Mary Nickles, co-anchoring Channel 2's 10 o'clock news Wednesday, started calmly. Then her voice cracked and she struggled with her tears. She was describing KUTV's decision to air an interview taped at the moment Tina Ellis learned her husband Kim had died in the Zion National Park hiking tragedy.
Nickles' piece capped two days of soul-searching at the station over how the interview should have been played.Last Monday evening, Nickles and a photographer were dispatched to the Ellis home just after it learned that the missing hikers had been found. While the camera was rolling, Tina spoke of how her son and husband had been looking forward to the trip, then picked up the wall telephone and called the Park Service for information on them. It was then that she learned her husband had drowned.
- SHOULD THE STATION have gone on the air with the tape?
Many viewers called Channel 2 to complain that the tape was callous and invasive, an assault on the vulnerable family at the most wrenching of moments.
For a near-parallel, though one not nearly so ill-timed, go back to Channel 5's decision last December to air an interview at the funeral home with Jennifer Brumett, the newly bereaved wife of a Utah Highway Patrol trooper, Joseph Brumett. The outrage at that report shook Channel 5, and especially the reporter, Steve Eagar (Media Monitor, Jan. 11).
Nickles also was visibly moved on air when reporting the Monday interview.
In her response Wednesday, she told viewers the station's intention "was not to exploit the personal tragedy or impose on Tina Ellis" but to show that deaths, usually reported impersonally in the media, involve real people and real families.
KUTV news director Diane Orr says she appreciates the calls of viewers because "I know they are concerned about privacy and sometimes have an image of reporters breaking down doors and being insensitive and they think that's what we did."
Actually, she says, the crew went to the Ellis home expecting to record a family's happiness in the recovery of the missing group.
- WHAT EMERGED INSTEAD was "a painful piece of video. It was a difficult tape to watch."
Nickles said on camera that the family gave permission for the tape to be shown, and Orr says it has not since complained. But the fact that permission had to be asked at all should have been a red flag.
I appreciate Channel 2's good intentions. Its record on invading privacy is mixed, but it has often shown great restraint, as when it, alone among the major Salt Lake media, refused to go after interviews with Mrs. Brumett.
But my feelings are the same as those I had in the Brumett case: It would have been a courageous act of magnificent compassion had the station, though in possession of the dramatic tape, decided that the situation was far too fragile and intimate to risk airing it at all.
Nickles said the broadcast used only a portion of the tape in a segment that was just over three minutes. (The crew was at the house when Mrs. Ellis had to tell the children, but none of this was shown.) Orr now believes that by hindsight too much was used, even at that. "But we did not do it for ratings."
- WHETHER REPORTERS dare lose their composure while giving the news on camera is another large question. Traditionally they have been expected to remain detached, if only to serve as competent and reasonably objective observers.
Legend has it that the radio reporter who broke down while describing the explosion of the dirigible Hindenberg at Lakehurst, N.J., in 1937 lost his job for having come unglued. Yet that newscast with all of its hysteria ("one of the greatest tragedies of all time; oh, the humanity!") became a classic for expressing the horror everyone felt at the disaster, far more compelling than the objective wire service-type reports of the day.
It would be reprehensible if a reporter were to play-act to tug the heartstrings - remember the episode in the movie "Broadcast News" when the character played by William Hurt conjured up a crocodile tear on camera just to give his career a boost?
Orr says that she has no problem with a newsperson expressing honest emotion on camera. "So often we do manage to maintain our professional demeanor, but it is perfectly legitimate when an anchor or reporter is so moved by circumstances that they show their humanity. Mary responded as a human being."
And that's how it came across to me. She'll hate my saying so, but I wanted to pat her hand, just as her co-anchor, Terry Wood, did.
Nickles' emotions showed us better than words that decent journalists struggle in that gray area between the need to respect privacy and the need to show the human condition.
- REPORTERS DID a first-rate job for the most part under very difficult circumstances to get the story out. TV newscasts gave it saturation coverage and led with it for days. KSL had exclusive photos of Ellis' body being recovered, and while I am generally against body pictures, this one made a special point about the difficulties of the rescue effort in the forbidding terrain.
I was disappointed with the Tribune's sketchy initial account on Tuesday morning, even making allowances for the late-breaking story. It was severely underplayed, as the third story on the local page and under a one-column headline.
The Tribune later brought the story out to page one and did some fine reporting, especially Norma Wagner's saga of survival that ran in Thursday morning's edition.
I appreciated the Deseret News' first-day story on Tuesday evening by veteran reporter Jerry Spangler and an intern, Jason Swensen, a gripping narrative of the ordeal told largely in its sequence.