Knocking On Death's Door

When serial murderer Ted Bundy was executed last month, Detroit-area editors and news directors followed one of journalism's most unshakable maxims: develop the local angle. In the case of Bundy, the local hook was Caryn Campbell, a 24-year-old nurse from Dearborn, Mich., whom Bundy murdered in Colorado in 1975. But what was second nature to most journalists was yet another horrible reminder for the Campbell family. "Any article or news report about Ted Bundy always included Caryn's name and the fact that 'her nude and frozen body was found in a snowbank,' " wrote her sister, Nancy McDonald, in a letter published in the Detroit News last week. "It's been extremely difficult for us to accept Caryn's loss and the way her body was found, but we, her family, did not need to hear, see and read the same fact for 14 years."

It would have been difficult to do justice to the Bundy story without in some way describing his grisly crimes. But on the day of his execution, did a Detroit TV station really have to rebroadcast file footage of Campbell's 1975 funeral? Last week 250 journalists, health-care professionals and members of the clergy gathered in Manhattan to explore such questions at a conference titled "Death, the Media and the Public: Needs of the Bereaved." Sponsored by the Foundation of Thanatology, a New York City-based organization devoted to studying bereavement, as well as the Dallas Morning News and the Milwaukee Journal, the three-day symposium covered everything from obituaries to the role of "Media as Murderer." "The press has been covering crime and death for centuries," says Texas Christian University journalism professor Tommy Thomason, "but we are just beginning to think about how we cover it."

By most accounts, there is much room for improvement. In a 1985 survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, more than 78% of the people questioned believed the press does not "worry much about hurting people." Almost two-thirds of the respondents agreed that journalists take advantage of victims of circumstance. Perhaps the worst transgressor is the TV camera operator who zooms in on the face of a dead person's relative -- and stays there as the face dissolves in grief. Says Anne Seymour, public affairs director for the National Victim Center in Fort Worth: "Any time there is a yellow line, some journalists in the interest of news will cross over."

When covering death, reporters and editors face a difficult paradox: the best material in a journalistic sense very often turns out to be what is most painful to grieving survivors. News organizations, driven by intense competition, rarely let concern for a victim's privacy get in the way of a scoop. The push for live coverage of late-breaking news has put local TV stations in the uncomfortable position of being able to broadcast word of a person's death before the victim's family has been officially notified.