Following is the Public Editor column from Sunday, July 27, 2008:
Two high-profile crime cases in the past couple of weeks caused some readers to wonder: What criteria does The News & Observer use to decide how much coverage to give to murder and mayhem stories?
The stories are the killing of Nancy Cooper, the Cary mother of two young children, and the sentencing of Sidney Lowe II, son of N.C. State University's head basketball coach, on drug and kidnapping charges.
First, the Cooper case. Coverage has been extensive: 16 stories in two weeks, including five on the front page and five on the local news front, complete with four-column photos of the crime scene and grieving family members.
Some readers questioned whether the coverage was excessive. Was Nancy Cooper's status as an attractive, popular young mother in the affluent suburbs a factor in the allocation of ink and newsprint?
"I just don't understand how a newspaper decides that her murder warrants coverage that is exponentially greater than that of almost any other murder victims," Randy Chambers of Durham wrote me. "At best, it's sensationalism. At worst, it re-emphasizes the darker side of racial and class stereotypes, whereby the murder of an African-American, inner-city kid is par for the course, but the loss of the life of a middle-upper-income white woman in Cary is a community-wide tragedy."
Others wondered why the paper gave so much coverage to Cooper but much less to Kelli Woolard, another young mother from Wendell who disappeared the same day as Cooper and whose body turned up the same week.
Thad Ogburn, the N&O's metro editor, has a ready explanation for that discrepancy. Woolard's case, while tragic, turned out to be the suicide of a woman struggling with drug abuse. Police said from the start that foul play was not suspected.
Cooper's case, by contrast, is an ongoing murder mystery. Tales of marital discord have heightened the drama. Other factors: Her father and sister have sued for custody of the couple's children and held news conferences about their concerns. Lawyers for Brad Cooper, Nancy Cooper's husband, held a news conference of their own declaring his innocence. He has not been charged.
Ogburn pointed out that hundreds of people turned out to search for Cooper after her disappearance and for two memorial services.
"I think we have to cover that," he said. "I don't think we have to apologize for reporting details that people are interested in."
The Cooper case has gone national, with tabloid TV coverage from cable vamps Nancy Grace and Greta Van Susteren. N&O reporter Mandy Locke said she received 40 phone calls one day from shows wanting her to go on the air. (She declined: "That's not my job.")
Locke said that she thought the coverage has been warranted because it is a still-unsolved mystery and that, if anything, The N&O has been restrained. "I can't tell you how much we have that we have held back on" as too tabloidish, she said.
She also pointed out that she has devoted just as much reporting, personally, to cases involving lower social strata -- including the trial last month of Lynn Paddock, convicted of abusing and murdering her 4-year-old adopted son (16 stories in June). Locke said she thinks The N&O has become tarred in readers' minds by the over-the-top TV coverage of the Cooper case.
I think the media in general, The N&O included, are overly drawn to the soap opera stories, in large part because of reader appetite. Lots of papers on my Triangle Transit bus last week were turned to the latest in the Cooper saga.
I think it's true also that we give disproportionate coverage to tragedy involving the well-heeled, perhaps because it's unusual -- a definition of news -- perhaps because our middle-class readership can relate better. But, as reader David Carr of Carrboro observed: "More important things are happening in the world, and you are missing them."
The Lowe story
The story of 23-year-old Sidney Lowe II, which dominated the Sports section for three days earlier this month, prompted heated debate last week at The N&O Community Panel meeting. Herb Wakeford of Raleigh asked: "Why is this Sports news? In fact, why is this news at all?"
An interesting rebuttal came from Jim Pomeranz of Cary, who used to work in sports information at N.C. State (and who hated it when The N&O wrote negative stories about the athletics program). The story about Sidney the younger was newsworthy, Pomeranz said, because of the prominence of his dad.
"When Sidney Lowe wins a national championship, that's front-page news," he said. "He lives in a glass house. When they do something out of the ordinary, it's a big story."
Pomeranz noted that the coach himself took responsibility, on the witness stand, for his son's problems because of his frequent absences from the family. That's news.
"I find no reason we shouldn't have covered that," said Andrew Curliss, the assistant Sports editor who oversaw the coverage. "It would have been embarrassing if we hadn't."
I agree with that, although I had a couple of concerns. One is inconsistency. Curliss and Executive Editor John Drescher justified running the story in the Sports section because it was of interest primarily to sports-minded readers. But when Lowe II originally was arrested in March, the story for two days running was on the front of the City & State section.
The second is that the coverage was a bit overheated. Yes, it merited big headlines when Lowe senior was the focus of the story. But a preview of the trial didn't deserve the lead position that it received on the Sports front. This was, after all, a story about a young man involved in drug violence that, unfortunately, is not uncommon in our courts. As Wakeford said, "If that had been my son, it wouldn't have been in the paper."
More on Helms
In the July 13 Public Editor column, I stated that Jesse Helms was North Carolina's longest-serving senator, at 30 years. Actually, as reader Andy Foreman pointed out, Helms tied with Furnifold Simmons (1901-1931) for that record. But Simmons wins the award for best name.
