Murder in Boston (24 page)

While the
People Are Talking
show dealt mainly with the mechanics of the Stuart case coverage, a soon-to-follow special on WCVB-TV, the ABC affiliate, emphasized policy. Produced by a television division of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism called Media and Society, the program was taped in Boston on January 17, the day after the
People Are Talking
segment was aired, but it was not shown until January 25. Entitled “The Boston Hoax,” the program was literally a round table debate on how the media had performed up until then. The host for the program was Fred Friendly, former president of
CBS News
and currently professor emeritus at Columbia.

The show had a large and varied panel, which was both its blessing and its curse. For the first time on the air, the people who made the decisions about the Stuart coverage at the opposing Boston newspapers sat at the same table: Greg Moore, an assistant managing editor at the
Globe
, and Kenneth Chandler, the editor of the
Herald
. Other news-people on the show were Emily Rooney, news director at WCVB; one of her reporters, David Ropeik; and Charles Austin, a reporter at WBZ-TV, who also had been on the
People Are Talking
program. The rest of the group was diverse. There was Bill Kovach, former Washington bureau chief for
The New York Times
, former editor of the
Atlanta Constitution
, and currently curator of the Nieman Fellowship program at Harvard; Dianne Wilkerson, an attorney for the Boston chapter of the NAACP; District Attorney Newman Flanagan; and Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School (which is only a few blocks from where the October 23 drama was played out). Poussaint specializes in race relations and is a regular on the talk show circuit.

The idea for the panel was a good one; in theory it provided a venue for examination of a case that, as Friendly said, was so extraordinary that it would never have been accepted by a panel if it had been presented as hypothetical. In practice, however, the panel failed in its objective because the group was too large and too many people had their own agendas. Poussaint and Wilkerson wanted to promote the case as an example of how blacks are discriminated against in news coverage, as well as how editors and news directors use crime coverage to perpetuate stereotypes of blacks as law violators. Flanagan wanted to cover his back and take his shots at the newspapers. Kovach wanted to talk about media responsibility in the general sense, particularly how virtually all organizations are doing a poor job of covering the inner cities. And the editors, reporters, and news director wanted to explain and defend their coverage.

A good bit of the early part of the show—too much, in fact—was taken up with a discussion of the
Herald
’s decision to print on its front page a graphic photograph taken on the night of the shooting. The picture, which was later printed in
Time
magazine without the charge of yellow journalism leveled at the
Herald
’s Chandler, showed Chuck and Carol before they were extricated from their car. Taken from the front of the car through the windshield, it offered a full-face view of Carol slumped on her seat, her chin on her chest and her mouth sagging open. Chuck was shown rigid in pain, his shirt ripped away with his chest and stomach exposed. Both Moore and Rooney said their organizations had access to the picture and declined to use it because they thought it violated the victims’ privacy. When asked why he’d made the decision to use the picture, Chandler said simply, “We’re not in the business of suppressing news.”

Wilkerson took a somewhat baffling position. She said she abhorred the picture so much that she still had not forced herself to take a good look at it. But even while castigating Chandler for using the photo, she claimed that the
Herald
, because of its racial bias, would never have used a similar picture of black crime victims.

Poussaint had a one-track argument: that the coverage given the Stuart shooting reflected the racism inherent in the country’s news organizations. Would the same interest have been shown in the story if the victims had been black? Probably not, he concluded, bolstering his argument that it is an accepted truism that a white life is more valuable than a black life. This also was a somewhat bewildering position to take in this case because Moore, who directed the Stuart coverage for the
Globe
, is black, as is WBZ’s Charles Austin.

Flanagan was not as interested in theory as he was in specifics. Wearing his characteristic outrageous tie, this time a neon blue number with an ostentatious design that looked like a palm tree rooted in a sandbar, Flanagan contended in a heavy New England accent that news organizations are driven by one objective: selling newspapers and advertising; therefore the more they can hype a story, the better it is for business. This is a common accusation made by those with little understanding of how a newsroom operates. Although the
Herald
relies heavily on newsstand sales, its future is not determined by the appeal of a single issue, nor will its solvency be determined by whether it prints or does not print a specific photograph. Although Flanagan and other critics are correct when they say that the aim of a newspaper or a television station is to make money, he and the other critics are dead wrong when they say that the issue is uppermost in the minds of those who make the everyday news decisions. Line editors, news directors, and reporters are too wrapped up in the technicalities of covering events to give more than a passing thought to the economic realities of the industry. That is what publishers and owners are for. In this case, the workaday journalists were too concerned with the rapidly changing dynamics of the Stuart story to consider its impact on the cash flow.

Many critics seem to think that the need to make a profit is the engine that drives a news operation. In reality, it is the opposite: it is the integrity of the news-gathering force that drives the economics. A wise (and financially successful) publisher or owner is a salesman for the product delivered by his news crew rather than the other way around. A rough analogy, in Flanagan’s context, would be to accuse the district attorney’s office of drumming up crimes so the staff could perpetuate their jobs.

The other point Flanagan wanted to make was to claim unequivocally that no one on his staff had been the source for leaks about developments in the Stuart case. He did
not
say, and neither did anyone on the panel call him on it, that his office had not cooperated by releasing information that it could easily have disseminated without damaging its legal position should the issue later get into court.

Chapter 22

Newspaper analysis of media coverage in the Stuart case assumed a completely different format. While the electronic media lends itself toward panels and group discussions, newspaper analysis is performed virtually exclusively by a single person, most often by someone who has not been directly involved in the issue being analyzed.

Perhaps the first such article examining the print media’s role appeared on January 8, only a little more than seventy-two hours after Chuck’s body was recovered from the Mystic River. Intriguingly, the article was printed not in a Boston publication, but in
The Washington Post
. The author, Christopher B. Daly, a former Associated Press staffer in Boston, dealt more with the newspapers’ defense of their actions than with an interpretation of the coverage. Still, it was fascinating on several counts.

For one thing, Daly made an early and direct connection between the Stuart case and the Tawana Brawley case in upstate New York, even if it was just a passing reference. What Daly was able to do, however, was get immediately to the top people at the
Globe
and the
Herald
, which was not an inconsiderable accomplishment considering that at the time he wrote the article the story was still developing.
Globe
editor John Driscoll, sounding more than a little defensive, especially so early in the evolution of the story, claimed his reporters’ coverage had been “accurate, thorough, fair, and consistent.” Furthermore, he added, the
Globe
’s stories had been based on “official statements and credible sources.”

Either Driscoll had not spent much time in the newsroom in those early days, or he did not want to admit to a writer for an out-of-town newspaper that his newspaper had tended a tad toward the hysterical. As far as “official statements” go, the only official statement alluded to in the
Globe
in the January 5–8 period is the one from Flanagan that said Willie Bennett was no longer a suspect. By “credible sources,” he had to mean Matthew’s lawyer, John Perenyi, who was the only source of consequence, except for Flanagan, Bennett’s lawyer, and the civil rights leaders, whose names appeared. Unless, of course, he was including columnist Mike Barnicle as well, the writer whose information in a front-page personal-opinion column on January 7 also turned up in the lead story of the day, which boasted three bylines: Kevin Cullen, Anthony Flint,
and
Mike Barnicle. Neither did Driscoll mention the January 5 banner headline that proclaimed Chuck both a suicide and a wife killer.

At the
Herald
, editor Kenneth Chandler denied that his reporters had been taken in by Chuck’s original story. When his people took their suspicions to police and prosecutors, Chandler said, they were rebuffed, he also said that Matthew decided to go to authorities only after reading in the newspapers that Chuck had blamed an innocent man. “I don’t think the media has anything to be ashamed of,” he told Daly.

The second out-of-towner to weigh in was Alex S. Jones of
The New York Times
. His lengthy article, which appeared on January 14, seemed to be half news story and half opinion, even though it was not labeled analysis and did not appear on the op-ed page. In the news portion of the story, Jones talked to most of the people whom Daly had interviewed or who would soon be on the Columbia University special or WBZ’s
People Are Talking:
the
Globe
’s Driscoll, Harvard’s Poussaint and Ellen Hume, and Kovach.

Jones’s story was different in one respect: it called Chuck’s death an
apparent
suicide and carefully said that
the authorities identified him as the likely killer
. This, of course, was in sharp contrast with how the Boston media, except for the
Phoenix
, were characterizing Chuck.

In what appeared to be opinion, Jones noted: “Few of the reports included such usual qualifications as ‘apparently’ or ‘said to be,’ as there seemed to be no reason to think that a man who almost died of a stomach wound would lie.”

But that was in the early stages of the story. Later the media completely changed its pace. Jones wrote: “Since Mr. Stuart’s death, critics say news organizations have gone to the other extreme, spewing a torrent of information about the case based on anonymous sources in what many see as a desperate overcompensation for having been fooled.”

Chuck’s apparent suicide may have made the media rethink its stance and decide to be more aggressive. At that point (although some think it was considerably earlier), relations between the media and authorities cooled to the point of freezing. Jones said: “Stung by criticism that they had not been sufficiently aggressive, Boston’s news organizations shifted to the other extreme, began reporting everything, and were immediately denounced for hindering the investigation.”

In the beginning, Jones pointed out, the Boston media was criticized for not being skeptical enough of authorities, but after Chuck’s death critics jumped on them for not being skeptical enough of their anonymous sources. To emphasize this point, Jones quoted Ellen Hume: “Journalists are supposed to keep cool heads in the midst of the crisis, and I don’t think they’ve done that as they fall over themselves to correct their own behavior.”

These were harsh words, but they were going to get harsher. In three long articles over as many weeks,
Boston Phoenix
media critic Mark Jurkowitz chastised the two Boston dailies as well as some of the other newspapers and magazines that reported on the case. On January 12, beating the
Times
into print, Jurkowitz wrote a day-by-day critique of how the Boston papers reacted to Chuck’s death and the other related events. Overall, he said, the result was chaotic.

“In the days since Chuck’s death turned the Stuart murder story completely on its head, revisionist history has been written at a frantic pace, scapegoating has become the local pastime, and rumors have been flying faster than the Concorde.”

Jurkowitz somewhat gleefully pointed out the obvious errors and even more gleefully swung a few punches at Mike Barnicle. At one point he noted how the columnist had used an unnamed source to break the news that Chuck had tried to kill his wife earlier. This leaves “the reader to judge [the report’s] believability depending largely on how he or she feels about Barnicle.” He did not leave much doubt about how
he
felt about Barnicle.