911: A Call for News Ethics

They’re dramatic, they’re theatrical, and running them generally stinks.

Is anyone else repulsed by TV newscasts gratuitously using 911 calls as centerpieces of titillation?

Obviously so, judging from the anger of some viewers objecting to newscasts all across the TV landscape--from local stations to national networks--deploying “Star Trek” hero William Shatner’s frantic Aug. 9 emergency call in stories about the death of his wife, Nerine, whose body he had discovered at the bottom of their swimming pool that evening.

In doing so, they were not-so-boldly going where uncaring, unfeeling media had gone many times before.

This newspaper ran the text of the call, which though bothersome to yours truly, seemed less intrusive, the printed word distancing you from the panic in Shatner’s voice.

The 911 tape was released by the Los Angeles County Fire Department, whose paramedics had been summoned to the pleading Shatner’s home. Authorities are required by California’s Public Records Act, in nearly all cases, to make these emergency calls available to media when they’re requested. “Just about everybody” wanted the Shatner tape, said Chief Daryl Arbuthnott, battalion community liaison officer.

So these Klingons of the airwaves weren’t breaking any laws by beaming Shatner’s extreme distress to viewers, even though it exposed to the multitudes private anguish that he poured out at a time when you would not expect him to be aware that his words were being recorded en route to a starring appearance in America’s living rooms.

If a celebrity said it, it must be newsworthy? Hardly. Released a week after Shatner’s call, the tape did not advance the story of his wife’s death, whose cause is yet to be determined, authorities saying earlier this month that there was no evidence of it being a suicide or the result of foul play.

So why did newscasts run the call? Again, it was dramatic, it was theatrical.

And they did it because they could do it.

That’s become a media mantra.

Take last week’s Jonathan Schmitz verdict, for example. Yes, him again.

Rejecting his crime-of-passion manslaughter defense, and echoing a previous criminal guilty verdict reversed for procedural error, a jury in Pontiac, Mich., convicted Schmitz of murdering Scott Amedure, the man who had revealed his sexual fantasies about him during a 1995 taping of a never-aired “Same-Sex Secret Crushes” episode of Jenny Jones’ syndicated daytime series.

Saying he was heterosexual, Schmitz claimed to have slain Amedure three days later because of being humiliated by the gay man’s public lusting for him during the segment. As if on some level that would excuse shotgunning Amedure.

Schmitz could get life in prison, and here’s hoping he gets the clobbering he’s earned at his Sept. 14 sentencing.

Yet his guilty verdict in no way takes Jones and her show off the hook as catalyst for this tragedy. They planned and proceeded with the segment unaware of Schmitz’s history of severe mental problems--such talk shows hardly can probe their guest hordes’ backgrounds--in effect playing Russian roulette with the lives of a potential triggerman and the man who became his victim.

With that in mind, a civil jury last May ordered the producers of the Jones show to pay Amedure’s family $25 million in damages for being negligent in his death. Even if that verdict is reversed, as some legal experts predict, the ethical case against “The Jenny Jones Show” will never be budged.

The Constitution’s 1st Amendment correctly protects media under a broad canopy of steel. The reasoning is that democracy is messy, and that unfettered media that sometimes misbehave and act irresponsibly--as ours surely do--are preferable to rigidly censored media that are orderly and pliant on behalf of authoritarianism. Cased closed. Yet. . . .

Affirming legal can be lethal, the Jones show violated no laws in the Schmitz-Amedure matter, but acted in a morally corrupt manner by pairing them carelessly for no purpose other than to create a burlesque tickle for its viewers.

The Jones show did it, too, because it could do it.

Ideals are not always compatible with laws, which sometimes codify the most minimally tolerable behaviors. In other words, just because media can do something legally does not always entitle them to do it ethically.

They can be legal and still smell up the place. And getting back to Shatner, what better example than those newscast-run 911 calls, his being just the most prominent recently of a myriad that should not have aired.

Only last week, some Los Angeles stations felt it necessary to run the 911 call made by actor-comic Martin Lawrence’s despairing girlfriend following his collapse and near death in Ventura County after jogging in the blazing midday sun.

Again, there was no journalistic reason for its appearance in a newscast, just as there rarely is for 911 calls made by ordinary citizens that are aired in far greater number, nearly always for one reason: Their panic ambience creates a sense of electricity and excitement.

“We were reluctant to release the Shatner tape, but on advice from the [Los Angeles] city attorney and the LAPD, we did it,” Arbuthnott said.

The LAPD, which responds to 911 calls such as those not requiring paramedics, releases the tapes only “if it doesn’t jeopardize the investigation, if there are no confidentiality issues and it doesn’t jeopardize or hinder the prosecution of a case that’s developing,” said department spokeswoman Lt. Sharyn Buck.

Not that authorities and the media always see such things through the same eyes. And there are times, of course, when running 911 calls is merited at some point because, other factors notwithstanding, their news value eclipses personal privacy issues. That happened with chaotic 911 tapes emanating from last month’s North Valley Jewish Community Center shootings, in which callers differed about the race of the gunman, in which LAPD initially was reluctant to release to the media. And also with the emergency call Nicole Brown Simpson made concerning her ex-husband, O.J. Simpson, that nourished the scenario that he was violent and killed her.

As for Shatner, the fire department “advised” him as “just a courtesy” that it was going to release the 911 tape, Arbuthnott said. It would be nice if noncelebrities were extended the same courtesy.

“We felt there was nothing newsworthy about the tape,” Arbuthnott said, “but it was not our job to make that decision.” Nor should it be, the law and logic dictating that media alone define newsworthiness, even though the outcome is sometimes repugnant.

Very repugnant.

Concerning 911 calls, Arbuthnott urged TV to better distinguish between “what’s news and what’s not news.” Fat chance.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com