Tales of Journalism Frozen in the Past

by Amy Z. Quinn

I recently began teaching a college journalism class on media ethics, and yes, you may insert your own "Hey, isn't that an oxymoron?" joke here. As part of their homework last week, I asked the undergrads to pick a story from the recent news which they felt raised some kind of ethical question for the reporter or photographer involved.

Examples aren't terribly hard to find, but last week had a couple of doozies. One was Minnesota sports columnist Larry Fitzgerald Sr. sitting in the press box in Tampa covering a Super Bowl in which his son, Larry Jr., was playing. I admire the character it took for Larry Sr. to remain planted in his chair like a good, impartial journalist while his son streaked down the field for the Arizona Cardinals. But to me, the more genuine move would have been to attend the game as a spectator and revel in the moment as a proud parent, and maybe write about it from that perspective, rather than choosing to put himself in the position of having to prove an unnecessary point. I'm sure Mr. Fitzgerald could have scored a ticket.

But the big gimme last week came out of Detroit. Charlie LeDuff, a reporter for the Detroit News, got a tip about a dead body in an abandoned building a few blocks from his office, and went to investigate. He found the report was true: The body of a man, mostly submerged in a frozen pond that had formed in the building's basement, had been there for who-knows-how-long. Yet even the macabre sight of a pair of legs sticking up out of a block of ice hadn't been enough to motivate any of the homeless men or "urban explorers" who had seen it to notify police. "Frozen in Indifference," the headline screamed, accompanied by a haunting photo by the paper's Max Ortiz.

The body was later identified as a 56-year-old man who worked as a handyman and had sheltered in the building. The story and photo made their way around the Internet, bouncing from Facebook to Twitter and back again, accompanied by the expected questions about what the whole situation says not just about Detroit, but about society, humanity and the value we place on one another's lives.

Certainly the whole situation is sickening. But because of the way the story was written, I was also reminded of how many newspaper journalists are frozen in an increasingly outdated mentality in which it's essential to remain above and apart from the news.

LeDuff's piece is peppered with phrases designed to show us that as a journalist he was just there to see, but isn't really involved in what's happening in that warehouse: How "this reporter" sees the body, how the sole of one shoe was worn, the color of the guy's socks. "A series of events over the past few, frigid days," he wrote, "causes one to wonder how cold the collective heart has grown."

I asked LeDuff if it had been his decision to write it that way, and he said it was — for one thing, he said, he's a reporter, not a columnist, who learned newspapering at The New York Times, the oldest of the old schools. Now, his job is to "tell the truth about Detroit." It's not about me, he told me, it's about the dead guy.

But it's not some anonymous "one" who's wondering how cold the collective heart has grown, not some unknown symbol of a person. It's LeDuff who rightly wonders what the city has come to.

When we discussed the story in class Monday night, the students wondered, as I had, how it all went down when LeDuff saw, and reported, the body. In the story, LeDuff pointedly asks three different people if they'd called the police and notes how they hadn't; the fact that life went on around the body is part of what makes it all so outrageous and sad. But what did he do? The story just says "a discreet call was placed to a police officer."

LeDuff told me he actually made four "discreet" phone calls to cops he knew while standing at the frozen man's feet, and eventually headed back to his office, where he called 911. He said he figured calling his police sources might actually get quicker action in a city where 911 isn't known for its speed and responsiveness.

Fair enough. But LeDuff was inside that story as surely as the dead man, as surely as Larry Fitzgerald was part of his son's Super Bowl. Why does neither feel comfortable acknowledging it? If we're teaching future journalists about the importance of transparency in our work, why aren't we actually writing that way?

Citizen Mom blogs at www.citizenmom.net.