Residents of Small Town Cut Big Media Down to Size

Joel Myrick knows what he has.

The assistant principal of the local high school in Pearl, Miss., knows the value of a videotape he recently discovered in which 16-year-old Luke Woodham, performing a skit for his speech class, acts out a grisly murder.

Myrick knows the tape is a vivid illustration of Woodham’s violent mental state in the months leading up to Oct. 1, when he allegedly butchered his mother and sprayed gunfire around Pearl High School, killing two students and wounding seven others. No doubt the tabloid newspapers and certain TV shows would kill for a copy.

Still, Myrick’s not selling. The thought has crossed his mind, Lord knows, because he’d love an all-expense-paid vacation with his wife after these past stressful weeks. But he just can’t bring himself to profit from the tragedy that befell his hometown, a point of view not shared by all his fellow residents.

Even in the high-minded heartland, the moral dilemma descends within minutes of every disaster: to trade or not to trade on human tragedy? After Susan Smith and Timothy J. McVeigh and JonBenet Ramsey and O.J. Simpson, the average American has come to understand what the average Hollywoodian always knew: that tales of pain and cruelty have intrinsic market value, no less than cotton and pork bellies.

What makes the phenomenon in Pearl so strange, and possibly emblematic of Americans’ changing relations with the media, isn’t the fact that some are loathe to cash in while others are glad to. Rather, it is the control that Myrick and his neighbors are exerting over the previously overpowering media horde.

Even in a remote city of 22,000 people, where most can’t pronounce Geraldo Rivera’s name and don’t care to be corrected, where the cost of one 30-second commercial during “Dateline NBC” probably exceeds the mayor’s annual salary, folks are doing a masterly job of fencing, or flirting, with the droves of reporters and producers trolling for stories, regardless of whether those reporters and producers wield checkbooks or notebooks.

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Picture a real-life “Mad City,” a rural version of the new Costa-Gavras film that explores the psychic battleground between a weary public and its free press.

In fact, few Pearl residents define “the press” in traditional ways. “Legitimate” journalists can cry all they want about being the more moral and never paying for stories. People in Pearl are unimpressed. A media member is a media member, they believe, so everyone gets the same treatment: polite, but blunt. The balance of power has shifted.

Case in point: Uneasy with the vibe she was getting, the mother of shooting victim Lydia Kaye Dew simply strolled away from the cameras of a live TV show last month, only seconds before the broadcast began, leaving field producers flabbergasted. It was a scene that would have been hard to imagine several years ago.

“They’ve handled us very well,” said Jennifer Buksbaum, a producer with “48 Hours” and a veteran of the Oklahoma City bombing as well as other large-scale tragedies. “I think they’re more orchestrated here, more conscious of what can happen.”

“I’ve never seen so many people with agents in such a small town,” said Nancy Duffy, senior editorial producer for “Public Eye With Bryant Gumbel.” “More people have agents there than here in New York.”

Duffy’s show was among many to scramble for exclusives in the days after the Pearl shooting. Since then she’s pulled back, but other shows and national publications remain. Dan Rather is rumored to be on his way to Pearl, and at least one tabloid TV show continues to linger, like a miner who can’t quit a once lucrative claim. “PrimeTime Live,” meanwhile, on Wednesday aired the blockbuster interview: Luke Woodham, speaking for the first time about the killings, and telling the ABC program that he “was just trying to find hope in a hopeless world.” Media representatives still working the Pearl beat must contend with a needier and nervier breed of subject. Some Pearl residents want money up front. Some want an agent, in case a TV movie is ever made or a book is ever written. Some want unusual control over any interview they do choose to grant. Some want to be left alone.

But no matter what they want, nearly everyone shows an uncommon level of sophistication, an unprecedented poise, and the reason seems to be that they’ve learned a little something from watching TV. They’ve learned about the American media monster from the monster itself. They’ve learned that when the monster pushes, you push back, or else get sucked into its maw.

“We all saw the Bronco chase on TV,” said Mayor Jimmy Foster, who formed a close alliance with the police chief and the lead investigators on Woodham’s case, an alliance that kept the lid on most crucial evidence until a pretrial hearing. “We set down here watching the [Simpson] trial, and we just didn’t want that happening here.”

Four years ago--that is, pre-O.J.--a man like Foster might have been cowed or wooed into surrendering details of his police department’s investigation, and he readily admits it. Or, he might have run from the media, a disastrous tactical error that would have heightened the frenzy and fueled the rumor mill.

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Today, supremely confident after countless hours of Simpson coverage and Princess Di coverage and Oklahoma City bombing coverage, he deems himself a worthy adversary for reporters. He grants every request for an interview and answers each question patiently, calmly, even if it means repeating variations on the theme of “No comment.” In fact, the mayor takes such pride in his handling of the media that he plans to carefully critique himself and his colleagues when the tragedy fades, to find ways of honing his skills before the next tragedy strikes.

So deft have Foster and other officials become at media management that one Mississippi newspaper could do little more than complain meekly in a rambling editorial.

“All media are not the same,” lamented the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. “There are some that do not seek to exploit and intrude. The people of Pearl will find, however, that most seek to relay the facts and feelings of people involved and sort out a tragic situation to a nation that needs to hear the truth. The truth is revealed only with openness and cooperation by public officials.”

But in an era of omnipresent lenses, out-of-context quotes and pirated life stories, Pearl officials scoff at the notion of total openness, preferring to practice the art of shrewd public relations with the best of their big-city brethren.

No one has been more beset by media than Myrick, since it was he who halted Woodham’s rampage, grabbing a loaded .45 from his car and disarming the teen after a tense standoff.

Just the other day, the assistant principal finally got around to tossing out reams of faxes and letters and phone messages from producers, reporters and others who promised to make him famous. (Imagine, he says, if they knew about that videotape!)

With the best of them, Myrick can now speak fluent agent-ese, discussing “life rights,” and the prices those rights might fetch (between $50,000 and $125,000, he says, if a movie ever gets made) in the same blase tone he uses to tally the Pearl football team’s statistics.

He’s absorbed these facts, and spits them out disdainfully, because they don’t impress him as they might have once. He’s the byproduct of a brave new world in which country people no longer view satellite trucks as invading tanks and no longer naively welcome every agent and story monger who comes through town as a leprechaun toting a pot of gold.

“The media have such a pervasive influence on our lives, and I think today everybody has an opinion on them and a way of dealing with them if they ever hit close to home,” said Joe Atkins, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi. “[People] have sort of a built-in system for dealing with this situation . . . even in rural Mississippi.”

A reporter for 15 years before becoming a professor, Atkins has long instructed his students in the gentle art of interviewing farmers, as opposed to, say, senators. In class he often conjures for students the image of a lone Mississippi man plowing his fields, a man ignorant of journalism’s arcane rules and intimidated by its practitioners.

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“It’s getting harder and harder,” he said, chuckling, “to find that farmer.”

“The media doesn’t scare anybody anymore,” said Maureen Rubin, a lawyer and journalism professor at Cal State Northridge. “It’s a level playing field now.”

Rubin, a former press officer in the Carter White House who recently taught a popular course called “Sleaze and the Media,” says it was inevitable that Americans would begin fighting back, rather than rolling over and letting reporters have their way.

“I’m not at all surprised,” she said, “that the average American wants a piece of the gravy train, or at least [they] want to protect themselves.”

Clearly, Richard Schwartz wants to protect his client--from Diane Sawyer, along with other high-profile media figures seeking exclusives. The Pearl-area lawyer, who represents the family of shooting victim Christina Menefee, spent weeks turning back network representatives.

Schwartz says he told reporters and producers that there would be no Menefee family exclusives, that the family could care less about exclusives, that he’d been hired to field calls and choose an interviewer who would do the story justice. Then he infuriated everyone by granting an exclusive to Geraldo Rivera.

“They’re not in it for any money,” he said of the Menefees. “We haven’t asked for an appearance fee with anybody. The only thing we did get, when we went to New York to do [Geraldo Rivera’s show], is a room, compensation for lost wages, and $1,000 donated to the memorial fund at Pearl High School.”

Not everyone, however, felt such strong moral opposition to getting paid. And those interested in money were not shy about letting their interests be known.

“These people are poor,” said lawyer Bob Waller, who represents the family of Lydia Kaye Dew, the second student killed in the shooting. “They’ve hired me, and they’ve got to pay me, so [money] is a consideration.”

In recent weeks, Waller has conducted countless impromptu debates on the topic of checkbook journalism with newspaper reporters and network producers, telling them as succinctly as possible that he considers their refusal to pay for his client’s story a load of bunk.

“The point that needs to be made,” he said, “is that ‘PrimeTime Live’ and Bryant Gumbel and Geraldo Rivera, they want to consider themselves journalists and news media, but they’re out to make a buck!

“If they’re going to make several hundred thousand dollars from talking to you, and they can’t make it without you, then you deserve compensation, and I don’t see the problem with it. Everyone else is money driven.”

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Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.