Behind the scenes: Make it even more transparent

I admire the journalists at The Spokesman-Review, in Spokane, Washington. They are doing great work in online video, redesigning their Web site, listening to their young staffers, and practicing transparency.

Now their editor, Steven A. Smith, has posted an account of how and why the newspaper fought to have a horrifying video (of the torture and murder of 9-year-old) shown in open court at the sentencing hearing of the child’s confessed killer.

Smith’s blog post carries all the weight of what makes journalism meaningful — the fact that responsible journalists do think long and hard about what they do, and about what is right to do. His post makes it clear that journalists do not just beg for any and all shocking material to be thrown out in the open, but rather, they ask for some material to be made public on the principle that hiding the truth from the public is a dangerous precedent.

But he doesn’t make it clear enough.

I was touched by the emotion in his post. Smith convincingly conveys how reading the reports about the hearing affected him and others.

Testimony over the last nine days has produced in escalating detail a picture of Duncan’s crime that truly cannot be described. In 36 years in the business, I’ve never seen anything like it. … Because of the amazing work of SR reporter Betsy Russell, in combination with the Twitter reporting of Meghan Cuniff from a separate media room, outsiders were given a written glimpse, and just a glimpse, of the video’s contents. We were conservative in what we reported, posted and sent over Twitter. And still it was enough to nauseate even the most hardened journalists in our newsroom.

But he’s just not as clear when he writes:

My newspaper, joined by more than a dozen media outlets in the region, fought those motions on grounds that closing the courtroom would deprive citizens of the knowledge they would need to weigh the appropriateness of the final verdict.

Sure, the language is plain enough. And all you journalists understand it down in your bones — it’s a death penalty decision. Maybe the details of this case are too awful, but in general we don’t want a death sentence decided in secret, behind locked doors.

The case of the Dale Earnhardt autopsy photos came to mind. Not a death penalty case, but a case in which compassion toward the family of the NASCAR driver made the argument for suppressing something that is true, something that constitutes evidence. In that sense, it’s the same as the Joseph Duncan video case, because the argument for not showing the video is based on compassion toward the surviving family members.

The Orlando Sentinel wanted to show the Earnhardt photos to medical experts, who would discuss the cause of death. There were questions about the restraint system in the race car in which Earnhardt crashed.

But in the public discussion of the case, most of the talk centered on photos, photos, photos (and regular people thought, “What if that was my father, brother, son? I wouldn’t want his death photos all over the Internet!”) — and the questions about the investigation, and a newspaper wanting to pursue the truth about race car safety, were lost. Obscured.

I think Smith unintentionally allowed the same thing to happen in his blog post.

When we step out to explain to the public — or rather, when we pull back the curtain and show them the engine, the gears and pistons, of how journalism works, we need to remember that we have our own jargon, our own shortcuts and slang — our own odd culture. The public wasn’t brought up in our culture, and things that are as clear as clean window glass to us can be much murkier to almost everyone else.

Smith wrote a great and moving blog post, but he talked too much about the horror of the crime. The horror of the crime is exactly why people think the Duncan video should not have been shown!

The horror of imagining autopsy photos of your own husband or father — that’s why people thought the Earnhardt photos should be suppressed, locked up, not released to a (gasp!) newspaper.

We need to do a better job of explaining why the public needs journalism and journalists.

Journalists who will watch the horrible video and explain, with restraint, why a jury decided on a death sentence, or otherwise. Journalists who will examine the grisly photos, searching for clues. Journalists who will search the database of driver’s licenses for, say, sex offenders who today drive school buses.

We need to communicate better with people who are not us. That means putting the end result up front and keeping it there — the safety systems of race cars, not the photos — and how the decision is made to sentence a man to die, not the content of a video.