By David Hiltbrand, The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA - Tarot cards, garbled messages left in fake accents, a tree stump packed off in a U-Haul -- the sniper story had so many bizarre twists that at times it resembled an episode of “Twin Peaks.”
The one constant -- through three weeks of frayed nerves and blind alleys -- was the underlying tension between the media and the police over who controlled the flow of information. Criticism was still flying even after arrests were made.
“Here’s what my desk was fuming about today,” Jerry Nachman, MSNBC’s executive editor and on-air commentator, said Thursday. “The license plate (on John Allen Muhammad’s car) was never released by the authorities. It was picked up by the press from the police scanners and, in a lightning-short time, led to a citizen spotting the vehicle and pointing the police to it.”
In the tent village hastily erected outside police headquarters in Montgomery County, Md., the media corps bridled at the task force’s efforts to keep a lid on developments and at Chief Charles Moose’s determination to talk through them rather than to them.
“The media had information the police did not want them to broadcast, and the police had information they wanted broadcast in a very precise, controlled way,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, and author of” “The Press Effect. “Both those situations make the press very nervous.”
The insatiable 24-hour news channels -- MSNBC, Fox News and CNN -- chafed at the restrictions.
“It turned into an intellectual and emotional taffy pull between the press and this particular police chief,” Nachman said. “For all the strategic reasons he may have felt justified in being elusive, it was in variance with the way progressive law enforcement officials operate in America.”
Independent media analysts also initially questioned the information embargo.
“Chief Moose was naive to think he could demand media attention and at the same time dictate the story line,” said Matthew T. Felling, director at the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington. “In a competitive news environment, that’s just not going to happen.
“But when he became aware he would not be able to control the press flow, he started to manipulate it. The press corps had every reason to believe (the police) were fumbling in the dark, but apparently they had a direction they were following the whole time.”
Stonewalled by the task force, print and broadcast reporters cultivated other sources and continued to uncover news. The outlets that were consistently ahead of the pack were the Associated Press, which reported that the sniper had left a note demanding $ 10 million; WUSA, the CBS affiliate in Washington, which broke the discovery of the tarot card; and MSNBC, which revealed the Tacoma, Wash., connection.
By and large, the media did a respectable job of balancing their responsibility to report the news against the possibility of endangering the investigation.
“I didn’t sense a great deal of sensationalism,” said Horace Newcomb, the director of the Peabody Awards program at the University of Georgia.
“It was plain, old good journalism,” said Teya Ryan, executive vice president and general manager of CNN. “This was an extraordinary story that gripped the nation. But it was also a very personal story of mothers and fathers and children fighting to get out of their homes.”
Indeed, the most poignant images from the Beltway were of children sprinting from parents’ cars into school, of people crouching behind their vehicles as they gassed up, as if living in a war zone.
“The fear factor was incredible,” Ryan said. “And the role of the media was to get information out to the public -- as soon as the authorities thought it was appropriate.”
The coverage may have been responsible, but it also was probably excessive. “The intensity of the media has grown so great,” said Brian Gallagher, USA Today’s executive editor, “that the collective din overwhelms people.”
Nowhere was the decibel level higher than at Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, where viewership was up an average of 52 percent over the last three weeks. The all-news channels are like traffic gapers: When something gruesome happens, they cannot look away.
With endless hours to fill, the cable anchors often found themselves treading in speculative waters. The situation, we were constantly reminded, was “delicate,” developments were “fluid,” and theories were “hypothetical.” Was this a news report or a seance?
A parade of experts -- profilers, criminologists, and former FBI agents -- filled the screen, offering all kinds of projections about the sniper’s identity. He might be an al-QaIda operative, we were told, probably a Montgomery County resident, and -- the consensus -- a white loner in his 30s. Imagine our shock when the suspected perpetrator turned out to be not Maryland’s version of “Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, but a pair of peripatetic African Americans.
“Almost all these segments in which you have experts speculating about the mind and motive of the killer are attempts to fill time for ratings,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington. “Whenever we move ahead of the facts into the realm of the hypothetical, we almost always embarrass ourselves.”
The cable outlets make no apology for trotting out the pontification posse.
“Everyone we put on the air,” CNN’s Ryan said, “whether they are criminologists or ballistics experts, are at the top of their game. They know their fields far better than we do.” (The network, however, reportedly tried to recruit actors from CBS’s “CSI to serve as pundits during the sniper coverage.)
“Newspapers are resentful that they can’t cover a story like this anymore without watching television,” MSNBC’s Nachman said.
Bill Shine, the executive producer of Fox News, thinks the criticism results from a faulty perspective.
“The casual viewer may tune in for 10 minutes, check in again while they are cooking dinner, and then not watch again all night,” he said. “When (a newspaper) has an analyst sit down and watch our coverage all day, of course they’ll say there are too many experts.”
The real problem with a story like the hunt for the sniper, which is both sustained and consuming, is that it moves through the news cycle like a tornado, obliterating everything in its path.
“The airwaves were hijacked by a story that was important to a small section of the country,” Jamieson said. “Meanwhile, a great deal of important news -- the upcoming election, Iraq, North Korea -- was displaced. The perspective of the major news outlets should have been, ‘It’s a piece of the news, but it isn’t “the” news.’ ”