Instant Celebrities Are Sometimes Seared by Media Spotlight

Oliver (Bill) Sipple didn’t want any attention.

Yes, he was a hero. He probably saved the President’s life. On Sept. 22, 1975, while attending a San Francisco campaign rally for then-President Gerald Ford, he saw a woman aim a gun at Ford. Sipple--a disabled Vietnam veteran--instinctively knocked the gun from her hands.

The woman, Sara Jane Moore, was sentenced to life in prison. Sipple’s “sentence” was perhaps even worse. In 1989, he died alone, in a run-down apartment, a 47-year-old ex-Marine with a drinking problem. He was still estranged from the family that had not known he was gay until the media told them, a disclosure that he said caused him “great mental anguish, embarrassment and humiliation.”

All Sipple had wanted was to be left alone. He didn’t want to discuss his homosexuality or anything else. But he had performed his heroic deed on the national stage, at a time when personality journalism was just beginning to take off. However unwanted, instant celebrity was inevitable.

The Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Examiner wrote about Sipple’s activities in the San Francisco gay community. Wire services picked up the stories. So did other newspapers--including his hometown Detroit News.

Sipple’s mother never spoke to him again.

Critics have long cited invasion of privacy as one of the greatest shortcomings in news media ethics. In a time of instant celebrityhood, when mainstream media and sensationalist tabloid media alike are competing to be first with every new detail on the latest hero, villain, victim or eccentric, invasion of privacy has become an almost daily occurrence. One need not save the life of the President to suffer it.

For those hit by tragedy, trial-by-media can be especially intrusive--offensive, suffocating and agonizing. The media often turn these people into what Tom Brokaw, anchor for the NBC “Nightly News,” calls “the innocent victims of the press.”

Ellen Levin can still recall in vivid detail the media ordeal she went through six years ago after her daughter Jennifer was choked to death in New York’s Central Park in what became known as “the preppy murder case.”

“The press camped outside our apartment,” Levin says. “They kept a 24-hour watch on our building. Anyone coming and going, even while we were sitting shiva (the Jewish mourning process), was subject to unwanted interviews and cameramen pushing and shoving, especially if it was a relative or close friend of Jennifer’s who was crying.

“We had to take our phone off the hook and change our number three times. The phone rang constantly. Our apartment buzzer rang constantly. The press never allowed us a moment of privacy.”

This kind of invasion of privacy is devastating, Levin says, “because it comes at a point when you’re most vulnerable,” before there’s been enough time to absorb a shattering personal loss.

One tabloid TV show, “A Current Affair,” even broadcast a re-enactment of Jennifer Levin’s encounter with her confessed killer, Robert Chambers, using actors. When Ellen Levin saw the show, she ran out on the terrace of her apartment building, screaming hysterically into the night.

The media echo chamber in New York is louder and more brutal than anywhere in the country, but Linda Biehl in Newport Beach knows just how Levin feels.

When her daughter Amy--a white woman working for racial peace in South Africa--was dragged from her car and beaten and stabbed to death last summer by a mob of black youths, the media descended instantly and en masse on the Biehls’ home.

“We were so surrounded and inundated by the press that it was three weeks before I really got out of my house,” except for a couple of quick trips to the store, Biehl says. “I’ve never been through anything like it. . . . The media were here all the time.”

When three of the suspects in her daughter’s murder were subsequently released by South African authorities, Linda Biehl and her husband were in Washington. But one television station called her home at 5 a.m., awakening her 16-year-old son, then called his school to try to get him out of class so they could interview him.

He declined, but when he returned home he found the camera crew waiting anyway.

Several TV magazine shows pursued the Biehls, asking for exclusive rights to their story.

“ABC had three magazine shows after us at one time,” Linda Biehl says. “I wanted to call . . . Roone Arledge (president of ABC News) and say, ‘Why don’t you get your act together. . . .”