approached crying kids
and asked them to talk about what they’d seen.
How should television
journalists interview students too young to understand how to be careful with
the media?
What is the reporter or
photographer’s responsibility in this situation? Just to get the story? To protect the children?
Excitable kids often blurt
out information, correct or not, on live television. Certainly in this
situation, teenagers were emotionally overwhelmed.
As an example, at 3:14 p.m.
before it was officially known if anyone was dead, KMGH interviewed a
16-year-old boy after he’d been rescued.
Boy: “We ran by the
commons. There were three dead bodies going up the stairs.”
Reporter: “There are
still students inside.”
Anchor: “It certainly
changes things, describing dead bodies. We can certainly hope he’s
mistaken.”
Reporter: We don’t
know anything. It could be somebody down. The police have not told us
anything.”
How should the station have
handled this interview?
What can a journalist do to
prevent a child from saying something libelous, damaging, incorrect or hurtful
on the air during an interview?
Student Bree Pasqual
witnessed Klebold and Harris killing students in the library and was hysterical
when interviewed by television reporters shortly after fleeing the school. In
essence, Pasqual was first to report there were dead bodies.
“The big decision was
that Bree was so hysterical you almost felt frightened,” says
KUSA’s Ginger Delgado, who interviewed Pasqual at the time. “She
was so in shock and trying to describe what she’d seen. Her voice was
shaking so badly and she was crying so much, her voice started to crack.”
A competing station, KCNC,
showed the interview live. Some say KCNC exploited Pasquale, showing the world
her pain when she was still stunned by what she’d seen. Others argue the
world needed to see pure raw emotion to fully comprehend the senseless
massacre.
Should KCNC have shown her
live, sobbing on camera, barely able to get complete sentences out, while the
situation was still in play?
Rather than air Pasquale
live before anyone knew of deaths, KUSA held the interview, running it at 4:32
p.m.—about a half-hour after the sheriff told reporters 23 were wounded
and there were “possibly 25 fatalities.” After Pasquale’s
interview was sent out on a feed, NBC and CNN, among others, broadcast it
repeatedly.
Which station made the right
decision? Why?
When, if ever, should that
footage have been shown?
KCNC interviewed students
too. It allowed some students to blurt out the names of the gunmen before they
were double-checked by KCNC’s reporter or confirmed by police.
Should KCNC have allowed
that? How might it have been avoided?
KCNC’s reporter Mike
Fierberg, at the school, put two girls on air live. But before he let them
speak, he said: “We don’t want you to tell us rumors or
conjectures. I just want to know what you saw, not what you heard?”
(if
time permits)
Incidents like
Columbine and other examples where media and police goals conflict often create
tension as each tries to do his or her job. While television reporters and
producers need to be sensitive and cautious during strained police standoffs,
law enforcement officers need to stonewall journalists less and cooperate more.
“Unfortunately, a lot
of law enforcement agencies view (the press) as the enemy,” says FBI
negotiator Gary Noesner. “Their initial inclination is to cut off
information from you. ‘If we don’t talk to them, maybe they’ll
go away.’ That doesn’t happen. You won’t go away. …
When I teach negotiators and crisis managers, I say: ‘You either feed the
shark or the shark will feed itself’.”
The relationship between
journalists and law enforcement officials has always been testy. Rather than
showing mutual respect, they often perceive each other as the enemy.
Journalists, in particular, fiercely guard their independence and bristle when
police try in any way to control a story.
“One of the principles that applies in this kind of
situation is journalistic independence,” says Robert Steele, who teaches
ethics to journalists at the Poynter Institute. “The news media are not
an arm of law enforcement, but they also shouldn’t be advocates for
individuals or groups who are demanding something. That said, it’s important
for journalist to meaningfully weigh the concerns of law enforcement. There may
even be rare times when we do cooperate with law enforcement to prevent
immediate harm.”
As an example, Steele points
to instances when a hostage-taker or gunmen demands to talk to the media. A
journalist should never, in his opinion, make that decision without consulting
law enforcement. The FBI’s Noesner adds that when a news organization
grants an interview, negotiators often lose leverage. “As a negotiator, I
may use that individual’s ability to talk to the media as a reward for
his good behavior,” says Noesner. “That may be one of the most
important things for people: to be listened to, to be heard. If you give that
to them up front, I’ve lost some leverage in dealing with that
individual.”
Considering the sensitive
relations between press and police, talk about how you think Denver stations
handled the following:
KMGH and KCNC both landed
their helicopters at the Jefferson County sheriff’s request. They put out
their reporters and each took on a deputy, who used the vantage from the sky to
report to other officers what was going on. The Denver alternative weekly, Westword, criticized the two stations for being part of the
law enforcement investigation. Many journalists consider joining forces in any
way with police or helping them in an investigation is wrong.
What could go wrong in this
situation?
Would the pilot then be
forced to go where the deputy wanted, and possibly miss taping an important
moment?
What competing interest
should have priority: law enforcement or the public’s need to know what
is going on?
KMGH broadcast live a SWAT
team advancing toward the school, hiding behind an armored vehicle. It was
fascinating, dramatic television. A real-live rescue operation. The goal was to
save student Patrick Ireland, who was standing in the library window, dazed and
calling for help. If the gunmen were still alive, this footage would have
provided them valuable information. As it happens, the two gunmen were dead,
but that wasn’t publicly known at the time. FBI negotiators say they can
almost always count on hostage takers watching television or listening to a
radio in a tense, standoff with police.
KUSA too showed live on-air
footage of students dashing from the school—“fleeing for
safety,” said KUSA’s helicopter reporter Tony Lamonica, who
narrated the rescue. “Cops are running for cover behind cars,”
Lamonica, the station’s weather reporter, told viewers. “We are
going to pull the camera a little bit back. We don’t want to tip the
gunmen off to where the police are.”
How should a station handle
that kind of live footage when the outcome isn’t known?
“I don’t think
there was enough thought put into showing the escape routes of the students
while the situation played out,” says Poynter Institute’s Bob
Steele. “If the gunmen were still alive, and they had rifles and they saw
the students running from the building on TV and knew the escape route, they
could have shot at students and law enforcement. The same thing with Patrick
Ireland falling out of the window. Showing that live made him and the SWAT team
highly vulnerable. KMGH pulled away but not early enough, in my opinion. And
they did it more, it seems, to not offend the viewers as opposed to giving away
a vulnerable position. Certainly (KUSA) putting the phone calls on the air live
was very dangerous too.”
What if the gunmen were
watching television inside the school?
How valuable to the public is
this kind of live TV?
In almost every hostage-type
situation, said FBI Chief Negotiator Gary Noesner, the gunman is watching
television, listening to the radio, even surfing the Internet, as the event is
occurring. Media attention is often a strong motivation. “More often than
not, these people are watching TV,” said Noesner. “That’s
where it can be problematic for us. A 20-second shot could potentially cause
problems for us. But it’s also true that law enforcement has to learn how
to deal cooperatively with the press.”
[NOTE: This is a good point
to introduce guidelines for covering volatile situations written by the
Radio-Television News Directors Association. You might pass out copies. Discuss
other guidelines that could be included. As an example: One guideline states:
Always assume the hostage taker, gunman or terrorist has access to the
reporting.]
CELL PHONES:
Cell phones, said KUSA News
Director Patti Dennis, played a new and dynamic role in coverage. Shortly after
noon, a student, saying he was in the school, called KUSA and was transferred
to Executive Producer David Kaplar in the control room. Kaplar asked his name,
age, where he was, what he’d seen and if he’d be willing to tell
viewers live on television.
The student, Bob Sapin, was
heard live on KUSA twice: at 12:15 p.m. and 12:45 p.m. Months later, a
journalism magazine would tell Dennis that Sapin’s calls were a prank. He
wasn’t hiding in bushes behind the school; Sapin (his real name) had
called from Utah, where he’s a 25-year-old unemployed snowboarder. CNN,
the New York Times, the
Associated Press, Boston Herald, Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle used part or all of Sapin’s telephone
interviews, according to Brill’s Content.
Dennis and Kaplar also
allowed Columbine student Jonathan Ladd to tell viewers live that his friend
was “hiding in the choir room.” Law enforcement officers were
particularly critical of this 1:23 p.m. interview. At 1:23 p.m. police still
didn’t know where the killers were or whether they were still alive. With
television sets in most Columbine classrooms where the killers could watch
them, that call could have provided them with a road map to the next victim.
What should the television
stations have done with student eyewitnesses calling on cell phones as the
event is breaking when there is so little other information?
Months after the Columbine
shootings, KUSA News Director Patti Davis said, “It was one of those
decisions we could have made smarter. Now, I would have talked to the caller,
debriefed him, taped it and thought about it. But at the moment, every
journalist I know who had an eyewitness, not someone saying, ‘This is
what I heard’. But someone saying, ‘This is what I saw.’ At
that moment, we felt we had an eyewitness. …You have to weigh the
public’s need to know now. The keyword is now. His (Sapin’s)
insider information was answering questions, but we could have waited.”
Include a discussion of
guidelines for unsolicited telephone calls, which were written after Columbine.
HELICOPTERS
Multi-million dollar
helicopters are now a staple at many television stations.
How should they be used in a
situation like Columbine?
How could photographers best
use sophisticated camera equipment that can zoom in from as far away as three
miles?
KUSA News Director Patti
Dennis told her field crews right at the start: “No tight shots. Parents
don’t know. I don’t want to see faces. It’s not appropriate.
There are too many parents wondering what happened.”
SATELLITES
Satellites and other
high-tech equipment allow television crews to go live much more easily than ten
years ago.
How should that ability to go
live in a breaking news situation be handled?
Additional Questions if time permits |
Do you think this story
might have been handled differently in a different television market? Denver,
admittedly a conservative town, is the country’s 18th largest market.
Might different decisions
have made covering an identical story breaking in Miami, Los Angeles, New York
or Kansas City, Des Moines, or Aberdeen, South Dakota? Why?
In October 1999, six months
after the Littleton shooting, CBS News broadcast a chilling surveillance video
obtained by its Albuquerque affiliate, KRQE-TV. The 90-second segment shows a
grainy, black and white image of Klebold and Harris shooting at a homemade
propane-tank bomb in the cafeteria, students running for cover under tables,
and the bomb exploding.
Worried that such graphic
images might re-victimize survivors and their families and saying the video
didn’t advance the story, the three Denver stations opted to not show it,
including Denver’s CBS affiliate, KCNC. In its defense, CBS and KRQE-TV,
said the news value outweighed any negative impact.
Do you think CBS should have
run the video? Why?
Was it wrong for the Denver
stations to not run it? Why?
In stories of this
proportion, the national media will descend, bringing large staffs, fancy
equipment, fame and deep pockets of money. Invariably, tension arises between
the local and national media. Local media have more invested in their
communities. They live there. Their children go to school with people they
might cover. Local Denver journalists reported that they tried extra hard to be
more sensitive and tactful in covering the Columbine tragedy. But, for the
national media, the first priority was getting the story.
Overnight, the scene went from 20 local crews to 100-150
television crews from all over the world. Journalists from television networks
and big city newspapers parachuted in, peppered local journalists with questions,
rudely demanded interviews, or camped out in front of homes belonging to
victims’ families.
KMGH’s managers
decided not to bombard the victims’ families. They refused to bang on
doors or pester families with phone calls, although other journalists went that
route.
“We tried to get in
the back door by calling friends of the families to see if they were willing to
talk,” says Gail O’Brien. “We used PR people a lot. We made
requests to interview the families. We tried to reach them through their
churches and funeral homes. But we would not camp out on a family’s lawn.
We tried to reach the Klebold and Harris families through their lawyers. Part
of it is, that’s just the ethic of Denver.”
Pestering families at a time
of obvious intense grief turned Denver’s citizens against the media, many
local journalists feel. The onslaught of hundreds of journalists overwhelmed
residents. After a time, the local community lumped national, local, and
foreign journalists into one evil group to focus their anger on.
After the outside media fly
home, the local media are left to “clean up” hard feelings. The
public often doesn’t make a distinction between the national and local
media. Those who have had a negative media experience often decide “all
media” are bad.
“I had the biggest
problem with out of town field producers, “ says Kehe. “They would
swarm people. They could be really intrusive, yelling questions. I think the
people hustling the crowd the most were field producers.”
Five months later, Kehe was
interviewed. “I’ve gone out to Columbine high school three times
since the tragedy,” says Kehe. “One was a class reunion. When I
went back to my car, which was obviously a media car, someone had written:
“Media Sucks,” and drawn a skull and cross bones. “
Another time, Kehe arrived
in a KUSA marked car when students were releasing 13 hot air balloons in memory
of the 13 killed. “As I drove up, people started yelling: ‘What the
hell are you doing here? Go the hell home!’ There’s still a lot of
anger out there by people who weren’t treated well by the media. I do
know the way I did my job and how I treated people, and I didn’t deserve
it. We have to regain their trust. It will take a long time.”
Is this kind of strain
between nationals and locals unavoidable?
Can you think of any ways to
ease the tension between the two camps?
What could the local media do
after a story is over to smooth relations with the local people?
What might the local media do
to improve relationships with local law enforcement officials?
As an example, KUSA-TV
invites public information officers, sergeants and detectives from various
metro jurisdictions to spend the day at the station and see first-hand how TV
does its job and what’s required.
Another kind of tension
erupts when local authorities are wowed by a celebrity newscaster, such as
NBC’s Tom Brokaw or CBS’s Dan Rather. While the story initially
belonged to the local media, a few days into it, such national media as the New
York Times or NBC started breaking
stories. Local sources were feeding information to out-of-town journalists and
not to the people who cover them day in and day out.
“What really got to me
was when the national media started breaking details of the investigation that
we couldn’t even get,” says KUSA reporter Ginger Delgado.
“When the nationals descend, they bring in hundreds of people. Our lowly
station doesn’t have the manpower to get what they get. You can’t
compete with the networks. Especially if it’s a big name network reporter
calling. You have to rely on sources and contacts you’ve made as a local
reporter to get the stories. That’s why it’s important to have
cultivated good sources.”
What could the local
journalists do to avoid being scooped by out-of-town press?
KCNC anchor Kathy Walsh was
reporting live from the triage site and broke into tears on the air. Walsh, a
parent herself, was criticized for being emotional and therefore,
unprofessional. What do you think?
Discuss journalistic
professionalism and how reporters should act when covering an event. They are
trained not to show bias or emotion when reporting and to work hard at being
fair. KUSA anchor Kyle Dyer, a broadcast journalism graduate of University of
Maryland, says it’s not always so easy. Covering Columbine, she says, was
the worst day of her career. Although not a parent, she has seven nieces and
nephews and found herself deeply affected by seeing children hurt and covering
teenager funerals.
“Journalism students
think that they’ll always be unbiased and untouched by their
stories,” says Dyer, then 31. “But that all changes when stories
like this happen. I am a lot more sensitive than I was when I started out, and
I think it makes me a better journalist. I live in this community, and I think
viewers appreciate it when I show ‘I’m one of them.’ But I
don’t wish a story like Columbine on any journalist.”
The three local Denver
stations pre-empted commercial TV for almost 21 hours of lucrative network time
between April 20 through April 22. By not running commercials during Columbine
coverage, each station was actually losing money. An NBC executive told the
Denver Rocky Mountain News that
KUSA’s decision to preempt commercials cost it about $600,000.
Let’s say you are the
general manager who knows that commercial television, not local news, pays the
bills.
What decision would you make?
Why?
How much should revenue loss
affect how a story is covered?
11:10 a.m. -- Eric Harris arrives alone at the
student parking lot at Columbine High School and parks his 1986 gray Honda
Civic. Dylan Klebold arrives minutes later, parking his 1982 black BMW.
11:14 a.m. -- Harris and Klebold walk into the school
cafeteria with duffel bags carrying two 20-pound propane tanks timed to go off
at 11:17 a.m. This is the time the two think the cafeteria will be most packed.
They go back to their cars to wait for the explosion.
11:19 a.m. -- The first 911 call comes in from a
citizen who heard an explosion three miles southwest of the school. Harris and
Klebold had planted pipe bombs there to divert law enforcement. At the same
time, the first gun shots are fired by Harris and Klebold, who have gone back
into the school and are standing at the top of school steps wearing black
trench coats. Students are shot randomly. Some, like Daniel Rohrbough, are
killed instantly at close range.
11:22 a.m. – A school custodian hits the record
button on the VCR in the cafeteria and calls the police resource officer
assigned to the school, who is out for lunch.
11:23 a.m. – The first 911 call from a
Columbine student reporting a girl possibly paralyzed by gunshot in the south
parking lot.
11:25 a.m. -- Jefferson County Sheriff’s
Department sends out a dispatch over the police scanner: “Attention south
units. Possible shots fired at Columbine High School, 6201 S. Pierce, possibly
in the south lower lot towards the east end. One female is down.” This
dispatch is heard over several newsroom scanners.
11:27 a.m. -- Deputy Neil Gardner, the resource
officer, arrives with lights flashing and exchanges gunfire with Harris.
Gardner is wounded and radios for help. More officers arrive. Dispatch says
possible hand-grenades have been detonated.
11:29 to 11:36 a.m. -- Harris and Klebold have moved
to the library and are shooting at students inside as well as out the window at
law enforcement officers and fleeing students. In seven minutes, 10 people are
killed and 12 more injured; 34 escape injury.
11:36 a.m. to 11:44 a.m. -- The two go into the
hallway toward the science area. They shoot into empty rooms. A report made a year after the tragedy
says that at this time, “Witnesses say the gunmen do not appear to be
overly intent on gaining access to any of the rooms. The gunman easily could
have shot the locks on the doors or through the windows into the classrooms,
but they do not. Their behavior now seems directionless.”
11:46 a.m. – The video shows the gunmen are in
the cafeteria for about 2 minutes.
11:47 a.m. -- Denver’s KMGH-TV announced
confirmed gunshots fired at Columbine High School during its late-morning news
program.
11:56 a.m. -- Klebold and Harris, after shooting into
the school office, the ceiling and at art in the hallway, move back to the
cafeteria. Klebold is holding the TEC 9. Shots are fired and video shows the
pair surveying the damage in the cafeteria.
12:06 p.m. -- The first SWAT team, hiding behind a
fire truck, approaches the school. Television news coverage broadcasts the
team’s movements.
12:08 p.m. --
After firing the last shot at police from the library window, Harris and
Klebold use their 9-mm semi-automatic weapons to kill themselves.
12:20 p.m. -- A student interviewed on television
says the gunmen shot his friend. He says he recognizes the shooters as
Columbine students but doesn’t know their names.
12:28 p.m. -- Local TV and radio stations broadcast a
hotline number for parents of Columbine students.
12:41 p.m. -- News broadcasts ask students who have
escaped from the school to call the sheriff’s office or 911. The phones
at the sheriff’s are instantly jammed.
1:22 p.m. -- SWAT teams continue search and rescue
inside the building.
1:44 p.m. -- Three males dressed in black clothing
are detained by police in a field near the school. TV cameras catch this live,
but no one knows what’s happening. The images raise questions about
whether these three are involved. Later, it’s learned they are not.
2:19 p.m. -- A parent waiting tensely at a nearby
elementary school, which is set up for reunions, is taken to a hospital because
of chest pains.
2:33 p.m. -- President Clinton talks to the country
on national television about the Columbine shootings.
2:30 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. -- Police learn the two
gunmen are dead, according to Steve Davis of Jefferson County’s Sheriff
Department. But they don’t tell the press or the public.
2:38 p.m. -- Student Patrick Ireland, standing in the
library window, is slipping in and out of consciousness due to bullet wounds.
Police rescue him.
2:47 p.m. -- A SWAT team rescues about 60 students
from the science area. KUSA videos this.
3:12 to 3:17 p.m. -- Fifty more students are evacuated.
4:04 p.m. -- Jefferson County sheriff’s
spokesman Steve Davis holds a press conference with Sheriff John Stone. They
announce fatalities but give no names. Stone says, “At least 25 are
dead.” He’s wrong.
4:45 p.m. -- SWAT teams finish searching the 250,000-square
foot school. The deceased inside the school are pronounced dead by a doctor.
[1] “Record News Interest in Littleton Shooting,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, April 26, 1999.