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911 Tapes

The Post and Courier has gone to the mat in order to secure 911 tapes that are associated with major crimes and accidents. The authorities are often reluctant to produce them even though information on them can be key to understanding what happened.

One reader asked a good question. It's one thing to expect to to to Charleston.net and hear a 911 call about a West Ashley fire in which nine firefighters died. It's another thing to hear a caller's tearful plea for help in a domestic dispute or another person's description of his chest pains. The reader feared a reckless use of 911 tapes might be harmful and invasive to ordinary citizens.

It is a situation similar to situations reporters face every day. The paper does not publish the names of rape victims unless they approve it, for example. The use of 911 tapes on newspaper websites will be a good test. I hope those making decisions about posting the tapes will consider whether the tapes are helpful or harmful and whether they are of a public or private nature.

When to stop

The woman who called me was clearly exasperated. "PLEASE. PLEASE STOP!"

It was a headline in today's paper that pushed her over the edge. "'Please tell me my husband is OK' Wife of I-526 crash victim shattered by loss of 'soul mate.'"

"Of course, she was shattered! What else would she be?! PLEASE, PLEASE."

When I called her to talk about it, she admitted she had not read the story. She had found the headline too disgusting. I explained that the story took readers beyond the reports of which car did what and how police are investigating. It introduced readers to one of the men who was killed -- a man with a wife and a job and some skills all his own. I explained that his widow was glad to let people know that he was not just a statistic.

This particular reader called back five minutes later. She read the article, and she understood. Several other readers have posted comments on the story as it appears on Charleston.net. They were touched by the story.

It is indeed no surprise that the woman was devastated. But the story, in my opinion, added a sense of humanity to a grim story.

Sensitivity

Two readers with tender hearts wrote me today to say that The Post and Courier has been insensitive and intrusive by publishing photos of families grieving the loss of firefighters who perished Monday night. I'm familiar with tender hearts. I'm a pushover.

This is a tough issue, however. One of the biggest elements of this huge tragedy is the depth and breadth of grief that it has left in its wake. Families are grieving. Friends are grieving. The firefighting community nationally and locally is grieving. The Charleston community is grieving. The paper should be covering that very important aspect of the story, and photos are one way to do so.

Having said that, it is important to show respect and to recognize that there should be limits to what is published. In the case of the grieving Drayton family on 1A Wednesday, the family members were aware of the photo and helped staff members get the right identifications for those in the picture. Today, there was a poignant photo of family and friends of Louis Mulkey -- a photo that drew tears from me. Again, the family knew the paper was there and taking photographs.

Editors, in evaluating photos for today's photo, opted to put a less devastating one on 1A. They opted for a photo of women taking gifts and food to a fire station. However, I would expect more disturbing photos will appear in coming days as the memorial service takes place and as individual funerals are held.

This is a devastating story. The paper's aim is to tell that story to readers within the boundaries of good taste.

Obits and ads

Death is a sensitive thing for most people. Some people can't even say someone died. Instead they say he "passed away."

Death is also a key subject for many newspaper readers. Some readers read the front page first. Some read the Sports page first. Some go straight to the comics. But surveys show that one of the pages at the top of readers' lists is the obituary page.

A reader this week wrote a nice letter in which he said that it was "tacky" for the paper to place advertisements for cars or dentures on the obituary page. It is almost as if such advertisements cheapen the gravity of the news about area deaths.

I'm in this business, so I am accustomed to ads being adjacent to news stories. If a heartwarming story about a high school student recovering from an accident appears alongside an ad for home repairs, I am unfazed. I don't have trouble distinguishing between ads and news copy.

Having said that, I understand that death is a sensitive thing. The newspaper's policy is to place ads on obituary pages only at the request of advertisers. Usually the advertisers who ask to be on that page are those who have a product or service that they believe will be of interest to older readers -- dentures, hearing aids, cremations and funeral chapels.

Cropped photos

Some things are subjective --  like cropping photos.

Recently, a newspaper reader objected to the way The Post and Courier crops photos -- often chopping off the top of someone's head in a portrait shot or cutting off a tennis racket or a baseball bat in sports shots.

I know when I wrote a news column and my photo was used regularly on 1B, the top of my head was on the cutting room floor somewhere.

What do you think? If you go to www.Charleston.net today, you'll see two examples -- shots of the candidates for mayor of North Charleston. Do you think it is effective to have the faces cropped tight as shown? Or would you prefer to see the whole head?

Molly Ivins

Columnist Molly Ivins died Wednesday after a long struggle with cancer.

Those people who read only The Post and Courier might not have gotten a taste of her sharp wit and liberal leanings. Her columns did not appear on the op-ed pages here.

I, for one, found her writing delightful -- insightful, bold and funny. I would think that even people who lean to the right where she leaned to the left might agree that she could turn a phrase and draw a laugh.

The Associated Press, in a story noting her death, highlighted some of the quips she wrote about politicians on different sides of the aisle. I hope you enjoy them:

— "If you think his daddy had trouble with 'the vision thing,' wait'll you meet this one," Ivins on George W. Bush in "The Progressive," June 1999.

— "If left to my own devices, I'd spend all my time pointing out that he's weaker than bus-station chili," on Bill Clinton, from the introduction to You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You

—"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?", in a 2002 column about a California political race.

— "The poor man who is currently our president has reached such a point of befuddlement that he thinks stem cell research is the same as taking human lives, but that 40,000 dead Iraqi civilians are progress toward democracy," from a July 2006 column urging commentator Bill Moyers to run for president.

— "Many people did not care for Pat Buchanan's speech; it probably sounded better in the original German," Ivins in September 1992, commenting on the one-time presidential hopeful's speech to the Republican National Convention.

— "I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults," from a March 1992 column.

— "I love Texas, but it is a nasty old rawhide mother in the way it bears down on the people who have the fewest defenses," Ivins wrote in September 2002.

— "....our very own dreaded Legislature is almost upon us. Jan. 9 and they'll all be here, leaving many a village without its idiot," from a December 2000 column.

Divorce news

Saturday, The Post and Courier published on 1B a story about two former political rivals on opposite sides of divorce proceedings. Lawyer Gedney Howe and his wife are on the way to divorce. Mrs. Howe chose as her lawyer Larry Richter, a longtime political enemy of her husband.

The story's headline suggested this was about the political past playing a role in the present divorce. But to some readers, the story came across as gossip. Since when did The Post and Courier report on divorces? And, while the story did offer only minimal information about the divorce filings, some readers suggested that the story was intended to be sexy. Howe and Richter, while both are prominent lawyers, are no longer in politics.

I admit to having misgivings about the story. What do you think?

Execution images

Before Saddam Hussein was executed, editors at the paper had a spirited discussion about what they would do if someone took photos of him hanging from a noose. Would the paper publish them? If so, where?

There was no concensus. Here's a simplified recap of the sides:

A: Run the pictures and run 'em big. On the front page. This is a news event of tremendous interest internationally and especially in the United States which is at war in Iraq. Readers have a right to see that Saddam actually was hanged. If readers find it distasteful, that's regrettable. The news is often distasteful. We don't do something like this often, but this is a time we should.

B: Use some restraint. What good does it do to upset readers with an unnecessarily gruesome photo? The words say it all. If we publish a photo of him swinging, his eyes bulging, we are condoning such acts. We can't sanitize the news, but we don't need to be insensitive either.

C: If you have to use a photo of Hussein hanging, use it inside the paper and publish a heads-up on the front page so readers can choose whether or not they want to look.

D: Look for pictures that tell the story without sickening readers. Show Hussein standing with his head in the noose. Readers know what happens next. They aren't stupid.

The conversation was moot because the photos that came did not show Hussein being hanged. The Post and Courier did indeed use photos showing him before the execution, standing with a noose around his neck. They told the story dramatically but were not likely considered over the top.

What about you? How many of you rushed to the internet to see footage of Hussein swinging? Would you have published such a photo on the front page? Would you have put it on a newspaper's website?

Elsa

Amish photos

Some newspapers across the country are getting complaints from readers. The problem? They published photos of Amish people following the tragic shooting story. Some have complained that newspapers intruded on people's personal grieving. Others have complained because many Amish people do not like to be photographed because of their faith.

The Post and Courier has published several wire photographs in connection with the story. None was an up-close photo of an Amish person. Instead, they showed scenes like a family crossing a field in the distance and a buggy going to a funeral. The paper here has received no complaints.

Not all Amish people have the same sensitibilities about photographs. Some do not allow their photos to be taken at all. Some allow them from a distance or from behind. Others allow photos to be used without their names.

When The Post and Courier decided to use photos to accompany the shooting stories, they did so with the understanding that the photographers had found out these Amish people's rules and shown them appropriate respect.

In addition, even the strictest Amish rules might look different in such an extreme situation. For example, the Amish lead simple lives -- not lives where they are wont to receive extraordinary gifts. One Amish man was quoted as saying his people could probably handle the financial end of the tragedy on their own, "yet is not right to stop people from the blessing of giving or receiving a gift ... It would be unChristlike for us to stop this."

This was an unusual (and unusually devastating) situation.

Comic humor

I could use your feedback about today's Bizarro cartoon. It is entitled "Future challenges of the funeral industry," and it shows a funeral home employee saying "I worked on him all night, but I could NOT get that smirk off his face."

A reader contacted me to say it was "tasteless and inappropriate." He said the paper should have rejected the cartoon. So far, he is the only person to complain.

In this case, the Features staff did discuss the panel and decided it was not inappropriate. What is amusing to one person is often far from amusing to another. Some people are not amused by Andy Capp's excessive drinking. Others think Cathy's obsession with her appearance is demeaning to women. Let's face it, someone could be offended by any cartoon.

In the past, I have agreed with editors' decisions to remove vulgar words from comic strips. I understand that what is vulgar to some is routine to others, but I agreed with them that the words could be replaced without losing the integrity of the strips.

So does this sound like double-talk? Take out the bad words that might offend, but leave in a cartoon that might offend?

Expletive not deleted

In the context of world crises, a dilemma facing news media this week seems more amusing than anything else. But it is a dilemma nevertheless.

At lunch Monday during the Group of Eight conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, President Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s--- and it's over." Bush did not know a microphone at the table was turned on.

The question was not whether to report the story. It was a seemingly frank exchange between two world powers on a subject of grave importance.

The question was how to report his salty language. The Post and Courier handled it as you see it here. According to USA Today, different media handled it differently: CNN broadcast and posted the unedited video. The New York Times and The Washington Post reported the word in the paper and in Web stories. On CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox News and MSNBC the word was excised in videos and Web stories. USA Today, however, removed the word in stories, but posted the audio clip along with a warning on its Website.

Two schools of thought: One says this word is part of everyday language, like it or not. It's not going to shock many. The other says it was not necessary to use the offensive word to get the information to readers, so why do so?

In the print media, I think it worked just fine using "s---." What about you?

Comics

More on the conversation about what is appropriate language for comic strips, this time from a cartoonist's perspective.

The conversation began here with Sunday's Doonesbury using a word considered vulgar. The Post and Courier management said the word should have been changed. The word, which means the same as "the F word" according to dictionaries, apparently does not offend some readers. They hear that word and others similar to it so frequently that they consider it acceptable.

Recently, "Get Fuzzy" cartoonist Darby Conley was quoted  by CNN.com as suggesting that newspapers compromise comic strips in an effort to make them palatable to all audiences. "Some newspapers are nervous about taking on edgier strips."

Conley says he has received complaints from papers about using the word "butt" in his strip, "but then you turn on 'South Park,' and you go, what? It's a really weird situation," he says.

"Newspapers are, in my guess, in 1959 in terms of morality," he says. "They'd rather have a dead comics page than have people writing in."

I agree that newspapers hold on to tired old comics to keep their older readers happy and probably lose an opportunity to appeal to younger readers. But to get back to the "F word" substitute: Would it really make an edgy comic strip so much less edgy if everything stayed the same except that word? 

Censorship

On Sunday, a character in a Doonesbury comic strip was drawn using a vulgar word. It slipped through the filters here at The Post and Courier, and the managing editor was not happy about it. He felt that the company which supplies the Sunday comics sections to the paper should have alerted him ahead of time so he could make a decision about how to handle it. He could have held the strip and used another one. Or, more likely, he could have replaced the unacceptable word with something less offensive.

I explained this to readers after getting a complaint that the word should not have appeared. One reader, upon reading my explanation, charged The Post and Courier with supporting censorship. He felt it was his right to read Doonesbury just the way Garry Trudeau intended it to be read.

Newspapers edit copy. They publish some photos and not others. They publish some comic strips and not others. They should take very seriously their mission of providing the public with information they need to know. I do not consider it censorship to remove a vulgar word from a comic strip.

Anniversaries

A local nonprofit was making plans to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its founding. The staff was hoping for lots of attention from the media. My advice to them was to take a different approach. Instead of focusing on "30 years," focus on the organization's significant accomplishments.

Birthdays and anniversaries are really important to young children and newlyweds, but not so important across the board. The first anniversary of Hurricane Hugo was, of course, an appropriate time to revisit the storm and assess the area's recovery. The fifth anniversary was good for the same reasons. The 13th? Not really.

Recently, the news media has noted the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake, the 11th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the 400th anniversary of America's first permanent English settlement, the seventh anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School, and the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth.

All of those events are an important part of our history. But, in my opinion, it is not necessary to write news stories on every important event's anniversary. The 11th anniversary of the bombing in Oklahoma City? I'd say it wasn't necessary to note. The seventh anniversary of the attack at Columbine High School? It was worth noting because authorities uncovered a plot to mimic the attack on that day.

For the most part, I think the media should stick to the major anniversaries -- 25 years, 100 years, 150 years. We need to report what is happening today, not what happened 30 years ago.
 

Quote or No Quote

It wasn't just because it was Easter.

Tennis star Nadia Petrova's statement to The Post and Courier Sunday after beating Patty Schnyder to win the Family Circle Cup in Charleston would have offended some readers on any day.

Asked about the crowd's reaction to her, she said, "I heard a lot of time 'Patty!' and I was quite feeling disappointed, thinking, 'Jesus Christ, I'm almost dying here and they're rooting for her.'"

Was it necessary to use the full quote?

Here's why some would say "yes":

-- The newspaper was simply reporting what a major sports figure said.
-- That’s how our culture talks, and it is the responsibility of the paper to reflect what culture is like, not to pretty it up.
-- Perhaps Petrova was speaking prayerfully, not flippantly.

Here’s why some, including me, would say not to use the full quote:
--  It is appropriate to be sensitive to people's religious beliefs. Remember the Danish cartoons?
--  It doesn't add much to the story.
--  News media regularly paraphrase sports figures -- and others --  whose language is offensive.
--  Since there could be a question about Petrova’s tone or intent, eliminate the question. Paraphrase.