Knocking On Death's Door

By Laurence Zuckerman

When serial murderer Ted Bundy was executed last month, Detroit-area editors and news directors followed one of journalism's most unshakable maxims: develop the local angle. In the case of Bundy, the local hook was Caryn Campbell, a 24-year-old nurse from Dearborn, Mich., whom Bundy murdered in Colorado in 1975. But what was second nature to most journalists was yet another horrible reminder for the Campbell family. "Any article or news report about Ted Bundy always included Caryn's name and the fact that 'her nude and frozen body was found in a snowbank,' " wrote her sister, Nancy McDonald, in a letter published in the Detroit News last week. "It's been extremely difficult for us to accept Caryn's loss and the way her body was found, but we, her family, did not need to hear, see and read the same fact for 14 years."

It would have been difficult to do justice to the Bundy story without in some way describing his grisly crimes. But on the day of his execution, did a Detroit TV station really have to rebroadcast file footage of Campbell's 1975 funeral? Last week 250 journalists, health-care professionals and members of the clergy gathered in Manhattan to explore such questions at a conference titled "Death, the Media and the Public: Needs of the Bereaved." Sponsored by the Foundation of Thanatology, a New York City-based organization devoted to studying bereavement, as well as the Dallas Morning News and the Milwaukee Journal, the three-day symposium covered everything from obituaries to the role of "Media as Murderer." "The press has been covering crime and death for centuries," says Texas Christian University journalism professor Tommy Thomason, "but we are just beginning to think about how we cover it."

By most accounts, there is much room for improvement. In a 1985 survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, more than 78% of the people questioned believed the press does not "worry much about hurting people." Almost two-thirds of the respondents agreed that journalists take advantage of victims of circumstance. Perhaps the worst transgressor is the TV camera operator who zooms in on the face of a dead person's relative -- and stays there as the face dissolves in grief. Says Anne Seymour, public affairs director for the National Victim Center in Fort Worth: "Any time there is a yellow line, some journalists in the interest of news will cross over."

When covering death, reporters and editors face a difficult paradox: the best material in a journalistic sense very often turns out to be what is most painful to grieving survivors. News organizations, driven by intense competition, rarely let concern for a victim's privacy get in the way of a scoop. The push for live coverage of late-breaking news has put local TV stations in the uncomfortable position of being able to broadcast word of a person's death before the victim's family has been officially notified.

Several news organizations have responded to public criticism by adopting - new codes of behavior. WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, for example, forbids its reporters to ask victims' relatives how they feel. When the family of a hit- and-run victim asked television reporters to stay away from the funeral last month, WCCO agreed, even though its competitors did not. Rosemary McManus, assistant editor at Long Island's Newsday in New York, says she never sends a reporter to the home of a victim until she is sure the family is aware of the death, and always instructs her reporters to honor a relative's refusal to talk. "It is one of the few situations in journalism where you should take no for an answer," she says. (However, she does advise the reporter to leave a business card in case the person has a change of heart.)

A different set of issues arises when reporters do gain access to victims. Jacqui Banaszynski, a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch, won a Pulitzer Prize last year for a lengthy series about a gay couple dying of AIDS. Privy to the most intimate details of the lives of both the men and their families, Banaszynski had to balance her sense of loyalty to her subjects against her desire to make the series as truthful as possible. "I would not print information so private that it would harm without enhancing," she says.

Reporters who are exposed to death on a regular basis can suffer some of the same psychological effects as grieving survivors. "Even though most reporters don't have a close personal relationship with anyone killed," says Vanderlyn Pine, a sociology professor at the State University of New York, "the grief component is just as serious as ((for)) anyone who does." Banaszynski says the stress from working on her series took a toll on her physical health. Free-lance writer Joe Levine of New York City was haunted by dreams about AIDS after he completed a long profile of a man who was dying of the disease. Such experiences may hold the key to improving coverage, since reporters who have been affected by seeing death close up may become more sensitive to the needs of the bereaved.

But most journalists at last week's conference held out little hope for reforming the way death is covered. "We have a commercial interest in catastrophe," admits Milwaukee Journal editor Sig Gissler. The most realistic changes that can be hoped for, agreed the journalists, are slight improvements in tone and treatment. Said Newsday columnist Sydney Schanberg: "If we see only five seconds instead of 30 seconds of ghoulish film, we've made progress."

With reporting by Leslie Whitaker/New York