A Journalist Breaks the Golden Rule

Many of us in the media are potentially compromised these days, if only because we work for conglomerates whose sprawling interests cut across our news beats.

On a less cosmic level, though, media conflicts of interests should be easy for all to spot. For example:

It was a lovely eulogy, heartfelt and warm, that Anna Song gave at a public memorial service for two girls who were kidnapped and murdered in Oregon City, Ore. She was tender, she was compassionate, and there was no cause to question her sincerity.

Only her judgment.

Thousands of mourners had packed the high school gymnasium on a Thursday night to hear speakers celebrate Ashley Pond, 12, and Miranda Gaddis, 13, whose remains were found recently in the backyard of Ward Weaver III, a 39-year-old convict with an alleged history of violence against females.

The murders have attracted national press attention at a time when children going missing are television’s crusade du jour and a means for the least savory of newscasters to use tragedy to present themselves sympathetically as victims’ extended families. The self-serving message to viewers goes something like this: We care like family because we are family.

Ashley and Miranda were best friends and neighbors who vanished eight weeks apart. Although Weaver had publicly proclaimed himself a prime suspect, it took authorities months to discover the bodies buried on his rental property near the apartment complex where the girls lived. He has not been indicted for the murders, however, and remains in jail on an unrelated rape charge.

The televised Aug. 29 memorial attracted an overflow crowd. Screens were mounted on the school’s roof to beam the service to those watching outside from the softball field, and a video of the ceremony has been available on the Web site of KATU-TV, the ABC station in Oregon City.

One by one, speakers went to the podium. The event’s organizer, Oregon City Christian Church youth pastor Ken Swatman, spoke first. The city’s police chief spoke. One of Ashley’s favorite teachers spoke. The principal of the middle school attended by the girls spoke.

As did others, including family members and Song.

She spoke for nearly five minutes. Although her voice faltered occasionally, there was no false emotion or manipulation in the words she read.

She mentioned that Ashley and Miranda touched her life during the months residents and authorities searched for them, and how they became “members of our own families.” Picking up on a theme expressed by others in TV interviews, Song twice urged everyone to close their eyes and imagine the girls smiling.

“Can you see them clearly?” she asked. “Can you see what they are doing? They are smiling.”

Her eulogy was earnest, dignified and moving, and when she finished, she was applauded warmly. Then a quartet sang “Amazing Grace.”

One problem, though.

Unlike the others speaking about Ashley and Miranda that night, Anna Song is a reporter. Not just any reporter, but a prominent member of the KATU “coverage team” attached to this story.

Oregon City is a community of 26,200 just 20 miles south of Portland where Song, a Taiwan native, grew up, became Miss American Teen in 1993 and represented her high school as a Portland Rose Festival princess two years later.

Although she had interviewed Miranda briefly at a bus stop in January about Ashley’s disappearance shortly before Miranda herself vanished, she didn’t know the girls or their families personally before this story evolved. Despite its closeness to a metropolis, however, Oregon City is a small town where reporters are more likely than their bigger-city counterparts to be tugged by ties of friendship with sources they encounter on a daily basis. Hence, Song’s eulogy, which went over big with locals.

Even so, it transformed her into an activist, and would fit nicely into the “Conflicts of Interest” chapter of any book on journalism ethics.

However well meaning, in other words, Song crossed a line, violating a basic tenet of journalism by participating in a story she was supposed to be observing as a reporter, as an outsider.

And she knew it, for she began her remarks at the memorial by saying this: “Usually as journalists we do everything we can to avoid getting involved in the stories we do ... “ Then she went ahead and ignored that wise tradition.

As some others had before her.

If anything, this rather obscure incident is a microcosm of something dangerous that is edging forward nationally: a blurring of lines separating news media and newsmakers in television. It’s a growing trend that threatens to erode the independence of journalists working on the small screen.

That includes newscasting’s celebrity journalists being on a cozy first-name basis with many of their interview subjects, including those occupying the loftiest towers of government.

And in the 1980s, it included the late Wayne Satz acting as KABC-TV’s lead reporter covering alleged child abuse at the McMartin school while secretly sleeping with a key prosecution witness.

So there are far more egregious examples of media conflict than Anna Song publicly praising two young victims of murder about which there appears to be no difference of opinion.

Yet cross one ethical line and it’s that much easier to cross another.

It was Swatman, the youth pastor, who asked Song to speak at the memorial, she told Times reporter Dana Calvo in Oregon City recently. “It was ... an honor to be asked,” Song said. “It wasn’t an easy decision. We thought about it. We collaborated, my news director and I.”

Song is little more than a callow youngster in the news business, having been a full-time reporter for only two years after attending Pepperdine University in Los Angeles and spending a year as an intern at KABC-TV here and another at KATU.

But her boss, a 20-year news veteran, should have known better.

“It was my decision,” KATU news director Mike Rausch told Calvo. “Anna had questions about it. But I thought we should think about it from the [viewpoint] of Oregon, not from the viewpoint of fairness.”

Not that he found fairness an issue, seeing no difference between Song “giving her opinion [at the memorial] and a reporter writing a column.” The distinction, though, is significant. Reporters are not hired to write columns or commentaries. They report stories, which are meant to exclude opinion. Commentaries (like this one) are written by columnists and labeled as opinion.

Song remains on the story, meanwhile. Earlier this week, she was outside Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Portland, covering the private burial of Miranda, this time wearing the reporter’s hat she shouldn’t have flung away at the memorial.