Bomb-Suspect Reporting Sets an Ugly Record

There’s speculation he had a hero’s complex.

--KCBS-TV Channel 2 on Tuesday

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Call it synchronized swimming in rumor and innuendo.

Whatever the title, it stinks. If anyone has a hero complex, it’s those members of the media who, swept up in their own pandemonium, leaped to conclusions about Richard Jewell based at the time only on shards of circumstantial evidence. They’re the ones prancing in the limelight.

Jewell is the 33-year-old security guard who was anointed a hero after alerting police to a knapsack containing the bomb that exploded in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park last Saturday, resulting in two deaths and 111 injuries. But a front-page story in Tuesday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution labeling Jewell a suspect drove hordes of TV commandos into another of their ravenous frenzies, producing a steady torrent of speculative stories whose virtual indictment of Jewell appeared to exceed anything authorities had in mind at that time.

Inevitably, the story assumed a life of its own, sucking in just about all of the media in varying degrees. (The Times ran a front-page story Wednesday about Jewell being a suspect.)

Yet the only agency that matters, the FBI, had not arrested or charged Jewell with anything or officially said that he was a suspect as of Wednesday afternoon, although it had questioned him, searched his apartment at length and apparently shared tidbits about him with some of the media.

Even if Jewell does turn out to be the bomber, though, it won’t absolve TV’s clowns of summer. It won’t alter the fact that their coverage of the FBI’s early nosing around has been mostly outrageous and irresponsible.

Here is some speculation about that coverage:

1. By privately leaking possibly damaging information, the FBI may have been using the media to put pressure on Jewell to make him crack. If so, the media have been manipulated into being an extension of law enforcement. That should not be their role.

2. All of this wild, scattershot reporting and stalking of Jewell, and the staking out of his Atlanta apartment by the media multitudes, puts crushing pressure on the FBI, swelling public expectations and the possibility that authorities will be driven to take some premature action that could jeopardize the bomb probe.

In any case, what we have here is a striking example of the worst of journalism in the ‘90s, another case of O.J.itis coursing through TV veins. Another case of how TV technology is not only a means to an end, but now often part of that end. Of how live TV, far from filling the traditional journalistic role of observer, now shapes, influences and potentially determines stories. Of how this technology has goosed and accelerated reporting, too often with negative results.

Olympic sprinters have nothing on the media assigned to cover them in Atlanta. Blurring speed now drives and defines nearly everything, from those initiating it (TV and radio) to those hoping to keep up (newspapers). We see video of the Centennial Park bomb exploding, the reporting unfurling as the incident unfurls, lines of separation no longer visible, all of it leading us to expect a resolution as speedy as the minute-by-minute coverage.

Here was CNN reporter Bonnie Anderson at 6 a.m. Wednesday on the fringe of the international media throng outside Jewell’s apartment complex: “We’ll keep you updated. The agents are inside right now.” Anderson at 7 a.m.: “I believe we may have somebody coming out of the complex now.” At 8 a.m.: “FBI agents have been in the apartment now for about two hours. Also within the last five minutes. . . .”

Almost simultaneously, correspondent George Lewis was reporting on NBC that investigators had removed some items from Jewell’s apartment. Quickly now to Paul Crawley, NBC affiliate WXIA-TV’s eye outside the complex. “Today’s” Matt Lauer to Crawley: “George Lewis said they have brought some things out. Have you seen anything?”

Had he seen anything? What was this, a stakeout on “NYPD Blue”? “Homicide: Life on the Street”? Couldn’t be. Their scripts are more believable.

What’s being generated in Atlanta is almost surreal. It was only Tuesday morning that Jewell was on NBC’s “Today” with an admiring Katie Couric, being celebrated as a modest, gee-whiz savior whose alert action Saturday may have limited the casualties. By nightfall, though, he had been recast as warped and demonic, a pudgy gargoyle lumbering along inside a smothering entourage of reporters, minicams and microphones, all searching his demeanor for hints of guilt to justify the accusatory tone of their stories.

As if Jewell had been fingered in a lineup, TV cameras were all over him, and networks and local stations tenaciously probed his background, questioning his Los Angeles employer and digging into his records from his days as a deputy sheriff and a security guard at tiny Piedmont College.

In Atlanta Tuesday, a CNN reporter asked some people who had returned to Centennial Park if they were pleased that “they may have caught the perpetrator,” even though Jewell may not be the perpetrator.

Jewell was squarely in the cross-hairs of NBC’s biggest guns, from correspondent Fred Francis, with his “high-level federal sources,” to anchor Tom Brokaw, who assured viewers Tuesday that authorities would not have reopened Centennial Park if not “fairly sure” their man was under wraps. “We should have some resolution of this,” he promised.

You were getting impatient with Jewell by this time, wondering why he didn’t just get on with it and admit that he had a hero complex and had planted the bomb to gain credit for saving lives.

That was the rumor zooming across TV for two days, KCBS-TV Channel 2 being a typical messenger.

The headline: “Coming up, the suspect’s possible motive. There’s speculation he had a hero’s complex.”

The story: “A theory is floating around that Jewell has a hero’s complex,” KCBS anchor Linda Alvarez began. Reporter Mary Grady had “the story,” consisting of a generic interview with a psychologist about persons with hero complexes, then a review of past criminals with such complexes, then anchor Michael Tuck cautioning: “But we don’t know whether Richard Jewell has a hero’s complex.”

Or whether he suffers from multiple personalities, one of whom could have planted the bomb without Jewell knowing it. Quick, get another psychologist on the horn.

CNN played the same game with a criminologist Wednesday, getting him to say it was “possible” that Jewell had a hero’s complex. It was possible also that Jewell was innocent, something too few appeared willing to consider.

An exception Wednesday was CBS correspondent Jim Stewart, who reported that “investigators” were repeatedly advising CBS, “Don’t jump to any conclusion yet.” And NBC’s Olympics host, Bob Costas, broached the subject of Jewell’s possible innocence Tuesday night to Brokaw, who responded that if it did turn out that way, “The FBI will be very embarrassed.”

But not NBC and the rest of the media, he seemed to be saying. Destroying lives was their job.