Anthrax Poses a Challenge to Media Getting Out Story

The headline in Wednesday’s Portland Oregonian was intended to ease readers’ worries in a time of growing apprehension:

“Nature of Anthrax Doesn’t Warrant High Anxiety.”

But after that headline was written, after editors decided to put the story on Page 1, after the paper’s first edition was already printed, the Oregonian received a new, more unsettling, story from Associated Press: Government officials said the anthrax mailed to the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) was highly concentrated, made up of particles so tiny they could spread through the air undetected.

Editors revised Page 1 for the next edition, put that story at the top of the page and then “felt a little foolish” the next morning,” said Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of the Oregonian.

“This shows just how fast this story is moving,” Rowe said. “We were trying, with that first story, a locally written story, to use science to intentionally calm people, to try hard not to sensationalize a story that was already way beyond sensational by definition.”

Rowe said Americans are being asked to hold two conflicting ideas simultaneously. On the one hand, they’re told to be careful because anthrax can kill; on the other, they’re told they shouldn’t worry because it is difficult to make and disseminate in a fatal form.

“When that’s played out in a newsroom,” she said, “it can make things very difficult.”

Other newspaper editors and television news directors are facing a similar challenge as they try to sort out conflicting, often contradictory, messages about the growing number of anthrax cases.

The challenge is compounded by the media’s direct involvement in the story. Anthrax exposure has been reported at ABC, NBC and the supermarket tabloid The Star. An envelope containing white powder also was delivered to the New York Times, prompting evacuation of the paper’s newsroom, but so far, tests have indicated that powder to be benign. Thus, the news media have become participants--in a few cases, victims--in the story, not just dispassionate chroniclers of it.

The threat of anthrax is now “the story of the day,” in the words of Wolf Blitzer of CNN, where the words “Anthrax Anxiety” were frequently emblazoned on the screen. Anthrax was omnipresent on the all-news cable networks Wednesday, virtually serving as journalistic wallpaper.

Erik Sorenson, president of MSNBC, said he worries that developments in the anthrax story are pushing other important news off the air. “Are we losing track of the bombing in Afghanistan or the politics in the Arab world?” he asked.

This is a special problem for the nightly network news programs, which have only 22 minutes to cover all the news. Cumulatively, ABC, CBS and NBC devoted more than half their nightly newscasts to the anthrax story Monday and Tuesday, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors and measures television news content. That was 50% more time than the networks gave those nights to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.

The New York Times devoted half of Page 1 to three anthrax stories Wednesday and spread nine more anthrax stories over four full, ad-free pages. The Los Angeles Times published two anthrax stories on Page 1 and ran seven more spread over five other pages.

Is being a target of whoever is sending the anthrax prompting the news media to give the story more attention than they would otherwise? Have the media been more alarmist in their anthrax coverage than they would have been had news organizations not been among the anthrax targets?

“The media have the megaphone, so I guess the coverage has been a little faster and maybe a little louder,” said Tom Goldstein, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. “But I don’t think it’s been overplayed. This is a real threat, ratcheting up day by day. . . . It’s the media’s job to put everything in context. By and large, I think that’s what they’ve been doing.”

Some critics wonder, however, if the news media--rather than giving the anthrax story too much coverage because they’re involved--have withheld certain information for that same reason.

A 7-month-old boy, the son of an ABC News producer, contracted anthrax after a visit to the network with his mother. ABC has covered the story, but it has declined to identify the producer.

Erin O’Connor, assistant to Tom Brokaw, the NBC news anchor, contracted anthrax through a cut in her skin when she handled a contaminated letter addressed to Brokaw. NBC has covered the story, but it has yet to identify O’Connor by name (although several other news organizations, including The Times, have done so).

Withholding these names suggests a “sensitivity and sympathy for our colleagues that we have not always had for other victims,” said Jim Naughton, president of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit center for journalism studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.

But Howell Raines, executive editor of the New York Times, attributes NBC’s decision not to use O’Connor’s name to an unwillingness to focus undue attention on itself, not just to protect O’Connor’s privacy.

Indeed, Raines says, news organizations have tried hard “not to thrust themselves forward just because they’re part of the story.” Times reporter Judith Miller was especially concerned about that, he said, before she wrote a first-person story last weekend about having received the letter that was feared to contain anthrax.

“I thought her story was journalistically justified,” Raines said, in part because Miller has written a book on bioterrorism and “probably knows more about bioterrorism than any other journalist in the country.”

“It wasn’t the fact that it happened to her in our newsroom but that it happened to her with her particular state of knowledge and awareness,” he said. “Here was this person having an experience that other Americans were having or were afraid of having, but this person knows the entire implication of what this means.”

Anthrax is far more than one reporter’s story, though, and Raines said he thinks the massive coverage has been warranted.

“The state of government preparedness, the fact that we have no real control of Cipro supplies and the repetition of these events, culminating in the insertion of weapons-grade anthrax into the nation’s capital, closing it down, makes it a major story that you have to share with your readers,” he said.

News executives said they are trying to be careful with the potentially frightening facts in the anthrax story--to be certain, for example, to distinguish between “exposure” to anthrax and having actually been infected by it.

“I have to go home and face my doctor wife and three boys and explain myself, and they are scared,” said Paul Slavin, executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight.” “I’m not looking to scare them any more.”

Newspapers and television news programs use their medical correspondents to lessen the fear that many readers and viewers feel, says Joe Angotti, chairman of the broadcast department at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

“They tend to be more level-headed and factual,” Angotti said.

*

Times staff writer Elizabeth Jensen in New York contributed to this report.