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October 1998
Privacy: CNN vs. MSNBC
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By
What happens when A family's right to privacy conflicts with
the public's right to know? It may depend on which network you're watching.
On July 24, U.S. Capitol police detective John Gibson and officer Jacob
Chestnut were fatally shot when a gunman opened fire in the U.S. Capitol.
Both CNN and MSNBC learned of the shooting before Chestnut's family did, but
the two news networks handled the information differently.
Even before CNN was sure of Chestnut's identity, anchor Bernard Shaw hastened
to explain that they had a moral obligation not to reveal it. Interrupting
correspondent Brooks Jackson, Shaw announced that "apparently one of the
wounded officers' family has not been told...and, because of that, it would
be obscene for us to be reporting the man's name with his wife and children
and relatives not knowing that he has been injured." Later in the same
broadcast, Shaw reiterated CNN's position: "We had to back off reporting one
name we had because we...had learned that the officer's family had not been
notified. So obviously, out of decency, we would not report that name."
Meanwhile, on MSNBC, NBC's Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, went on the
air during Tom Brokaw's "NBC News Special Report" to announce that "a source
close to the Capitol Police" had called him to describe what had occurred.
Russert relayed the source's description, complete with the identity of both
officers. Moments later, as if to drive home the point that information
trumps privacy concerns, NBC cut to live footage of a patient being unloaded
from a medical helicopter. The cameras followed the patient and paramedics
into the hospital emergency room, while Brokaw narrated: "This is the medevac
helicopter arriving at the hospital. We believe that one of those gurneys
contains one of the officers that was shot, either Officer Gibson or Officer
Chestnut...we're looking at live pictures from the hospital."
But it appears that NBC had chased the wrong ambulance. Only one shooting
victim had been airlifted from the Capitol; NBC's footage showed an officer
being loaded onto a blue-and-white U.S. Park Police helicopter on Capitol
Hill; the patient at the hospital, meanwhile, was unloaded from a
red-and-white helicopter. Further suspicions were aroused in the ER: as the
cameras turned away from hospital staffers treating a patient, a barely
audible off-camera voice could be heard saying "that last transport was not a
shooting victim. That was..." before the feed abruptly cut out. "We've lost
that now," said Brokaw. "They were right in the emergency room."
Through NBC spokeswoman Barbara Levin, Tim Russert, Tom Brokaw, and Beth
O'Connell, the network's executive producer of specials, all declined to
comment. Through Steve Haworth, CNN's vice-president of public relations,
news division, Shaw also declined to comment.
Haworth, however, is less reticent. He doesn't characterize MSNBC's decision
as indecent or obscene, but says he believes it is "widespread journalistic
practice" to withhold the names of victims until their families are told.
Haworth will not comment specifically on NBC's decision to bring cameras into
the emergency room. "It seems to me fairly self-evident that there are times
when a viewer or reader's right to know must be tempered with other mores,"
he says. In the case of the Capitol shooting, "you weigh the public's right
to know against the right of the family to have some amount of privacy."
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