When "News" Is Almost a Crime

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

In Alabama, a TV station gets a story that no one should want

The call was the kind that every TV news director dreads: a despondent person demanding the attention of a camera, and an audience, for one last desperate act. On scant notice and even scanter knowledge, the TV executive must decide whether the threat is news to be covered, or a cruel, senseless display that the cameras will only encourage. The voice on the telephone said, "If you want to see somebody set himself on fire, be at the square in Jacksonville in ten minutes."

On duty that quiet Friday night in the newsroom of WHMA-TV, Channel 40, the only TV station in Anniston, Ala. (pop. 29,500), were a woman office worker and Photographer Ronald Simmons, 30, and Sound Technician Gary Harris, 18. Both men had been up since early morning covering a high school basketball tournament.

Thrust into something they had never imagined would be part of their working lives, they told themselves the call might be a hoax. But they telephoned police. That decision was right. Almost everything that followed went tragically wrong. WHMA got its story, one of the more horrifying minutes of video footage ever recorded. The nation, and especially its journalists, got a troubling case study that prompted an overdue debate about whether some stories are worth getting.

The caller was Cecil Andrews, 37, an unemployed roofer and day laborer who had a history of instability. On the night he telephoned his threat or plea to WHMA, he was staggering drunk. Andrews was apparently near the Jacksonville square (actually, a green rectangle bordered by shops and the city's police and fire stations) when he phoned the TV newsroom three times within half an hour. He was there when Simmons and Harris arrived and set up their lights and camera, more than an hour after Andrews' original call. The police insist that they and volunteer firemen combed the area, but were unable to spot any sign of a potential suicide. They dispersed minutes before the news crew arrived.

What followed was the gruesome result of lapses in communication and judgment. The station, which had alerted the police four separate times, contends it had worked out a deal to use the camera as "bait" to draw the troubled caller out of hiding so that police could apprehend him. Police Chief Paul Locke, 35, however, says there was no such deal. In any case, Simmons and Harris failed to notify the police of their arrival on the scene, an omission that both sides termed disastrous. Says Chief Locke:"I am very critical of their behavior."

The next moments in the unnerving story are recorded on a videotape that WHMA showed in edited form on its news the following evening. By the end of last week, excerpts from it had been seen by tens of millions of Americans on the nightly news shows of CBS, NBC and ABC. Andrews came up to the camera crew. They stalled him, briefly, then set the camera rolling as he struck a match and touched it to his chest, which he had doused with lighter fluid. The match went out. He touched another match to his leg. That too went out. He stumbled a few steps toward the lighter fluid, splashed more on, returned to the camera, squatted and touched another match to his left thigh. A tiny glow appeared, then spread.

Too late, Harris burst forward, dropping his role of impassive observer to bat at the flames. Andrews fell, rose and lurched away, a human fireball. A volunteer firemen, still near by after the failed search, extinguished the flame seconds later. But Andrews had inflicted second and third-degree burns over half his body. His condition at week's end: fair.

When the story came to national attention, Simmons and Harris found themselves pilloried in front of millions of TV viewers, as fellow journalists demanded: Why did you stand by as Andrews spent 37 seconds trying to burn himself, before moving to stop it? Looking shell shocked, the two men insisted they had been let down by the police. Said Harris: "My conscience is clear." Added Simmons: "My job is to record events as they happen."

Off camera, TV news leaders condemned the judgment of WHMA'S news director, Phillip Cox, 30, in permitting his staff to tell a troubled person, or police, that the station would send a crew. Dean Mell, news director at KHQ-TV in Spokane, Wash., and president of the national RadioTelevision News Directors Association, said, "My crew would not be a tool of the police department in 'smoking out' a man. And to set up the cameras, provoking an incident is absolutely unethical." Fred Friendly, a Colunbia Journalism School professor and former president of CBS News, said " I fault the station for putting it on air just because they had it, not because it had redeeming social value. That amounts to voyeurism."

Edward Joyce, vice president of CBS News, of which WHMA is an affiliate, was more gentle. Said he: "This was a situation where one had to be human first and professional second. We have guidelines: where the presence of the camera could provoke danger, put the camera away." WHMA had no such guidelines although, News Director Cox said, it had "an unwritten policy to involve police in matters like this."

The station stood by Simmons and Harris. Said General Manager Harry Mabry: "There have been serious discussions, but no threat of firing." Mabry added that he hoped to organize a seminar on cooperation with law-enforcement officials. But broad questions remained. The TV news camera has become a stage for terrorist theatrics and sick personal melodramas. The guidelines that stations need would tell when not to cover a story, when not to negotiate with a deranged person, when not to treat an appalling but meaningless event as if it were news. TV executives must think through those issues. Even the smallest station, like the one in Anniston, may be forced to confront the largest ethical dilemmas.

- By William A. Henry III

Reported by Richard Bruns/New York and BJ Phillips/Jacksonville

With reporting by Richard Bruns/New York and BJ Phillips/Jacksonville This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.