It began with a phone call.

I was at the time the editor of The Jewish Week, a paper reporting news of special interest to the Jewish community. It was then, and still is, the largest-circulation Jewish-content newspaper in the world, with about 120,000 subscribers.

I had known the caller for some time. "Do you know," he said, "that W.M. is a regular advertiser in a Nazi paper? Can you imagine the nerve of this guy — he gives money with one hand to Jewish charities, and with the other he supports Nazis!"

I promised my caller to look into the story. W. M. ran a large mail-order business, selling all kinds of kitchen gadgets, household aids, gift items, and the like. I had seen some of his ads over the years — the kind that catch your eye with bold, 96-point blocks of type, and then try to dazzle with hyperbolic claims.

I phoned a friend at the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. He confirmed that the paper in question, The Spotlight, published in Arlington, Virginia, was as racist, bigoted and pro-Nazi as I remembered it to be. I asked him to glance at some recent issues, to see if W.M.’s company was really a regular advertiser. I waited, and heard my friend turning pages. "Full-page ads," the ADL man said. "We never knew this was a Jewish-owned company, Now that we know —"

"Hold off," I asked him. "I know this guy, I know his wife and kids — his son and my son attend the same school. If there’s a big story, in my paper or from you, it’ll kill them. People will spit in their faces. Give me a few days, maybe I can work something out we’ll all be happy with."

"Okay," he said finally. "Keep me in the picture."

At home that evening, I phoned W.M. who lives in the same town as I do. I came straight to the point — would he explain how he, a respected member of the Jewish community, justified his full-page ads in a neo-Nazi paper?

I could almost hear his breathing intensify on the other end of the line.

"Listen," he said, "this is business. It’s a good paper for my business. If I don’t advertise, one of my competitors will."

"You’re not hearing me," I said. "This is an anti-Semitic rag, you’re a Jew and —"

"What do you think I do with the profits? I give them to the United Jewish Appeal."

"Baloney! What kind of twisted thinking is that?"

"Look, I put ads into hundreds of papers all over the country, I can’t check out each and every one of them to see what they publish — I’m running a business."

He had inadvertently given me an idea. "You pull your ads, all of them, cancel right now, and I’ll say that when you found out that this was a racist paper, you withdrew your ads immediately. Otherwise, I run the story straight, and people will learn that you give to Jewish charities with one hand, and back a Nazi sheet with the other."

There was a long pause. "I’ll think it over. I’ll call you in the morning." The phone went dead.

Early the next morning his wife called. Her voice was teary. "Please don’t do this to us," she said. "He’ll cancel the ads, I’ll see to it, but don’t make him look so bad, I’ll never be able to hold up my head in this community — and my children will be ashamed. Please!"

W.M. phoned a few hours later. He had canceled the ads. He sounded angry and unrepentant.

I ran the story as agreed, which said he’d canceled his business advertising in The Spotlight after learning of the publication’s racist philosophy.

As a lifelong journalist committed to honest reporting, I have wondered more than once why I didn’t tell my readers the true story. At the time, I attributed it to wanting to shield W.M.’s family. But, in retrospect, I may have had another motive — in a sense I was shielding the Jewish community.

Let me explain: A Jewish newspaper is replete with bad news — anti-Semitic incidents; ongoing threats to Israel from terrorists; a decline in religious affiliation; inter-marriages and the subsequent reduction in the number of Jews. My readers, and people outside the Jewish community, did not need to know the shameful news that a respected Jewish leader had been driven by greed to advertise in a Nazi paper. If the ads ceased, I reasoned, that would be enough.

To this day, I am not sure I did the right thing. Perhaps, if there had not been so much "bad news" for the Jewish community that particular week, I would have printed the straight story on W.M.

I still live in the same town as W.M. and his wife; neither will speak to me which is not important. He is still in the same business, only now his ads do not support neo-Nazism.

When hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan bring their road show to town, some news media yawn and give the "event" a superficial nod. But others, often unwittingly, roll out a journalistic red carpet by treating a very old story as fresh news.

My assignment arrived with all the casualness that’s attached to the annual meeting of the community arts center: A press packet clipped to the assignment note gave the KKK spokesmen’s phone numbers and details on an "education and recruitment" rally to be held in an isolated section of The Tribune-Democrat’s circulation area in the spring of 1989. It was clear that I was to do more than an obligatory graph or two.

I reached deep for impartiality, but grasped only revulsion. Protest, I felt, was useless. I was a general assignment reporter on a skeleton weekend crew and the story was needed to fill a sizable news hole. Nina Kalinyak, my regional editor, was at home and generally unreceptive to dropping assignments. Her superiors discouraged reporters from breaking the editorial chain of command. And, most importantly, the T-D had no policy governing its coverage of hate groups.

The paper had been covering the "news" of the anticipated rally for months, ever since the Klan had issued its first speculative press release. A 21-inch piece, based only on Klan sources, read: "Rallies of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, are planned for Somerset County this summer, but no one is saying where, when or how many."

The article proceeded to publicize the KKK’s membership requirements (white, Christian, at least 18), its activities and goals. "Why the [KKK] keeps targeting this region for its activities is puzzling," an accompanying T-D editorial queried. Why indeed?

When the Klan finally stated the time and place for its event, I received the assignment. My byline-less 16-inch story gave four graphs to the Klan’s rally information and then went beyond the scope of the assignment to quote reactions from local municipal officials and a representative of the NAACP. Copy editors decided to jazz it up by dropping in a KKK logo.

And our coverage didn’t stop there. Another piece was published two days later and a final advance story announced a prayer vigil in opposition to the rally. The T-D ended its KKK coverage with a pair of next-day stories on the two events (reporting that the prayer vigil had outdrawn the uneventful rally 100 to 60).

Were there Klan sympathizers among my superiors, conspiring to advance white supremacy with plenty of free publicity? No, just editors who believed a KKK publicity event was hot news.

Feeling that simply withholding my byline was not enough, I wrote a memo to Kalinyak on my concerns and asked that the editors reevaluate their approach on Klan coverage.

I recommended that we emulate the policy of a paper in Frederick, Md. which had extensively covered a legal battle preceding a march, but limited march-day coverage to a picture and cutline.

Good call. If an organization is spitting out the same venomous beliefs it has been expressing for decades, how can that be news? How can it be the media’s responsibility to aid racial supremacy groups’ search for fellow travelers?

"In case you hadn’t noticed," Kalinyak responded, "all good papers track hate groups and their activities — and report them — in large part because information of this kind is what makes the public sit up, take notice and really see what’s up. It is, quite simply, exposure in the most uncollaborative sense of the word."

Additional rallies were held in our coverage area that summer and again in 1990. The new editor-in-chief imposed a policy that toned down the coverage. But a small klavern was organized in Johnstown’s west end and KKK graffiti started appearing.

Then this spring, under yet another new editorial team, local Klansmen were handed the legitimizing opportunity of appearing in our Sunday Perspective section, a question-and-answer interview focusing on timely topics and newsmakers.

There they were, the "Great Titan" and the "Kludd" of the local klavern, expounding for 75 inches on their "new" attitudes and image. The accompanying photo showed them robed and hooded — and anonymous.

Why? "We felt we should take a closer look at what the Klan was in the same way we’d look at any other organization," said managing editor Larry Hudson, then acting editor. He explained that it was the publisher’s decision not to identify the Klansmen — something he said he personally disagreed with — but added, "We all knew who they were."

Well, so did our colleagues at the neighboring Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But when the Klan held a rally there last month, they identified our nameless "Great Titan" — Barry Black, of Johnstown — and gave the event a mere nine inches.

Why the difference in approach? The Post-Gazette says it simply uses news judgment. But papers like the Tribune-Democrat obviously need an established policy that kicks in whenever the KKK comes calling. Coverage decisions aren’t haphazardly left to individual editors who may be more concerned with filling a hole or latching onto eye-catching headline fodder than in evaluating the fundamental merits of an event.

On January 30, 1989, two weeks after a gunman killed five children and wounded 29 in a schoolyard in Stockton, California, a letter arrived at an elementary school in Watertown, Connecticut.

"We will start shooting the little pigs on the schoolyard real soon," read the crudely-typed note in part. "We will start with the little sluts so they can’t breed. We will not stop until they are all dead."

During my regular rounds covering Watertown the next day for the Waterbury Republican, my usual police department contact showed me the letter and a similar one that had arrived at a resident’s home on Saturday. He told me police were stepping up school security, and the school superintendent was sending a letter home that day with every child telling parents about the threats.

I agreed with the cops that this was no kid playing a prank. The ugly tone of the letters seemed to reveal a disturbed adult, vicious toward women and Catholics and very aware of publicity. "We hope to hell you think this is a joke . . . Do not think you can cover this up," it read. "We have started notifing (sic) your people. Thanks for putting their names all over everything."

The other letter and a third that turned up the next day were aimed at a Catholic school down the street. "Dear Catholic Pig: We will start shooting the children on the Magdalen schoolyard real soon — Ladies First," it read.

The question was not whether to cover it, but how. It was an explosive story, and as the only daily reporter regularly covering the town, I was pretty sure I had it first. Everyone in town would know in a few hours once the children brought the superintendent’s letter home.

But the thought of a huge outside headline in tomorrow morning’s paper made me uneasy. Here was a sick person who craved attention. Media coverage of the Stockton shooting had probably given him the idea. Would the newspaper become an accomplice if we overplayed the story?

How would a splashy story affect the more than 3,000 children?

In addition, as the superintendent pointed out as he urged me to play down the story, he had informed every parent in the district. Everyone who needed to know, knew, he said. In fact, the superintendent’s letter was a double-edged sword: Once the story was out, why tread carefully?

I returned to the office and told the state news editor, Charles Dixon. His immediate reaction: Play it small. Get it on the record, but do nothing to encourage hysteria. In a five-minute discussion at the start of a regular planning meeting, he asked the other editors if anyone disagreed with his decision to give the incident the bare minimum of coverage.

They agreed the paper had to mention the incident. But any more than minimum attention could breed panic or, worse, encourage the letter writer. After considering who could benefit from playing the story big, they decided it was in everyone’s best interest to keep it inside.

A short time later, I was on the phone with the superintendent. His relief that we were downplaying the story made me think we must be doing something wrong to make a source so happy. Then he told me WTNH-TV, the local ABC affiliate, had just sent out a crew.

I told Dixon. After just a moment’s thought, he said we should stick to our decision. If they were going to be irresponsible, it did not mean we had to be.

I wrote my four-paragraph story. Channel 8’s 6 p.m. report did not mention the threats. At about 10 p.m., a friend called to tell me the station was promoting the story for the 11 o’clock news. I told my editor. No change.

The television story made me feel we were doing the right thing. A graphic over the anchor’s shoulder blazoned "Watertown Sniper" over a target riddled with bullet holes. The story quoted frightened parents. I was angry at what I considered sensational coverage, and a little deflated: After all, I had gotten the story first, even if it was handed to me.

My story ran quietly the next day. Follow-ups, though written longer and played a little harder, continued in the same tone, dealing mostly with school security and reactions from parents and children.

I never quoted the notes, though other print and broadcast media used some of the milder phrases like "shooting the little pigs." The decision whether to quote the letters was left entirely to me, and in retrospect, I may have been too squeamish. But by the second or third day, the news value would have been all but gone, and the words could renew fear in children reading the paper.

Looking back, I still believe we did the right thing. We can’t determine story play only on how many people will read it; we have a responsibility to consider the consequences.

In this case, excessive play could have only bred more hysteria. That hysteria, in turn, would make more news: I could see people pulling their kids out of school for weeks, or demanding heavy security at the schools. In that scenario, the panic does more harm than the original threat.

In a hostage situation, when ethnic hate is involved, or any time news coverage can incite a publicity-hungry person to do more to draw attention, I think we must err on the side of underplaying. Even if the competition gets a flashier story.

The Watertown letter-threat case remains unsolved.

When the popular county sheriff makes sexist remarks during and after a public meeting of the prison board, is it a story? Or is it simply a harmless attempt at "humor" that should be allowed to die quietly?

At The Pocono Record we wrote the story - and unleashed a storm of controversy that sparked two days of anti-sheriff protests, dominated a local call-in radio show for more than a week, and made the newspaper as much a focus of debate as the sheriff himself.

Sheriff Forrest Sebring had made his comments during discussion of a plan to house female inmates for the first time in Monroe County’s history. It was dominated by the male officials’ view that women prisoners would likely pose numerous problems.

"Everybody we talk to says we’re crazy to start housing women because they’re so much trouble," the jail warden was quoted as saying. As examples, he mentioned drug problems, social diseases and possible pregnancies and miscarriages.

It was then that the sheriff commented: "Every woman that you get in over there (at the jail) has to have some kind of complications. She has to be rebushed or something." Following laughter from fellow board members, all male, he added, "OK, recycled."

Asked during a later interview what he’d meant by "rebushed," Sebring told the two female reporters questioning him, "If you can be straight with me, I can be straight with you….It’s jailhouse talk. It’s prison talk. It’s cop talk. But if you write it, I’m going to tell you right now I’ll sue both of you."

Questioned again, he told them, "You take a 10-pound ham, you stick it up a woman’s bug and you pull out the bone, and that’s how you rebush a whore who comes to jail."

"To recycle a woman," the sheriff also told the reporters, "is to send her down to the Virgin Islands and make a virgin out of her."

Except for the ham quote, all of the above was reported the next day in a page one article that gave a straightforward, basically chronological account of the discussion about women inmates. The ham quote was described - inaccurately, it turned out - as "a vulgar statement apparently concerning cleansing of the female genitalia." We later learned that the term actually referred to tightening a woman’s vagina for the enhanced enjoyment of her male sexual partners.

Decisions about story content, placement and coverage were made by the editor, publisher, wire editor (all three male) and myself, then the news editor (a combination city editor/m.e.). We saw little question that the comments were newsworthy.

The public has a compelling interest in knowing about the perspectives and judgment of its elected officials, especially those influential in the running of public institutions. Making comments that denigrate any group of people is neither acceptable nor evidence of good judgment, and this was not the first time Sheriff Sebring had done it. Eleven years earlier, he had drawn severe criticism for making racist comments. If a newspaper ignores sexist comments on grounds that they’re "just a joke" or "have always been made," that newspaper helps perpetuate sexism.

Our editorial discussions focused, then, on exactly how to report the story, and whether to include the ham quote.

The reporter argued that the quote belonged - that no paraphrase could convey what the comment itself did. (As it turned out, she was right.) The editor and publisher, on the other hand, deemed the sheriff’s explanation too offensive to publish in a community newspaper. I agreed with elements of both perspectives; and though I conveyed the reporter’s concerns to the editor, I felt good about his final decision not to use the quote.

What clearly seems, in retrospect, to have been the most troublesome aspect of our coverage was something we had never discussed; whether the reporter who covered the prison board meeting should follow subsequent developments.

The issue was neither her ability, integrity nor her desire to cover the story, but rather the appearance of her objectivity - she, with the editor’s knowledge, was a member of the local National Organization for Women chapter. And NOW participated in the anti-sheriff protests that she covered.

Also, I too was a NOW member. Like her, I played a backseat role in what was customarily a low-visibility organization in our community.

But when supporters of the sheriff learned that we were NOW members, the degree of our involvement mattered little. To them, the story had been reported only because we were women and feminists, in a conservative area where that term remains pejorative and threatening to many people.

We, then, became the focus of attacks on the newspaper’s credibility - and on us, both personally and professionally.

By not assigning someone else to the protests, I believe, we did both the reporter and our newspaper a tremendous disservice.

While many people supported our coverage, we had unthinkingly handed those who didn’t the perfect weapon to detract attention from the real, newsworthy issue of the sheriff’s inappropriate and offensive comments.

"Physicist Stephen Hawking is confined to a wheelchair, a virtual prisoner in his own body," began a February 8, 1988, Time magazine piece on the world’s leading theoretical scientist.

If Hawking were black, any mawkish reference to race in a lead would bring outraged charges from civil rights groups. But reporters know better than to call attention to race - or gender. Yet despite gains in rights for disabled people, the press continues to sensationalize when doing stories in which a disability is involved to the exclusion of real news. Features on "courageous" individuals surmounting handicaps - we call them "in-spite-of stories" - greatly outnumber disability issues reporting.

It’s not just the approach to disability that’s unethical. The copy’s awful, too. Reporters flaunt demeaning and inaccurate cliches; "afflicted" and "victim" are routine. Reporters and editors like the impact; they defend it as "powerful" writing. But it makes most disabled people today cringe. Journalists, they say, have no more right to turn them into objects of pity with such phrases as "virtual prisoner in his own body" than they have to turn women into sex objects.

Sometimes, of course, the disability is the story. Wheelchair athletes push cross-country to raise funds for rehabilitation groups. Charities approach reporters with stories about clients made good. A recent Canadian study suggests the soppiest stories were hawked to the press by groups serving disabled people! What’s an editor to do?

Practice good journalism. Is there really a story in the event that merits reporting? Or is it merely a tug at the heartstrings? If it does deserve coverage, what’s the issue, the angle that can open up the story rather than the same old tired "in-spite-of" approach?

So what’s wrong with an occasional tug at the heartstrings? There’s been too much of it. Journalists repeatedly exploit what they see as the "interesting" angle - the disability. The "super-crip" approach has become the staple, comparable to the "credit-to-the-race" angle once epidemic in stories involving black people.

California Angels pitcher Jim Abbott has felt the frustration ever since CBS News’ Charles Osgood, back in 1987, refused to allow him to be a regular pitcher, over Abbott’s on-air protests. Press focus on Abbott’s lack of a right hand has continued.

Abbott has put it this way. "It seems weird to me sometimes that I’m a first-round pick and yet . . . since I turned professional the only thing anyone wants to talk about is playing with one hand."

Reporters know it’s wrong to interject their feelings into a news story. Yet the "in-spite-of story" - like use of "afflicted" or "courageous" (even when the disabled person is doing the most ordinary of things like raising a family or going to school) - comes from reporters’ attitudes and pre-ordained angles.

Where are the reporters who are listening to disabled people rather than using them merely to shore up their own beliefs about what it’s like to be disabled? Where are the reporters interested in allegations of abuse by welfare and rehabilitation agencies or stories on the impact the Fair Housing Amendments Act will have on the lives of disabled residents?

Disability rights is not a heartwarming feature story and disabled individuals should not be used for inspirational sagas. If they’re newsmakers, they should be covered like anyone else - the disability noted matter-of-factly only when its relevant to the story. If they’re not newsmakers, why are they being covered? Because their lives are unusual? If so, we should ask why, looking for the real story behind the "unusual."

Typically, it’s lack of opportunity, barriers, or discrimination. Those are stories. And they should be investigated and reported as they are for any other minority.

If it had been Janet Tremain, the director of San Benito County’s Child Protection Services, who had failed to register as a child molester, there would have been no question about the situation’s newsworthiness.

But it was her husband, Gerald Tremain. Convicted in Oregon in 1984, he had not registered as a sex offender as is required by law when he moved with his family to California.

Was the crime which had taken place years earlier relevant? He had gone through probation and was supposedly rehabilitated. Was a news story worth the likely devastating effect on the family, especially the molested girl, Janet’s 14-year-old daughter?

Our newsroom at the Hollister Free Lance was split on the issue.

"This is the woman who is supposed to be protecting our county’s children," was managing editor Wayne Norton’s argument. "The fact that she had a molestation going on in her own home makes it newsworthy just on the face of it."

Executive editor Mark Paxton, however, felt the relevancy might lie more in Janet’s attitude toward the molestation. Did she attempt to cover it up? Did she report it? Did her relationship to Gerald affect her job performance?

I tended to agree with Paxton that if Gerald’s crime had no impact on Janet’s job it was not worth an article. We all agreed, of course, that it was worth investigating.

Unfortunately, under Oregon’s expungement laws, all records of Gerald’s conviction had been closed. Off the record, I was told it had been unusually serious abuse. My source said Tremain had raped his daughter, then 7 years old, every Friday for about six months. Janet said she had no idea it was going on until an officer came to their door to tell her that Gerald had been arrested. The abuse had been reported by the girl’s teacher.

Janet had cooperated with the investigation, but she had also used her position in the Oregon Human Services Department to get lenient treatment for Gerald. I also learned that she had reunited the family as soon as possible. Some counselors told me this indicated an ongoing unhealthy relationship between the three; others disagreed. This sort of professional disagreement over Janet’s fitness for her job made it even harder for us to decide if a story was warranted.

About this time, I found out that the local grand jury was investigating Janet and CPS counselors for alleged unprofessional conduct which put abused children at risk. We decided the story was important and we ran it after interviewing people who said they could verify the incidents being investigated.

I also learned there had been two recent investigations of reports that Gerald once again was molesting his daughter, but our story about the grand jury investigation made no mention of this or Gerald’s prior conviction.

The day our story ran about the grand jury, Janet resigned. When I called, she said she had resigned because she thought we were about to do a story on her husband’s past. Her resignation, she believed, made it a non-story. Janet told me that her relationship to Gerald had not had a negative effect on her job performance; in fact, it had been the opposite.

Her daughter then got on the phone and demanded to know why what had happened seven years ago would matter now?

I explained that there were some people who believed that her mother’s marriage to Gerald was affecting her work. I also told her we had heard that the things that had happened in Oregon were still happening.

She was crying at this point which was difficult for me. I should point out that two days earlier a county official had warned me that the daughter was a potential suicide. However, others familiar with the situation had dismissed the description.

Janet’s last words to me were, "I hope you freeze in Hell."

Our story the next day quoted Janet as saying she had resigned "for the good of the department." In the third paragraph, we mentioned her fear of "publicity" about her husband’s conviction. We did not mention her fear of a newspaper article and her hope that the resignation would kill any story about Gerald.

In an attempt to protect the daughter, we identified Gerald’s victim only as a "relative."

After the story was published, Paxton, our executive editor, regretted the use of "relative." I had more qualms. Janet and the daughter both begged me not to write the story and I was unsure if it was really worth the havoc it must be causing them.

While it may sound horrible, there was a certain feeling of relief when Gerald was arrested a week later for molesting his daughter. The girl brought the initial accusations. Janet admitted to knowing about the situation but failed to report it, a crime for someone in her position.

In the arrest story we included information indicating Janet’s superior had allegedly failed to pass on reports of the recent molestation to other law agencies.

In the end, everyone was glad the newspaper printed what it knew. It had led to official action, resulting in Gerald’s arrest and an investigation into the alleged cover-up. That’s how the system is supposed to work.

The first to take his life was Thomas Smith of Sheridan, Arkansas. Smith stood up in front of his 11th-grade history class one Monday afternoon, professed his love for a girl sitting nearby and put a .22-caliber pistol to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

Later that day, at about 10 p.m., and after Little Rock television newscasts had reported Smith’s death, 19-year-old Thomas Chidester, a good friend of Smith’s, sat in his bedroom, placed a 45-caliber pistol to his temple and shot himself to death. A note he left behind said simply, "I can’t go on any longer." His grandmother found his body about 3:30 a.m.

The following day, Jerry McCool, 17 years old and an acquaintance of Smith’s, went to his bedroom, put a .22-caliber pistol to his right temple and ended his life. He and his father had discussed the Smith boy’s suicide the night before.

With three teen-age suicides in 24 hours, editors at the Arkansas Gazette knew two things: One, we had a big story on our hands. And two, we would have to handle the story with as much sensitivity as possible while fulfilling our news coverage obligations in one of the most competitive newspaper markets in the country.

Reminding ourselves of studies that show "copycat" suicides occur sometimes after news coverage of such events, we decided to play down somewhat the story about the first boy, Thomas Smith. Editors at our competitor, the Arkansas Democrat, played the story at the bottom of their front page. We opted for the bottom of page 18, our metro/state front.

By late that Tuesday morning, we were aware of the second suicide, and later in the day, learned of the third.

And, as much as we didn’t want to overplay the story, competitive pressures, as well as the fact that it had grown into a national story, forced us to make it our lead story for Wednesday.

Yet we still talked a lot about the way we played that front-page story. I referred to guidelines based on a study of imitative suicides by Dr. David Phillips and Katherine Lesyna of the University of California at San Diego.

They said, in part:

• The story should not be presented in a romanticized or idealized manner.
• The story should mention alternatives to suicide (for example, counseling or a suicide prevention center) and not mention related suicides or a suicide epidemic.
• The story should link suicide with negative outcomes such as pain for the suicide victim and his survivors.
• The story should be short, placed on an inside page and not be repeated.
• Editors should avoid presenting authorities or sympathetic ordinary people speaking for the reasonableness of suicide.
• As our coverage developed throughout that week it became clear to me that we would be able to adhere to some of those guidelines but not to some of the others.

Looking at it, point by point:

• The Gazette’s Sheridan suicide stories were not written in such a way so as to romanticize what had happened. Special care was taken by editors and reporters not to draw conclusions or to present images that attempted to justify the boys’ actions.
• Numerous references were made to the need for education concerning suicide and stressing the importance of counseling for youths with emotional problems. We did not, could not, though, honor the suggestion that the suicides not be linked or painted as an epidemic. Gazette readers knew the story was a big one. Local and national TV newscasts were all over it. The other statewide paper, the Democrat, was linking the suicides on its front page as well.
• Our stories and photographs of grieving parents and friends definitely linked suicide with negative outcomes.
• Our stories, and there were many written to cover numerous angles that developed, weren’t necessarily short in length (though some were), but were only as long as they needed to be to tell all the facts. Many of our Sheridan suicide stories were placed on inside pages.
• No "pro" suicide or sympathetic views were reported.

Also, we took every chance to take the edge off the otherwise grim situation. That’s why we ran a sensitively-written column by John S. Workman, the Gazette’s retired religion editor, on the same pages as our news coverage one day. The closing message to his column said: "Sheridan, you are loved. You are special. We need you. You need us. Together we can make it."

In short, Gazette editors did their best to give the big story the play it deserved while making sure the coverage was not overblown or irresponsible.

Across Little Rock, editors at our competitor and news directors at the TV stations were doing the same thing.

Bob Lutgen, assistant managing editor of the Democrat, told the Gazette that they decided to play the story on the front page from Day 1, but not without some thought to the ramifications.

"I certainly don’t want to glamorize the tragedy of it, but it’s a big news story when you have a youngster kill himself in front of the class . . . and then two others follow," Lutgen said. "It’s frightening."

Bob Steel, news director at KARK-TV, Little Rock, said staffers talked a lot about how to properly play the story. But the bottom line was that it was a big story and had to be covered as such.

"There is this copycat syndrome and we were worried about that. I told reporters who were sent to the scene to be sensitive, to not be pushy in trying to get interviews," Steel said. "But our position was that there was not a person in Sheridan who didn’t know that the suicides had occurred. Hey, it happened and we covered it."

All newspapers and TV stations in the market did a balanced job of giving readers and viewers lots of helpful information on how to spot teen-age depression, how to get counseling, etc., including KTHV.

John Rehrauer, the news director there, said, "There was good work on all the sidebars on TV and the newspapers, very helpful stuff," Rehrauer said. "All in all, I thought there was pretty good restraint on the part of all the media here."

I would tend to agree with that assessment. News organizations in Little Rock managed to keep readers abreast of the latest developments without being too dramatic or sensationalistic.

The Gazette offered its readers a Sunday front-page piece by a former staffer who lives in Sheridan. Bob Lancaster’s story painted nicely the mood of the close-knit community and put into perspective what the town was going through.

"How could such a thing be happening?" he wrote.

"By Wednesday, Sheridan was aswarm with inquisitive and sympathetic strangers asking such troubling questions. A caravan of out-of-town and out-of-state news reporters and photographers found their way into Sheridan, as did an even larger contingent of counselors and suicide-prevention specialists, some from as far away as San Francisco."

His story made clear that the notoriety had not been sought by the people of Sheridan.

And while it was tough for Gazette reporters to intrude on their lives day after day for a week (there were isolated incidents where townspeople lashed out at newspeople) the story needed to be told.

At the Gazette we tried to do what was right — on the one hand, right by our readers who depend on the newspaper for the straight story, on the other hand, right by the people of Sheridan.

Under difficult circumstances, I believe the Gazette and all other news organizations in Little Rock met the challenge.

Tim Richmond is dead. For him, the hurting is over.

But while he was alive - as it happened, the last week of his life - a sportswriter for The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star decided to get to the bottom of persistent rumors that the flamboyant former stock-car racer had AIDS.

The reporter, Dave Lewis, passed on to readers the gossip he had picked up around the NASCAR circuit. He had called a Florida hospital and his story described the vague responses of anonymous nurses, switchboard operators and medical-records clerks he had questioned about Richmond’s condition.

Incredibly, the writer described a conversation with "a man in a barely audible voice," a patient in a room the reporter said he believed to be Richmond’s. The man denied that Richmond was in the room and apologized for not being able to help. The reporter summarized his denial as "puzzling." There was an unmistakable implication that the feeble voice belonged to a disease-wracked sports figure who had dared at death’s door to deny the press the most intimate details of his medical history.

Several readers were shocked.

As the newspapers’ ombudsman, I, too, was appalled at so crass and mean-spirited a violation of a man’s privacy. I said so in my weekly column.

I asked Sports Editor Bob Kinney why the story had been published.

"What we have here is a guy who is very visible, very flamboyant, almost larger than life, who, all of a sudden, drops off the [racing] circuit," Kinney said. "He disappears. No one knows why. We don’t even know if he is dead or alive.

"It’s not unfair to ask why," Kinney said. "In fact, I think that’s our job."

At the time the story was published, Kinney acknowledged to me, the sports staff of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star did not know whether Richmond had AIDS or not. "We could be wrong. I don’t dispute that," he said. "But if we’re wrong, everybody’s wrong."

But Kinney did know that Richmond did not want anyone to know that he was sick. He had made that clear through his family, his doctors and his racing organization.

We do not know why. Perhaps it was because he knew that associating a person with exposure to AIDS frequently results in ostracism. Perhaps he knew that many people still falsely assume that AIDS affects only homosexuals and drug addicts.

I cast my lot with those editors who have policies extending anonymity to AIDS patients and those who have been exposed to the virus. The nature of the illness, even in obituaries, is not published unless there is a compelling reason for doing so.

One argument for publishing an AIDS diagnosis might be to warn those who may have been unwittingly exposed. But this justification requires that the cause of death of the famous and the non-famous be revealed with equal vigor. This is not done.

Richmond’s fans couldn’t help being curious about his condition. But in my view their curiosity, even when compassionate, was trivial when weighed against his right to privacy about matters relating to his own body.

Less than two weeks after the rumors about Richmond were published, he died. His obituary said the attending physician had refused to reveal the cause of death, citing the wishes of the family and medical confidentiality.

Ten days later, with the blessings of Richmond’s survivors, the doctor called a press conference to confirm that the driver had died of complications caused by AIDS contracted during a heterosexual liaison.

"There’s no way of knowing who that woman was," the Associated Press quoted Dr. David W. Dodson as saying.

Dodson explained that the family had decided to break their silence because "They lost a son to AIDS and they don’t want other parents to lose a son. . . . People need to take precautions."

Journalists, too, need to take precautions - precautions to ensure that pursuit of a story never makes them less than humane.

But the lesson is a hard one.

An internal memo to the sports staff, issued in response to my criticism, admitted that the story may have gone "beyond reporting to badgering."

"Having said all this," the memo read, "don’t get the idea that I think Sipe was correct in the basic premise of his column, that we shouldn’t be bothering Richmond and/or his family. I couldn’t disagree more with that. Tim Richmond was a public figure, a very public figure, and when he dropped from sight it was news. It also was news as to why he dropped from sight. If we made mistakes in this story, going after it in the first place wasn’t one of them. We can, must and will continue to be aggressive in seeking the news, and Tim Richmond and his illness was news, regardless of what Kerry Sipe says."

A story and photograph in The Daily Beacon, the University of Tennessee student newspaper, has prompted an apology from the UT Publications Board after the paper’s editor declined to apologize. The apology, made in a large paid ad in the Beacon, followed charges that the story was racist and sexist and that the photo, showing accident victim Leslie Williams in the street, was insensitive.

Williams later died from the injuries suffered when she was hit by a car while crossing the street. The driver was arrested on DUI charges.

Friends of the victim were offended by the Beacon’s description of Williams as a "20-year-old black wearing tight black pants and a black top." The story also quoted an eyewitness saying he had seen a "chick . . . flying through the air."

After the story and photo appeared, about 100 UT students staged a protest march. The demonstrators called for an apology from The Daily Beacon and for the resignation of student editor Clint Brewer. Brewer said he wouldn’t resign, nor would he apologize, because he "didn’t do anything wrong."

"People construed the description of her clothing as sexist but it wasn’t meant to be," Brewer said. "When a pedestrian wearing dark clothing is jaywalking at night, it is relevant to the reconstruction of the accident scene."

Brewer also defended the eyewitness account as "establishing the validity of the witness because he could identify the victim as a woman."

"We had the eyewitness quote, why paraphrase?" Brewer said. "We didn’t say ‘chick,’ he said ‘chick.’"

The Daily Beacon ran editorials explaining the motives behind these descriptions and the use of the photograph. The photo was not to "dehumanize" the victim, the editorial said, but to humanize the tragedy. Another editorial deplored the problem of drunken driving and the careless street-crossing habits of students.

Herb Howard, acting dean of the College of Communications and chair of the Publications Board, said that he’s sure the Beacon staff was "well-intentioned." Still, the board believed that an apology was warranted "not for the coverage, but the effect of the coverage."

"The picture and some of the words used in the article tended to be offensive and just added to the grief that the family and friends of this young woman were suffering," Howard said.

The assignment desk called at 7 a.m. A veteran cop from Norwood, a bedroom town south of Boston, had been found shot dead in his cruiser in the parking lot of a shopping mall. Line of duty, said the early reports. Press conference at police headquarters TBA.

I had sources in Norwood. There was time for a few calls and I made them. A young detective who knew me hesitated for just a second, and then he spilled it. Two shots fired, the first wound superficial — an abdomen shot. The second was the killer, straight to the heart. The gun, the dead cop’s own snub-nosed .38, was on the floor of the car. Powder burns on his hands, windows rolled up tight, doors locked. No note but not murder, suicide. Call again when you hit town, the detective offered.

It didn’t occur to me on the ride that within the next few hours, and again two months later, I’d be faced with a number of tough decisions.

The first, to call the suicide a suicide, was a no-brainer. The deceased was a cop, not an anonymous, private citizen whose death by any means was of no consequence to anyone. Besides, the wrong story — that the cop was murdered — was already getting big radio play throughout the Boston area. A source at the medical examiner’s office had confirmed the details of the suicide for me, and my then-employer, WCVB-TV, would certainly run the true story at 6 o’clock.

I only spent a few minutes at the press conference by Police Chief James Curran. Frank Walsh, the chief said, was one of the town’s "best known and best liked officers," and while there were no suspects yet in the shooting, Walsh "had been involved in a number of dangerous investigations" at the time of his death.

A follow-up call to my detective friend led me to another source and the next phase of the story. The dead officer was also a member of the town’s housing authority and had just learned he was under investigation for alleged embezzlement of authority funds. In fact, the source said, auditors from the attorney general’s office were due in town that very day to begin going over the books at the board’s offices.

Cameraman Len Spaulding joined me. We aimed a camera through a ground floor window, and there they were.

I didn’t wear a beeper in those days (April 1977) but when I got into Len’s car the desk was calling me frantically on the radio. The detective, my initial source, needed to talk to me before I reported anything. What he had to say stopped me in my tracks.

Frank Walsh was no career criminal. Clean sheet, terrific departmental record for nearly 30 years. What he was instead was a father of four whose family had been devastated by death, illness and mountainous financial problems in the months prior to his suicide.

If the story gets out it’s a suicide, the nervous detective told me, Walsh’s family would be deprived of the $125,000 death benefit awarded when a cop dies on the line.

Len and I sat in the car for an hour, talking through a half-dozen versions of a script before settling on one that seemed adequately sensitive and subdued. Len was the right cameraman to be working with that day: He hated the trumpets, oversimplification and sometimes brutal invasiveness of television news.

I called the producer, told her the whole story, and told her it was solid. She said it would be the lead and agreed with us on how it should be played.

None of us anticipated the violent response the story got. Even though the Boston Phoenix and later the mainstream press all eventually reported the correct story, we were first and we were TV, and TV is where the action is — and also the reaction. When our crew cars passed through the town, they were vandalized. A colleague covering the funeral was assaulted. I received believable death threats.

And the letters.

There were scores of them, most of them spilling rage, but several recognizing that while I had a job to do I had also added pain and suffering to an already reeling family. Some included newspaper pictures of Walsh’s children. Whether the campaign was organized or spontaneous, it was relentless.

And two months later came decision number three. A source in state government told me that the state pension board had quietly awarded the death benefit despite the official finding that the beleaguered officer had died by his own hand.

I didn’t report it, or tell my superiors there was anything to report. I wasn’t sure what management would have said about it but I knew how I felt. To do this last story would only hurt innocent people, Walsh’s family, people who had already been hurt by the death and its aftermath. A reporter constantly faces decisions about how to use the information he gets. Sometimes the decision, the fair decision, is not to use the information at all.

Maybe another news outlet would pick it up, I thought. And maybe, in that moment, I chose to behave not as a reporter but as a human being. Anyway, that’s what I told myself, and how I’ve chosen to remember the story. Nobody else, as it turned out, ever did report that the death benefit had been paid.

It seems like such a good idea: good for journalism, good for the community. When a local family launches a desperate search for the bone marrow donor and funds that will save their child’s life, it’s only natural that they ask local media for help.

When a child will certainly die unless the family can find a donor and raise $200,000 to pay for the life-saving treatment, what local station or newspaper could resist broadcasting the plea?

It’s the kind of story in which news media both observe and incite an outpouring of community support. It’s the kind of story that editors and publishers carry in their hip pockets to refute accusations that "you only publish the bad news."

And, in this form, the story just ought not be done.

There’s the obvious problem of fairness. Unless the market is small enough to encourage philanthropy on behalf of all local people in need, how can it be OK to do it for one? When editors and news directors single out which sick people merit media assistance, they are literally choosing who lives and who dies.

These individual stories of desperation should also not be told if telling them consumes air time and column inches that could be spent giving readers accurate information on bone marrow transplantation. Both can be done, but most often fundraising frenzy and human drama replace the stories that can help citizens improve a hurting system.

Bone marrow transplants are part of a new and rapidly developing technology. It is the only hope for patients with a variety of cancers and blood disorders. But that hope may be no more than a 20-30% chance of survival.

The bone marrow stories promoted by professional fundraisers who represent individual patients and by bone marrow registries often perpetuate false hope and myths about the treatment. The myths are damaging both to desperate patients and to the public.

Some donor registry representatives say that there’s never been a time when a local call for bone marrow donors resulted in finding the needed match. The most optimistic say it sometimes happens that a local volunteer will match the local patient, but very rarely.

Since there is little, if any, chance that the volunteer will match and actually have to donate, the altruism is symbolic rather than literal. But, "minute-ten" packages do not explain symbolic gestures well. The public and the donors are misled about who really benefits. If participating in such a drive delays a patient’s exhaustive search of all available registries, the fiction can be fatal.

The patient may rarely benefit, but the sponsoring bone marrow registry that lends organizational expertise always does. It adds new typed volunteers to its list of potential donors. And it builds its list on the patients’ need. The $75 per volunteer typing fee is paid by the patient’s family or by volunteers when, realistically, there is almost no hope that the patient will get a chance for life in this way.

Maybe. Patients have to know to check out multiple registries, have to have enough funds for multiple searches. And the typed volunteer must be interested in more than becoming a local hero.

The National Bone Marrow Registry is one possible source of bone marrow donation. It boasts 370,000 typed volunteers. If no match is found there, patients who know of other groups will try the Caitlin Raymond International Registry, which claims an additional 40,000 typed volunteers in the states and access to 250,000 overseas.

There are still other state and regional registries. Each charges the patient a separate fee to search for a bone marrow match. If a match is found — with a $l000 price tag at one registry — the matched patient has to hope that the typed volunteer won’t back out. Someone motivated by media-hyped donor drives to become a local hero by donating marrow to the little girl down the street won’t be interested in enduring the painful harvesting process months or years after the local patient has died.

There are other possibilities, possibilities easily forgotten as reporters exclaim over the youngster who gave his piggy bank to help a classmate.

Insurance companies could pay for bone marrow transplantation, as could state medicaid programs. Or, if the treatment is truly experimental, as some of these payers claim, federal research funds could be set aside for the treatment. Or the federal government could pick up the cost, using the same argument it now offers for national access to kidney transplants: It’s cheaper to do the transplants than to maintain patients with the less curative types of treatment.

Each individual case of need provides opportunities for exposing these real issues of bone marrow transplant. But usually audiences don’t get the economists explaining how expensive heroic health care fits into personal and public finances. Nor are they provided policymakers forced to explain why solid organs and blood are managed nationally but bone marrow is not. Instead, the stories offer fundraisers and family who thank the community on behalf of little Jimmy.

News media perpetuate an unfair system when they help raise funds for individuals and fail to question the assumption that needy people must pay or die. News media share in society’s moral burden of allowing the wealthy to hoard the right to life.

He killed himself on a Saturday, four days before the newspaper’s deadline. By the time we’d pasted up Wednesday night, we were grateful for the time.

Todd, a 14-year-old freshman at Ipswich (Massachusetts) High School, shot himself at home one morning in March, 1985. I was editor of the Ipswich Chronicle at the time, a weekly newspaper covering the North Shore seacoast community.

North Shore Weeklies, the parent company of the Ipswich Chronicle, had an unwritten policy about suicides: If the person who killed himself was a public official, or if he killed himself in public, we covered it and called it suicide. If we knew it was a suicide but the person was relatively unknown in the community and he did it privately, we wrote a straight obituary, leaving out cause of death.

It was clear that we would report on Todd’s death and call it suicide. But it was not clear how extensively we would cover the story or where it would run.

When we began dealing with the story, the editor-in-chief and I disagreed with the newspaper chain’s publisher/owner on how to cover it. Selma Williams, the editor-in-chief, and I thought the coverage should be fairly low-key, but Bill Wasserman, always mindful of the competition, two daily papers, was worried the dailies would cover it extensively.

Selma, Bill and I discussed the story from all angles. Todd did not shoot himself in public. But he was a high school student and the school was buzzing with the news. In addition, Ipswich High School observed a moment of silence in his memory. The story had become a public event.

While we continued to argue about the story, one of the daily newspapers came out with a front-page lead story reporting the death. "Ipswich High School student shoots himself," the headline blared in 48-point type.

About an hour after that paper hit the street, I got a call from Dick Thompson, superintendent of Ipswich schools. He was very upset by the daily’s headline and he wanted to know how we were planning to run the story. I said we hadn’t made a firm decision; did he want to talk with our publisher? I pushed that huddle because I thought it would be helpful if Wasserman could hear Thompson’s side.

Thompson swayed Wasserman, who seemed now to lean toward calling Todd’s death suicide but leaving out quotes about him from classmates and teachers.

Wasserman decided to call a local psychiatrist, Dr. Howard Stone, who often worked with adolescents, and explained our predicament.

Stone gave us new information. He said he was aware of a possible suicide pact, where other students had agreed to kill themselves if one did it. We now realized even more that we were carrying an enormous responsibility. Stone understood our needs and agreed that it would be irresponsible, and perhaps, even more upsetting to other unstable youngsters if we ignored the story.

We thanked Stone and huddled again, this time coming up with a mutually agreeable solution. In the middle of page two, with a two-deck, 24-point headline, we ran a short, straightforward story telling what had happened. The other obituaries ran farther back in the paper.

On the editorial page, we ran a lead editorial about an unrelated story. The second and third editorials were about teenage suicide.

The first one carried the headline, "Looking for answers in the wake of tragedy." It started, "Suicide - chosen death - has shaken Ipswich this week."

"… What everyone faces after a suicide is a feeling of helplessness about the death that has occurred. But what becomes critically important is that we use our best resources to avert any additional tragedy."

That editorial praised the high school administration for reaching out to other students "who may feel despair." It continued in part, "The school’s example can be a model for the whole community. Counseling can help…"

The next editorial was called, "Help is available." It was boxed in 4-point broken tape, encouraging readers to clip it. There, we listed resources for those who contemplate suicide, and we included names and phone numbers.

It was one of the those stressful, wrenching times when you put in fifteen hours for six inches of copy. But the effort was well worth it. We didn’t hear a single complaint from the community, the superintendent and the consulting psychologist even complimented our coverage. Most important, we believe we did the right thing.

A city official tells a newspaper reporter that the city is pulling $3 million out of a bank because of the bank’s shaky financial condition.

The reporter knows that the story could cause a run on the bank. So does the bank’s chairman, who for that reason asks the reporter not to print the story.

I was the reporter, covering banks for the Tulsa World in 1986. Tulsa’s city treasurer told me one afternoon that the city was withdrawing half its total deposit from the Bank of Commerce because of the bank’s "capital problems."

I thought we should run the story on the front page the next day, which was Tuesday. I thought the bank’s depositors might want to know that city officials considered the bank a risky place to leave money.

My editors thought otherwise. They held the story a few days, tinkered with a few key paragraphs — i.e., all of them — and ran it on Saturday, when the bank was closed. I took my name off the story.

To be fair, maybe someone at the World was afraid of breaking the law. No one at the paper ever told me about it, but Oklahoma has a law that makes it unlawful "to publish, utter or circulate false, malicious or unprivileged statement or representation for the purpose of injuring any banking institution."

But breaking that law is about like committing libel. A newspaper has to print a story that not only is false but malicious in its intent. I wrote a few other stories at the World that caused runs on banks, and no one ever mentioned this law to me.

Concerning the Bank of Commerce, maybe I was just insensitive to the issues. I thought the chairman of the Bank of Commerce probably was right, that my story might very well cause a run on his bank. And the executive editor of the World, Bob Haring, agreed with me; he also advocated holding the story.

But this didn’t strike me as a hard case in journalism. You contact all the parties involved, put in all the boilerplate paragraphs about how deposits are insured up to $100,000 and the numbers showing how broke the bank is, and be done with it. So maybe nervous depositors do storm the bank the next day and withdraw millions in deposits. It’s nice to know people read your paper.

Think of a similar situation involving just about any other business — say, a restaurant. City inspectors say this restaurant has run afoul of the health code. Does the newspaper print that story? Word travels fast when you raise the specter of ptomaine poisoning. No way the restaurant is going to see a sudden surge in business after that story appears.

So what about an unhealthy bank? Is it wrong for a newspaper to print a story about a city government pulling its money out of a troubled bank? Here was an institution that was virtually broke, that had lost $15 million the year before and was being kept open only by the patience of the regulators. Did it deserve special treatment from a newspaper?

The World obviously thought so. Here’s the first paragraph of the story I took my name off of:

"The City of Tulsa will be taking new bids soon for a bank to handle the city’s accounts, according to City Treasurer and Budget Director Ed Koepsel."

In the fourth paragraph it said the city had pulled $3 million out, but not why. That came in the sixth paragraph, where there was an oblique phrase about how city officials thought withdrawing the money was the "prudent" thing to do.

They buried the lede, after holding the story for almost a week. I took my name off because it would have made me look stupid.

That story ran on Saturday. My competitor at The Tulsa Tribune, Mark Davis, followed up on Monday. Davis didn’t tiptoe around the subject.

He put the punch in the lede, saying in the first paragraph that the city was pulling its money because of the bank’s "capital problems." He added the crucial $3 million figure in the second paragraph, saying the city had shifted the money to another bank because of the Bank of Commerce’s "capitalization difficulties."

About two months later, on May 8, the Bank of Commerce was declared insolvent by the state banking commissioner. He said the bank was $17 million short of the capital required by regulators, the shortfall due to "enormously bad judgment" by the bank’s management in making loans. The loans were in energy and real estate, of course.

The commissioner also revealed that he had closed the bank a day earlier than he’d planned, because of an "uncontrollable run" precipitated by the Tulsa news media. No doubt he was referring to a story that appeared in a Tulsa paper the day before, on May 7, that said the bank was about to be closed.

My name wasn’t on that story, either. Nor did it run in the Tulsa World.

The priest’s murder had been page-one, top-of-the-broadcast news in St. Louis. Father Mario Ross, well-known and popular at St. Louis University where he headed the campus ministry, had been fatally shot while in Knoxville for a conference.

Now, a week later, both Knoxville newspapers, according to AP, were quoting anonymous police sources as saying that "sexual paraphernalia" was found on the priest’s body, after he had been found dying in his rented car in an area known for prostitution.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Executive City Editor Laszlo Domjan knew that this news would be painful not only to the priest’s family and friends but to many in the St. Louis area’s large Catholic population.

By coincidence, the news had broken on the day of Ross’s funeral in St. Louis. Domjan turned to Harry Levins, senior writer and writing coach, to handle what now had become a super-sensitive story.

The first decision had to be whether the funeral story should be separate from the Knoxville story or the two combined into one. The need for a combined story became obvious when reporter Lisa C. Jones returned from covering the funeral. She said the Knoxville news, already being broadcast on St. Louis radio, was common knowledge among those at the funeral and several had mentioned it to her.

Even in the funeral service, Jones said, there had been several indirect references to the apparent circumstances of the murder. One prayer, printed in the program, asked forgiveness for Father Mario’s sins "committed through human weakness." Levins used that as the ending for the story, thinking it might make Catholic readers "feel a little better," he explained later. But the ending got cut when the story was shortened for the final edition.

While Jones got on the telephone to Knoxville to try to confirm information, Levins began putting the story together. He argued that the lead should be based only on the funeral. That would govern the headline, he pointed out.

There was discussion about using a combined lead, Levins said, but editors at city desk agreed to accept a first paragraph about only the funeral if he would put the Knoxville angle in the second paragraph. Any lower in the story would make it appear to be buried, they argued.

Details that the Knoxville newspapers had reported were more graphic than the "sexual paraphernalia" in the AP story. They included:

— A type of ring "designed to enhance sexual performance" was found on the priest’s body by emergency medical personnel.

— The priest, who was not in clerical garb, had spent time before the shooting in a bar frequented by prostitutes.

— His pants were unzipped, when he was found unconscious.

— A page from the Yellow Pages listing adult book stores was found in his car.

Levins put most of that information into his story, except that he used a euphemism, "sexual device", instead of describing the ring. The more specific term and its description were used in some local TV newscasts.

In its final form, the story contained 25 paragraphs, with the lead on the funeral, the next seven paragraphs on the Knoxville information, and the rest on the funeral service, including several eulogistic quotes about Ross.

The decision about play of the story was made at the regular mid-afternoon meeting between the managing editor and news editors. The suggestion from city desk that the story and photo go on page 3A instead of page 1 met no objections. All agreed that the paper should not appear to be exploiting the sensational nature of the sexual aspects of the story.

The story went into the center of the page, under a three-column photo of Franciscan priests carrying the casket. The headline said: "Funeral Mass Is Held For Slain Priest."

Managing Editor David Lipman said that he thought the story had been handled with appropriate care.

Still, many anguished and angry readers telephoned the reader’s advocate, my title as news ombudsman, to complain about the story when it appeared. The callers asked why "unproven" allegations had been printed about a good man who could not defend himself. One woman called the story "tabloid writing and filthy."

I reported these reactions in my column that Sunday, explaining some of the discussions that had been held. And I told readers that I agreed with the way the story had been handled. Hurtful as it was to many readers, the news out of Knoxville was being widely reported by radio and television. Had the Post-Dispatch failed to report it, readers could justifiably have accused the paper of a cover-up.

Post-Dispatch Editor William F. Woo wrote about the story in his personal column that Sunday, also speaking of the difficult decisions it had required editors to make.

"The press must be sensitive," he wrote, "but if it suppresses a relevant fact, because it may be distasteful to particular readers, then it becomes harder to justify relevant facts in other stories that may upset different readers.

"It is a short step from a journalism that sacrifices the truth so as to avoid offending a special audience to a journalism that sacrifices the truth to please certain people.

"When you start down that road, you can go very quickly from honest journalism to a corrupt journalism that cannot be believed."

I agree with Woo’s conclusions. The sordid circumstances surrounding the priest’s murder were handled, I thought, with as much care and sensitivity as possible. But I wish that the excerpt from the prayer about "human weakness" had not been cut out of the story. That might have eased some of the pain I heard in the voices of callers who did not want to believe what they had read.

It had all the elements of which heroes are made.

On a Saturday evening in August, 1982, a firefighter died in a furniture warehouse fire. Killed when a wall collapsed was Norman E. Creger, a 17-year veteran of the Jackson (MI) Fire Department.

The Sunday Citizen Patriot devoted most of page one to the fire. The mayor ordered city flags to half-staff. An honor guard of firefighters flanked the casket until the funeral. Fire officials from throughout Michigan formed a three-mile procession following a pumper truck with Creger’s bronze casket atop it.

Creger’s widow received the America flag covering his coffin. It was a hero’s departure.

And then.

Forty-five days later, the newspaper revealed that Creger was legally drunk at the time of his death.

Rumors of Creger’s drinking were heard within hours of his death. He had been off-duty at the time of the fire, in a bar. When summoned, he finished his beer and drove to the blaze.

Creger was one of four firemen playing hoses on the north side of the four-story building. Fire Capt. Leland Bowman saw the wall might fall and ordered them back.

Witnesses said the other three firefighters sprinted to safety, but Creger turned and walked into a double-headed parking meter. The impact knocked him flat.

Seconds later, the falling wall covered him. Creger died of massive chest injuries.

A month after the fire, city officials received the autopsy report on Creger. Because it was a bombshell, they kept it secret for two weeks as they discussed legal ramifications.

The report indicated Creger’s blood alcohol level was 0.16 percent. In Michigan, a motorist with 0.10 percent is considered to be under the influence.

The police report was inconclusive on whether Creger’s drinking was a factor in his death.

What made this an important news story for the Jackson community?

The day the autopsy was released, the consensus at the Citizen Patriot news meeting was to play the story on page one, with a single column headline, not as the lead story. It was the most interesting story of the day, but we didn’t make it the lead story on page one because we knew it would be unpopular, and would draw criticism wherever we put it. Knowing our conservative community, we anticipated the cries of "Sensationalism!"

Numerous complaints from the public followed publication of the autopsy story which revealed Creger’s drinking.

"How can you speak ill of the dead," was the general complaint, "especially a hero who died serving the public."

"Do you really expect firemen to show up if your newspaper catches fire?"

"How crummy, anything to sell newspapers!"

"You owe the Creger family an apology."

In retrospect, I would not change our coverage of the fire. Perhaps handling the drinking/autopsy story differently might have prevented some of the criticism. We could have prepared the public for the drinking disclosure by a story saying an investigation was underway into Creger’s death, and that he came to the fire from a bar.

The number of complaints might also have been reduced if we had emphasized that it was the city’s investigation which revealed he had been drinking. This might have made it clear that the drinking was not something the newspaper came up with on its own.

No matter how we approached the autopsy story, some people would still have been angry that we had "tarnished" a hero. "What good did it do?" was often the question raised. They don’t see a newspaper’s function as journalists do.

Newspapers are not in the business of making or breaking heroes, but reporting events as they actually happen.

The phones didn’t stop ringing that day. Every time you picked up one you knew what was coming. It was gut wrenching.

And then the letters started. It seemed they would never stop.

The story went like this: A dentist in town had a mental breakdown. On a spring day in 1986, he took a walk down a busy street, removing his clothing as he went. He took a swing at a police office who tried to stop him. Soon other officers arrived. When they tried to get hold of the naked man, he became violent. A couple of police officers were injured. He bit one on the hand. Another was taken to the hospital with a back injury. Finally, an animal warden who was nearby helped get the man under control with a device used to restrain animals.

The story ran on the front page. Many readers who called and wrote were absolutely livid. Some knew him, some didn’t. Why did you use his name? Why did you put it on the front page? How can you be so insensitive? How could you do that to his family? How could you ruin his reputation? Some demanded a public apology. One guy threatened to alter my face.

It was the worst beating the Medina County Gazette had taken in my seven years here.

Three years later, I still think we did the right thing. And if it happened again, I’d play it the same way.

I don’t think there’s much question such an incident merits a story of some kind. The tough calls, the most controversial ones, were using his name and story placement.

In most cases, we do not use a suspect’s name unless he has been charged. The dentist wasn’t charged. Police said he would undergo psychological evaluation.

Why name him? Mainly because he committed an act of violence. Attacking police officers is a serious matter. In withholding names of suspects not charged, you have to make a distinction. If person is not charged for lack of evidence, it’s one thing. If he’s not charged based on a political and/or administrative decision, it’s another.

I don’t think a police decision on such a matter should dictate a news decision, especially on a case so sensitive. You have to ask yourself, if this guy was a drifter, would he have escaped criminal charges?

But it is who the man was that made the strongest case for identifying him. Being a medical professional means carrying a greater degree of public trust than most people.

Thus, I think newspapers have a duty to hold medical professionals to a higher degree of accountability.

It comes down to this: His patients had a right to know.

If they then decide to stay with their dentist or drop him - if they "destroy" his practice, as the Gazette was charged with doing - that’s their decision. That’s a decision they should have a right to make.

If the man wasn’t identified and later snapped with a patient in his chair, then where do we stand? How do we justify our actions then?

There was some disagreement in the newsroom on the story placement. One editor believed it should run on page two with other crime briefs. Front-page treatment was sensational, more than one in the newsroom said (a sentiment shared by many readers). They argued it was exploiting a man’s psychological problem.

My motive for playing it on front was rather simple. It was the most extraordinary local story of the day. Anything farther back would be underplaying. We’d really have to examine our motives for that.

Some of our readers would call my criteria for front-page news insensitive. I didn’t worry about his career, his family. And I won’t take responsibility for the story’s impact on those things. I guess that difference in perspective is what most often puts the media in the public’s doghouse.

Human nature is funny. When bizarre events happen, they dominate conversations in restaurants, stores, offices, banks and newsrooms. Yet put in print something that was yesterday’s conversation piece and it just may blow up in your face.

A postscript: After some friends of the dentist asked why we didn’t try to find out what he was going through, we attempted to approach that subject. It’s not only fair, it would shed insight to the stresses of dentistry. To our surprise, we learned dentistry is quite a stressful line of work.

We were turned away by the family.

As it turned out, the story did not destroy the man’s practice. He apparently received some psychological help and his shingle is still in place.

It’s a plea that’s hard to refuse.

The person on the phone is telling you of a local family saddled with huge medical bills and looming tragedy.

The parents are unemployed, there’s no insurance, and their 4-year-old daughter is stricken with a rare form of cancer. A fund drive is being planned.

"We were wondering if you could do a story," the caller says.

On its face, the story doesn’t appear to pose a problem. It has drama, tension, human interest - all the requisites for a compelling feature and heart-rending pictures.

You interview the family, run the story, and go on to other things.

Then the phone rings again. A family with a similar plight has the same request.

At this point, news judgment, fairness, and ethics can collide.

Do you agree to do a similar story - again - knowing you may be opening the floodgates for other afflicted parties? Do you fudge on a decision by telling the caller you’ll "pass this information on to the appropriate editor"?

More bluntly, do you say "yes" to one stricken family and "no" to another? Should you?

Providing coverage of individuals with fatal or potentially fatal diseases poses some sticky questions.

The stories, while they can be journalistically justified, also cast the media in the role of private fund-raiser - a role many editors and reporters find uncomfortable.

More importantly, these stories cast us in a God-playing role because we, in effect, decide who gets to benefit from the public pocketbook.

A case in point: Last year, we ran a large feature and photo on a 1-year-old boy needing a kidney transplant. His uninsured family’s medical expenses had topped $100,000.

The community took up the cause. A transplant fund was started. A local supermarket provided free breakfasts in exchange for donations. A woman donated her Tupperware party proceeds. Eight-thousand balloons were launched, each bearing a donor’s name.

Of course, this was all wonderful. What was not so wonderful was another family calling a couple months later, chiding us for the "unfair" coverage (we ran a news brief) given their cancer-stricken child.

What happened? We had simply slipped into the journalist’s we-just-did-that-kind-of-story mentality and given the second family’s story a passing nod.

OK, so life is unfair. Trouble is, that’s not supposed to apply to the media.

The fallout from the second family prodded us to assess our treatment of such stories.

We toyed with giving uniform play to everyone. That is, all stories falling into the grave illness/fund drive category would be given similar space and placement in the newspaper.

But that suggestion was quickly dismissed. Because each case is different, with some more compelling than others, it would be wrong to don blinders and give every story six inches on an inside page or, conversely, 20 inches and a photo on page one.

It was also suggested that our coverage be determined by an illness’ severity, with terminal or potentially terminal cases rating full feature coverage and non-terminal illnesses accorded lesser play.

Again, that suggestion was ruled out for the same reasons stated above.

Ultimately, we decided to accommodate, with at least a news brief, anyone who requested "coverage."

As a community newspaper we believe we can, and should, serve the reader in a literal sense, or at least more so than metropolitan media.

When we get one of these phone calls, we find it helpful to apply the personal litmus test: If this were happening to our family, what reasonable expectations would we have of our community’s newspaper?

The key word here is "reasonable." This gives us a working, albeit subjective, guideline in deciding upon the degree of coverage. This is important because, as stated earlier, all such requests get their day in print. Vetoing coverage is not an option.

Ultimately, though, this type of story jumps through the same set of hoops (reader interest, timeliness, etc.) as other feature stories. But an additional test - comparable worth, if you will - separates it from the general feature genre.

We try to determine a story’s merit by comparing it with similar terminal illness stories we’ve done: Does this story break new ground? Is it more or less compelling than previous stories? Can it be beefed up with any hard news, say, input from researchers on recent treatment breakthroughs?

Answering these questions allows us to be professionally equitable in our coverage while also providing specific reasons for our amount of coverage when we field reader inquiries.

Simply put, it allows us to cull the herd. All these stories are "worthy;" the guidelines help us determine what is newsworthy.

Our guidelines seem to be working well. At the least, reporters and editors are being spared the agony of making seat-of-the-pants decisions on these stories.

At most, they’ve made the duty of playing God something we can live with.

For further analysis of this issue, see "Deciding on Coverage."

Skyrocketing medical costs. Growing competition for available donor organs and other life-saving treatments. An increasingly media "savvy" public who knows that news coverage of their family member’s illness can mean thousands of dollars for medical bills and the difference between life and death.

Add these factors up and the only answer is: Newsrooms can expect a proliferation of requests for "help" from people vying for coverage of their loved one’s plight. The call which now comes to the news desk every few months about the sick child needing money for a bone marrow transplant or the loving mother of four waiting for a kidney donor will eventually be coming weekly, maybe daily.

So how are newsrooms handling these requests for coverage? How should they be?

Response to the problem of medical need runs the gamut from community newspapers like the Free Press in Mankato, MN, giving everyone at least a "mention" to newspapers like the Atlanta Journal and Constitution having an informal policy against doing stories on individual cases.

Mike King, science and medical writer at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, is asked "about once a month" to write about a sick child in need.

"I have to say to them that there are lots of people that need money for medical care, but who don’t get the opportunity to raise money through the news media," he said.

King handles the problem by trying to help readers understand the broader social issues. He writes about the increasing shortage of donor organs, the high costs of health care, and about the inequity of who gets specialized medical attention.

Dick Knox, senior medical writer for The Boston Globe writes about individual need cases only as illustration of the larger problem of public policy. "We have decided in this country that police and fire services ought to be universally available no matter who needs them. We haven’t decided that with medical care."

Other news organizations report on individual cases if they are considered "special."A case which succeeded in meeting this criteria involved 7-year old Norma Lynn Peterson from Windham, ME. She received a new liver at the Pittsburgh transplant center last July. News coverage netted her family $100,000 to help offset medical costs not covered by insurance. She also got a video camera, a truckload of toys, and a new puppy from strangers alerted to her situation.

The news directors from Maine’s three television stations said that how the community responded to the little girl made her news. But Norma Lynn’s parents and their main fund raiser see it differently.

The news coverage caused the overwhelming community response, they say, not the other way around. The family’s fund raiser knew if one television station came out to just one event, the rest would follow. And, they did.

Norma Lynn was not the only sick child in Maine last summer nor the only transplant recipient. She was not the patient with the most financial need. But she was the only one who got news coverage.

Maine’s TV news directors all agree that they wouldn’t cover every sick child in need of financial assistance. "Our business is not to raise money," Jeff Marks, news director at WCSH-TV, said, "our business is to tell an interesting story."

"If we tried to do every transplant, we’d be doing the transplant hour," said Jim Sanders, WGME-TV news director.

If news organizations choose to cover individual need cases, they should do more than allow the medium to be used for fund raising. Since the station or newspaper is, in effect, endorsing private contributions by providing news coverage, it should at least give the audience information about how that money will be used.

How much money does the individual really need? The public should know if medicaid or health insurance is covering part of the cost. Has a foundation been set up to handle contributions? What are the limitations on how donated money can be used?

The determination that one person’s need is newsworthy must be stronger than good P.R. Economic realities guarantee that editors and news directors who decide these stories ad hoc will soon be faced with explaining to a relative why last week’s bone marrow transplant was news, but this week’s isn’t.

For further analysis of this issue, see "When journalists play God".

Never before or since have five column inches on an inside page generated such fury from our readers.

The story began routinely enough. A 25-year-old man from a nearby town was found hanging from a tree in his backyard.

The Free Press (Mankato, MN) ran a short story about the death with few details, noting only that it was being investigated. Sheriff’s deputies were unusually tight-lipped about the case. In the week following the initial story, rumor fed upon speculation until several bizarre murder theories had circulated.

Interest in the death was heightened because the young man was a well-known teacher of the physically and mentally disabled. A local lecturer and volunteer, he was admired by many.

A week after a neighbor had found the nude body, the sheriff’s department and coroner released a ruling on the death: accidental, due to sexual asphyxia.

Even among our well-read news staff, few knew much about sexual asphyxiation. The practice, also called autoerotic asphyxiation, involves attempting to reach a heightened sexual orgasm by cutting off the oxygen and blood supply to the head during masturbation. Not everyone who tries it dies, but accidental death often occurs when the person loses consciousness and falls forward, being strangled by the rope or belt tied to his neck.

The question came immediately to mind: If we were somewhat shocked would our readers be at all prepared? The answer, we knew, was an unequivocal "no."

Editors, the reporter and the publisher met to discuss the options. The rumors were too widespread to even consider letting the incident pass without mention. Could we say the death was definitely not foul play and leave it at that? It would, of course, leave readers with the impression that it was a suicide — a normally unsettling cause of death for family and friends to accept, but in this case a less embarrassing conclusion than the true circumstances.

The argument to simply rule out foul play was buttressed by the fact that radio and television stations did not give the official cause of death in their reports immediately following the ruling.

But other reporters and editors argued that the death involved a week-long sheriff’s investigation and had gained wide public interest. A hazy article would not adequately answer all the questions.

And what about the newspaper’s role as an educator to others who may have thought about experimenting with the potentially deadly practice?

"Doc" Sanford, the savvy, progressive coroner who ruled on the death, came to the newspaper office arguing for publication of full details. "This is being done by a lot of people out there. It’s dangerous and they should know it," he said.

After some quick studying we learned that accidental death from the practice, is indeed, no fluke. According to an FBI study an estimated 500-1,000 people die yearly in the U.S. from sexual asphyxiation. The agency describes most victims as male adolescents or young adults who are happy and well-adjusted. Besides the deaths, many people are brain damaged by the practice.

After learning of the frequency of the practice, another possibility occurred. Perhaps we could do a short story on the death coupled with a longer news-feature on the facts about sexual asphyxia: state and national statistics, an interview with Doc Sanford, etc. The problem with this option, we worried, was overplaying the story and being open to charges of sensationalizing a family’s personal tragedy.

After examining all the arguments, we went ahead with an article we hoped would fulfill our public record reporting obligations, warn others about a dangerous practice, and at the same time, not give undue attention to the story. A short, five-inch story on the bottom of page 15 gave the coroner’s ruling of the death with a brief, clinical description of sexual asphyxia.

We expected criticism. But no one was prepared for the onslaught of outrage. Telephone calls and letters to the editor continued for weeks.

From the mother: "One word — accidental — would have explained it all. [The story] didn’t serve any good purpose, but only angered and hurt people."

From a minister: ". . . Your article, written from the very depth of the sewer, was totally uncalled for."

Even many staff members’ families and friends thought the newspaper was far out of bounds.

A couple of years later, we still are angrily confronted about "that story."

Would we have done the story the same way knowing the outcome?

I don’t think so. I think we would run a longer, not a shorter story. While that might seem like an invitation for even more criticism, I think it would actually have brought less.

If we had spent time talking to local doctors, counselors, ministers and perhaps even the family, we could have presented an informative, yet sensitive article. Such a story would also have given us an opportunity to talk about the good things the victim had done.

The sad affair leaves me with two firm conclusions: What we can justify as journalistically "right" doesn’t necessarily make it right for our readers. And, who we write about is often much more important than what we write.

Had the same story been about a down-and-out jail inmate (more frequently victims of sexual asphyxia) there would have been little outrage. The problem that most readers had with our story was they couldn’t reconcile their feelings for a very caring person with the fact that he died in a fashion they couldn’t easily comprehend.

Still, I think the decision to print the cause of death was correct. A young person cannot leave the face of the earth without someone explaining it to his community. And a dangerous practice, no matter how unseemly to some, can most effectively be discussed, and perhaps, prevented by describing a local example.

Westword, Denver’s brash alternative weekly, gave it full front-page play: "CU Coach Bill McCartney keeps the faith and gets a grandson fathered by his star quarterback."

But University of Colorado quarterback Sal Aunese and McCartney’s 20-year-old daughter, Kristyn, were not married.

And the young Samoan football star was dying of cancer.

Talk-radio telephones buzzed with outrage. The story was the topic of loud debate in every newsroom. But few Colorado journalists were writing.

The university confirmed that Aunese was the father of McCartney’s grandson on Aug. 30, the day the Westword story broke. But The Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, Boulder Camera and two of Denver’s four commercial television stations maintained silence, refusing to chase a story they’d all known about for months.

The tone of the Westword story, which depended exclusively on unnamed sources, was ugly. Aunese came across as an uncaring lout, Kristyn as little more than a tramp. But the harshest treatment was of McCartney.

"They tried to make it a story by putting an angle on it that Bill McCartney, a very Christian-type fellow, can’t control the team, or even his own daughter," said Rocky Mountain News Sports Editor Barry Forbis."That’s a pretty weak peg."

For Westword writer Bryan Abas, Kristyn’s pregnancy proved his central contention: "McCartney has lost the respect of his players, and some are retaliating in one of the most humiliating, intensely personal ways imaginable."

Denver Post Managing Editor Gay Cook called that "cheap-shot journalism."

"I don’t think the thesis of the article was substantiated by the reporting," she said. "And I think it came very close to a gross invasion of Kristyn McCartney’s privacy."

The mainstream media boycott of the story continued even after the 21 year-old Aunese died Sept. 23. Only the News, in Aunese’s obituary, noted that he had left "a 6-month-old son, Timothy." No last name. No further identification.

But on Sept. 25, before 2,000 mourners at a campus memorial service, a somber Coach McCartney addressed his daughter and resolved a dilemma for worried editors who still hadn’t decided how to cover the story.

"Kristy McCartney, you’ve been a trooper. You could have had an abortion, gone away and had the baby somewhere else to avoid the shame, but you didn’t. . . . You’re going to raise that little guy and all of us are going to have an opportunity to watch him."

The photo of Kristyn standing with Timothy by the casket was played prominently in all three dailies and on all TV newscasts.

The News also included an excerpt from a little-noticed June interview in which Aunese had proudly discussed his son with the sports editor of his hometown paper, the Oceanside, CA, Blade-Tribune.

But Aunese consistently refused or ignored requests to talk with Denver reporters. He never explained his reasons.

Except for Westword, Denver editors decided not to go with the story unless Aunese and the McCartneys were willing. McCartney opened the door at the memorial service. Until then, "he didn’t talk about it and we didn’t write it," said Forbis. Few felt they needed to confirm what was widely accepted as truth.

Most editors’ reservations revolved around issues of taste and privacy. For some, the clincher was that Aunese was dying. Others refused to violate Kristyn’s privacy, rejecting the Abas argument that the daughter of a public figure is, per se, a public figure.

In conversation, several criticized Westword for playing to racial stereotypes by emphasizing Kristyn’s relationships with black and Polynesian players. Others objected to an implied double standard of sexual conduct for men and women students.

All worried about how the community would react to a distasteful story.

"If I were maybe 20 to 25 years younger, I’d say, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve got to do this story now’," Barrie Hartman, executive editor of the Boulder Camera, said last month. But good sense for a paper of my size in a community like this says you put the brakes on it for a while."

Denver Post Editor Chuck Green, who hadn’t participated in daily news decisions on the story, criticized his colleagues for failing to aggressively pursue Westword’s allegations that McCartney’s religion has intruded into the CU locker room.

At KMGH-TV, News Director Mike Youngren observed that a tendency to take the easy way out seems to prevail in Colorado newsgathering. It took Sports Illustrated to fully report the off- field problems of CU football players, he notes.

Westword Editor Patricia Calhoun speculated that the boycott had much to do with the area’s fondness for football.

It remained for the state’s most idiosyncratic daily to take the most independent path. Editor Clint Talbott of the Colorado Daily, which is based on the CU campus but has no formal ties to the university, decided Kristyn’s pregnancy was a private matter.

Even after McCartney’s memorial service remarks, Talbott refused to join other newspapers in the rush to print the story. "It didn’t matter that it wasn’t news," he wrote in an editorial on Oct. 6. "It just mattered that the story was a good read, and the papers pounced on the first legitimate excuse to put it in print."

McCartney says he really hadn’t planned his memorial service remarks. But his daughter had been publicly attacked and deserved public validation. He apparently decided that the story would be handled right.

"The mainstream media had this story before that magazine," he said last month. "Obviously it was a tasty story, one that would have certainly garnered headlines, and the fact that they left it alone spoke volumes to me."