State of Local

The mall shootings in Omaha and the availability of security photos and 911 tapes forced a lot of consideration in newsrooms about how graphic to be and what kind of warnings to issue to viewers and online readers. At almost the same time as the shootings, a thousand miles away, a smaller but also horrific incident took place and forced a similar weighing of high interest against community standards.

KPHO in Phoenix was providing live coverage of police chasing a bank robber at up to 100 mph when the robber crossed the center line of a four-lane road and crashed head-on into another vehicle. Both drivers were killed in what anyone seeing it would describe as a spectacular and jaw-dropping collision. Some would say that’s what the helicopter chase business is all about.

But cameras immediately pulled away and the station did not show the crash again on TV. Viewers instead saw tape of the chase leading up to a split second before the crash, including smoking brakes on the innocent car. Meanwhile, the KPHO website posted the full tape and kept it up for a couple of hours before news director Tom Bell pulled it down, going instead with the chase leading up to the impact but not showing the collision.

Bell’s initial call is tough to argue with. TV is different from the web, he pointed out in an email exchange with me. It’s on in the living room with grandma, kids and everyone else watching with little expectation of extremely shocking content coming over the air. 

The web is more private and can handle more graphic content. You can label the content and force viewers to knowingly click before they see it.

Even then, however, there’s a limit, Bell suggests, and he acknowledges that’s where the tough decision is. The decision to pull the actual impact off the web was “influenced by the reaction we got from those who saw the video and the eventual confirmation that both men died . . . Driven more by our overall sense of community standards and respect for the families, we opted to trade out the impact video for the edited pictures we used on the broadcast side.”

I’m not sitting in Phoenix getting the phone calls, so it’s easy for me to say I was disappointed when the station took the incredible video down. But I agree with Bell that if you start from the position of trying to deliver as much information as you can find out, then community standards get to play a role in how you filter it. By being present in the city, dealing with users, KPHO gets to be an interpreter of those standards, and KPHO.com doesn’t have to be the mindless funnel that YouTube is.

“We’re not always right,” Bell said. “But hopefully we get a little smarter each time, and a little better at doing our job of reporting the news across all available platforms with a minimum of filter.”

The key is asking the questions and having the debate in the newsroom, which KPHO did. What’s the value of the information? What’s the public purpose served? Who is damaged by it? There’s no formula because every case is different and because the answers change as the information world changes, but having the conversation every time is important.