Scott Libin , Associate, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and Jay Black, Poynter-Jamison Chair in Media Ethics, University of South Florida
The Cheryl Ann Barnes Chronology
Each year there are 50,000 or so runaways in Florida. Few are newsworthy. Cheryl Barnes may have been the exception.
Bushnell, Florida, is a town of 2,200 population two miles from an exit on Interstate 75, about an hour from media-rich Tampa (to the south), Gainesville (to the north), and Orlando (to the east). It lies along the same highway Danny Rolling took to Gainesville several years ago, en route to butchering five University of Florida students. And it is in the same media coverage area where 20-year-old Tiffany Sessions disappeared from Gainesville in 1989, and where 12-year-old Jennifer Odom was abducted from a school bus and murdered in 1993.
Cheryl Ann Barnes, 17, lived with her grandparents (William Barnes Sr., and Shirley) in Bushnell. She was a senior at South Sumter High School, worked as a clerk at Evans Hardware, and sang alto in the choir in the Pentecostal Potters House International Church in the nearby community of Wildwood. By all accounts, she was religiously devout.
Cheryl’s father (William Barnes Jr., 39) and mother (Theresa Thompson) were separated in 1989 and later divorced. In December 1995 he married an 18-year-old fellow student and friend of Cheryl’s (Marty). Cheryl had a 19-year-old sister (Sheila Burgess). William Barnes Jr. worked as a linen salesman in Fort Lauderdale until January, when he lost his job, he says, for taking days off to look for his missing daughter. Marty is also unemployed. In January they moved in with Cheryl’s grandparents in Bushnell.
January 3, 1996: Cheryl Ann Barnes left home in her 1988 Mazda, but didn’t show up for school. Evidence uncovered the next day showed she withdrew $100 in cash from an automated teller machine near her high school.
January 4: After Cheryl’s grandparents alerted officials that the girl was missing, and the event received local print and broadcast attention, a spokesman for Sumter Sheriff’s Office said, “It’s 99.9 percent an abduction.”
Records later showed Cheryl bought some drawing supplies at an Office Depot in Louisville, Kentucky, on Jan. 4.
January 5: Noting that Cheryl had taken $100 from her ATM, Sumter Chief Deputy William O. “Bill” Farmer said, “It’s an indication that she was not planning to go anywhere. We feel strongly we’re looking at an abduction. Something occurred between the time she made the withdrawal and when she drove out of the parking lot to school.”
January 7: Given the lack of evidence (no car, no personal belongings, no reported sightings, no witnesses), Sheriff James L. “Jamie” Adams Jr. seemed to back away from his department’s earlier assertion that Cheryl had been abducted. On TV, he pleaded with Cheryl to come home if she had run away.
January 10: Records uncovered later show Cheryl bought a $2 meal at a Taco Bell in Indianapolis, Indiana.
January 14: It was later reported that Cheryl had attended church at Revival Tabernacle Church in West Milton, Pennsylvania, where she told the pastor she had been sexually abused as a child and that her parents had been killed.
Mid-January: Sumter County Sheriff Adams said, “Everything points to an abduction…We have no indication to support any kind of runaway theory.”
The disappearance was receiving intense regional and some national attention, prompted largely by Cheryl’s grandmother, who had “befriended” reporters at the Bushnell home and shared with them home videos of Cheryl singing in the church choir. According to St. Petersburg Times reporter Andrew Galarneau in a February 11 article, “Cheryl’s grandparents wielded their instant celebrity skillfully in a competitive media market. They returned phone calls, answered countless questions and didn’t play favorites among reporters. Fearing the worst and praising Jesus, they invited the news media in for the emotional ride.”
January 17: Cheryl’s Mazda received a parking ticket in New York City, near the Empire State Building.
January 18: Cheryl was found sitting in a snow drift, disoriented and somewhat incoherent, wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying no identification. She left police with the impression that she had been molested. She was taken to the psychiatric ward of Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan with amnesia, where she was labeled a 21-year-old Jane Doe.
Her car, found nearby, was impounded for a parking violation; no connection was made between the car and the disoriented girl.
January 26: An unidentified caller made a telephone call to the New York City impound lot, inquiring about Cheryl’s car.
February 6 (Tuesday): Police traced the impounded Mazda to the missing Florida girl, who was still presumed to have been kidnapped. Cheryl’s purse was on the front seat of the car.
February 7 (Wednesday): Tampa’s ABC affiliate, WFTS-Ch. 28, had a crew in New York. Channel 28 convinced its New York City ABC sister station that the story of a kidnapped girl and a missing-but-recovered car was newsworthy. WABC-TV ran a brief story on the case at 5:05 p.m., showing the home video of Cheryl singing in the church choir. A nurse in Beth Israel Medical Center’s psychiatric ward recognized Cheryl as the Jane Doe amnesia victim, and called WABC, which notified its Tampa sister station. During its evening news, Channel 28 contacted the family in Bushnell, and Cheryl talked to the family by phone that evening. Its New York connection enabled Channel 28 to beat its competition on this break in the biggest story of the new year.
Minutes after the news broke, Channel 28 news director Bob Jordan offered to charter a jet to fly the family to New York City at his station’s sole expense, in exchange for 24 hours of exclusive rights to the story. Cheryl’s grandmother reportedly turned down the offer, saying it wouldn’t be fair to the other television stations. (Channel 28 had launched its news operation only a year earlier when it switched from Fox to ABC; its news coverage is generally considered to be more sensational than its rivals in the Tampa Bay market.)
The Barnes family did get its Lear jet ride to New York and back, but by a cooperative arrangement of Tampa Bay media. It appeared late Wednesday that there would be no commercial airline seats available from Tampa to NYC until Thursday evening. (February is high tourist season between the northeast and Florida, and heavy snows in New York had filled commercial planes. February is also a “sweeps” month for television, during which the Nielsen ratings service measures audiences for all stations. The stations use Nielsen’s findings to set advertising rates for the following months. Five commercial television stations produce local news in the highly competitive Tampa Bay market. Orlando’s three TV news operations also pursued the Barnes story aggressively.) The Lear jet was chartered, at a cost of $8,314, by Daniel Webster, news director of the Tampa Fox affiliate, WTVT- Channel 13. (Webster made the necessary phone calls from his cell phone while in a graduate seminar in mass communications theory at the Universityof South Florida, where he is enrolled in the masters program in journalism studies.)
The local TV stations arranged to pool coverage and money for the event, including the family’s New York hotel (Grand Hyatt) and limousine transportation. The St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune, having learned the Barnes family would be on the chartered jet, arranged to pay for one seat apiece, but were not to join in the reporting pool. Departure of the family from the Tampa airport was delayed for up to a half-hour, by some accounts, to accommodate the 10 p.m. Wednesday newscast on Ch. 13. (Channel 44, an affiliate of the new United Paramount Network, also airs a newscast — its only one of the day — at 10 p.m. Tampa Bay’s ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates run their late local newscasts at 11 p.m.).
February 8 (Thursday): Shortly after midnight, the family (father, stepmother, and grandmother) and media entourage went from the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Beth Israel Medical Center, where the Barnes family was reunited. The hour-long reunion was attended by immense media coverage. (The front-page headline in that day’s New York Post said simply, but in massive type, “Lost And Found.”) Cheryl appeared to be partially recovering from her amnesia, and recognized her father and grandmother at the hospital. (Cheryl’s doctors had diagnosed her amnesia as having been triggered by some psychological trauma.)
The family (without Cheryl) got to the Manhattan Grand Hyatt at 3 a.m. That afternoon, the family took the media-chartered Lincoln Town Car to the hospital to get Cheryl. Reporters and photographers lined the sidewalk outside. The reunited family and the Florida journalists returned to the Tampa airport in the chartered jet just in time for the the local evening news. Cheryl appeared fairly calm during the plane ride, but broke into sobs when deplaning amid the television lights and cameras. The Fox station (Channel 13) flew the family on the station’s own helicopter from the Tampa airport to an immense community homecoming in Bushnell, covering the event live with another helicopter. (According to St. Petersburg Times reporter Andrew Galarneau in a February 11 article, “When Cheryl came home, she was greeted by five TV satellite trucks with crews, 11 roving camera teams, and photographers and reporters for at least seven newspapers, including the New York Daily News.”)
WFLA-Ch. 8, Tampa’s ratings leader and the only local station not affected by affilate switching in 1995, was the first station to pull away from the live coverage and return to other news; it led the news race at 5, 5:30, and 6 p.m. (Forrest Carr, Channel 8’s assistant news director, said he cut short the coverage because Cheryl Barnes “was smiling and happy until the TV cameras went on. Then she started bawling. I regretted it.”) That evening at 5, Channel 28, the new ABC affiliate that had been playing up the Barnes story since early January, earned ratings 57 percent higher than it had averaged the rest of the month. (Channel 28’s assistant news director, Steve Majors, was quoted Feb. 9 as saying “We consider it money well spent. We’re building an image here. We want viewers and competitors to know we will be taken seriously in this market.”)
Late Thursday William Barnes Jr. posted $1,300 bail after turning himself in to Sumter County officials who had charged him with violating probation on a year-old drunken driving conviction. The money was apparently provided to him by his father.
Allegations of sexual abuse by Cheryl’s father surfaced from comments made by some of Cheryl’s friends and reportedly by her older sister and from statements Cheryl had made to the Pennsylvania minister she had met in January. The abuses reportedly had occurred eight or nine years ago, but were denied by Cheryl’s father at several points during the Thursday media frenzy, in New York, Tampa, and Bushnell.
Late Thursday a 911 phone call from Cheryl’s grandparents’ home in Bushnell brought authorities to the home to investigate a fight between Cheryl’s grandmother and mother over Cheryl’s upbringing. Earlier that day Cheryl’s mother had flown in from Scottsdale, Arizona.
February 9 (Friday): William Barnes Jr., saying he and his new wife were unemployed and in need of money to pay for Cheryl’s hospital stay and ongoing medical care, said he was negotiating with national television talk shows for the Cheryl Barnes story. Oprah Winfrey and Sally Jessy Raphael reportedly were bidding. Montel Williams Show representatives called at least three times and left flowers. “If there is some money or some benefit to come out of this, we’ll take it,” Cheryl’s father told reporters, adding that he would allow Cheryl to be interviewed only if the program could be sensitive to her needs and offer her psychological help.
Area news media carried excerpts from Cheryl’s personal journal, 34 pages of which were released by the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office. Entries dated from Dec. 31, 1994, to Sept. 26, 1995, attest to religious devotion and adolescent confusion. (A Feb. 19 letter to the editor of the St. Petersburg Times said, “Very rarely do I disagree with what you print, but I must protest strongly your publishing excerpts of this teenager’s journal. This is her private information and thoughts to herself and had no business being in the newspaper. Not only did the sheriff’s office err in releasing it, you should have never printed it. These were her private thoughts and should have stayed private. There was absolutely no reason nor any news value in printing it.”)
Sumter County authorities learned that William Barnes Jr. had been convicted in 1980 of contributing to the sexual deliquency of a minor.
Both Tampa Bay metropolitan newspapers carried major stories by their television critics, faulting television coverage of the Barnes story. The story by Monica Yant of the St. Petersburg Times was headlined “Lost in the media frenzy: ethics, compassion.” It ran below a large color photo of Cheryl, in tears, facing TV cameras. The caption read, “Cheryl Barnes is surrounded as she returns home Thursday night. The teenager was smiling and happy until the cameras went on.” Walt Belcher’s column in the Tampa Tribune was headlined, “Media paid for the Barnes family’s flight.” He wrote that “The (media-sponsored) trip made for emotional television and provided drama for newspaper stories, but it also raised ethical questions about journalists getting involved in the stories they cover and even affecting the outcome.”
In mid-afternoon on Friday, WTVT- Channel 13, whose news director had chartered the Lear jet and arranged the media pool, ran a promotion claiming to have exclusive access to the Barnes family. The promo said (pool reporter) Stan Jayson was “the only reporter to see (Cheryl) and the only one present during a tearful reunion with her family.” St. Petersburg Times television critic Monica Yant, writing in her February 16 column, said Ch. 13 also had aired news footage of the Barnes story before releasing it to competitors, despite the pool arrangements.
February 11 (Sunday): Cheryl Barnes attended the Potters House International Church and sang alto once again in the church choir. She cried throughout much of the two-hour service, and received a standing ovation from the congregation. The minister said God was in charge of the lost-and-found department. Media captured her with her eyes closed and hand raised in prayer, and singing Amazing Grace. It made the evening news and front pages of the Monday papers. NBC’s Dateline was among those following her attempt to resume her old routines.
February 13 (Tuesday): Sixteen media representatives, including news directors from all five Tampa Bay television stations and editors and media critics from the St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune, appeared in a two-hour roundtable discussion before a media ethics class at the University of South Florida. By and large they joined forces in justifying their strategies in covering the Cheryl Barnes case. Occasional second-guessing came from the media critics, one or two of the reporters, representatives of Channel 8 (the channel that had done the most conservative job of coverage), and WTOG- Channel 44. There was no mention at the time of Channel 13’s apparent violation of pool arrangements. On more than one occasion, reporters and news execs told students that someday, if the students made it to the real world, they would learn that the kind of calls involved in the Barnes story had to be made instantaneously, on the spot, and not in the luxury of a classroom.
February 14 (Wednesday): NBC’s Dateline recapped the Cheryl Barnes story, interviewing Cheryl’s father, stepmother, and paternal grandparents.
February 15 (Thursday): Tampa Tribune television critic Walt Belcher said Montel Williams had won the Cheryl Ann Barnes talk show sweepstakes because, according to sources involved with the production, Williams “is a class act who is compassionate and won’t exploit the story.” Belcher said a spokesman for the show said William Barnes wanted to “set the record straight” about allegations of sexual abuse, and that Barnes “told Williams’ staff the ‘entire town is out to smear him’ because they are jealous that he married his daughter’s 18-year-old best friend.”
February 16 (Friday): St. Petersburg Times TV critic Monica Yant wrote that news officials at WFLA-Ch. 8, WTSP-Ch. 10, WFTS-Ch. 28, and WTOG-Ch. 44 were furious at WTVT-Ch. 13’s apparent violation of the pool arrangements, saying they joined the (Lear jet, limo, and hotel) pool believing Stan Jayson and the Channel 13 photographer would be representing all stations evenly. Channel 8’s news director Dan Bradley was quoted as saying “This is all about being honorable. We established a contract, they violated the contract, and I’m not paying for any of it.” Channels 10 and 44 expressed concern; Channel 44 said it was going to pay part but not all of its bill; Channel 28 said “We were less than pleased with the way it was handled, but we will pay our fair share.”
Also on Friday William Barnes Jr. told viewers of the Montel Williams Show that he had never molested Cheryl, and Cheryl’s sister Sheila denied that their father had ever sexually abused either daughter. Sheila’s comments contradicted what Sumter County officials say she had told them earlier in February. Barnes explained his 1980 conviction in Chicago for contributing to the sexual deliquency of a minor, saying that he only held the hand of a young girl who approached him as he came out of a bar, and that he had pleaded guilty to the charges to get probation so his wife would not find out. Producers of the Montel Williams Show said they paid Barnes’ travel expenses, including air fare, hotel room, and meals, but did not pay him to appear on the show. The show was titled “They’re Saying My Daughter Ran Away Because I Abused Her.”
February 22: The St. Petersburg Times reported that Sumter County officials had given up on trying to trace the January 26 call to the New York City impound lot, because there’s no way to determine who made it. The Times story said investigators had attempted to find out whether Cheryl herself might have made the call; if she did, they said, the action would cast doubt on her story. The same Times report said Cheryl’s father had moved to Illinois to escape the notoriety of sexual abuse allegations against him. Cheryl’s mother told the Times her ex-husband used to climb into bed with their two daughters and fondle them, later blaming his behavior on being drunk. Cheryl’s paternal grandmother called the mother’s claim “garbage.” Cheryl had begun home-schooling at her grandparents’ Bushnell home, and was not leaving the house alone, but her grandmother said Cheryl planned to speak publicly about her story when her memory returned.
The Issues in the Case
The police and sheriff’s departments in Cheryl’s home town initially told the media her disappearance was almost certainly an abduction. Among the reasons they offered for reaching this conclusion was that Cheryl “didn’t fit the profile” of the typical runaway: She was a “deeply religious girl” who “wouldn’t put her family through such pain.” Yet there were indications to the contrary – indications that, the media learned later, convinced some officers from the start that she had left home voluntarily. These indications included some information available (at least initially) only to official investigators – her journal entries, for example – but some that was available and even known to the media: Cheryl’s age, her apparent preparations for travel (including packing a bag and stopping at an automatic teller machine), and her disappearance without a trace from a very low-crime area.
Did the media ask enough questions? Should reporters have pressed for further insight from police and deputies as to why they believed someone had abducted Cheryl? Would more research, by computer or old-fashioned library work, have produced more informed skepticism on the part of those covering the story? Were they too accepting of the official account because it made for a more compelling story?
What if police had said there was a good chance Cheryl was a runaway? Most news organizations don’t routinely cover such cases. (The most common reasons are that there are too many runaways and that coverage sometimes encourages other kids looking for attention to mimic the behavior of runaways whose stories they see in the news.) Is that a good practice? Teenagers run away far more often than they are kidnapped. The issue of runaways affects far more families than abduction does. Did the media take the opportunity to examine the problem, its causes, warning signs, and ways to prevent or deal with such situations?
Several suggestions have surfaced as possible explanations for Cheryl’s leaving home. Clearly, her family situation was neither typical nor ideal. One particularly titillating detail was her father’s marriage, just a month before Cheryl’s disappearance, to an 18-year-old from Cheryl’s school. Did the media treat that element of the story appropriately? Was it a legitimate part of the story at all?
How about the allegations that Cheryl’s father might have molested her? Did or could anyone properly attribute the allegations? When did that become appropriate to report- if at all? How about her father’s criminal record – his earlier drunken-driving conviction, and older-still conviction in Chicago for contributing to the sexual delinquency of a minor?
Should the sheriff’s department have released Cheryl’s journal entries? Does its releasing the material make it okay to publish or broadcast?
How important are the actions of the competition? Using the journal and the molestation allegations as examples: If one station or paper uses the material, does that make it okay for its competitors to do the same? After all, “it’s out there….”
How close should journalists get to their subjects? In the two or three days surrounding Cheryl’s homecoming, TV reporters seemed to be positioning themselves as dear personal friends with whom the Barnes family had bonded in the weeks since Cheryl’s disappearance. Was it posturing, or had the journalists been taken in, literally and figuratively, by the Barnes family since early January? Had the weeks of cozying up to the grandparents (using the Barnes home as a media headquarters, eating Grandmother Barnes’ homemade treats, gaining access to home videos of Cheryl, falling prey to small-town compassion for one of its missing children) cost journalists their independence and thus their capacity to analyze the story objectively? Did compassion get the better of them? Was any of the on-air emotion artificial? Does it matter?
And what about the now-infamous plane plan? Coverage pools are not uncommon on stories of such huge interest among the media. But this one came about in an unusual way: The night of her discovery in a New York hospital, Channel 28 offered to fly Cheryl’s family to New York and back in a chartered jet at the station’s expense in exchange for 24 hours of exclusive access to the family. The cost approached $10,000. Is that an attempt to buy a story, as Channel 10’s news director told the St. Petersburg Times? Is it different from offering a news source actual money for a story? Or is it more like flying a guest in to appear on a talk show?
The Barnes family rejected Channel 28’s offer, but accepted a proposal to make the trip by chartered jet once all five local TV stations got involved. Channel 13 provided a reporter and photojournalist to fly with the family and to provide tape to all five stations. Was it then a legitimate pool arrangement?
At least once on the round trip (and twice, by some accounts) Channel 13 delayed departure of the plane in order to cover its takeoff live on the station’s newscast. New Director Daniel Webster says it was a matter of only 10 minutes, though others claim it was more like half an hour, and he says it’s not a decision he would necessarily make that way again. Should he have made it that way in the first place? Jets can make up that much time in the air, and the reunion happened sooner, because of the charter arrangement, than it would have had the family taken a commercial flight. What harm, if any, did the delay do?
Cheryl’s return to Florida the next day dominated local newcasts. How much coverage is too much? One station, Channel 8, decided to move on to other stories significantly sooner than its competition, and Channel 8 had the market’s highest ratings for the day’s newscasts. But Channel 8 regularly wins the local news ratings race. Channel 28, which seemed to have more coverage (at least in sheer volume of time) than anybody else, had the highest early-evening newscast ratings in its brief history. How much is too much? And if viewers reward a station with higher-than-usual ratings, as they did Channel 28 in this case, doesn’t that vindicate the station’s performance? Aren’t viewers the ultimate judges?
The reunion and hours immediately following it were understandably tearful, but Cheryl seemed to compose herself each time she had a few private moments with her family. By several accounts, she lost her composure and nearly collapsed on a couple of occasions when the bright lights went on and the crush of media surrounded her. Did the crews covering her homecoming treat Cheryl with the consideration she deserved?
That homecoming also reunited some of Cheryl’s feuding family members. Several media outlets carried accounts of a physical fight between Cheryl’s mother, who had flown in from Arizona, and her grandmother, with whom Cheryl lives. That fight resulted in a 911 call. Was that legitimate news?
In the week following Cheryl’s return home, the TV stations that had cooperated on coverage of her homecoming began to bicker – publicly, once the newspaper picked up on it. Channel 13 began running promotional spots claiming to have been “a step ahead of the competition” on the story with “exclusive” video its crew shot in New York. The other stations say that violated their agreement that anything the pool crew got would be available to all participants, and that there would be no claims of exclusivity. At least one of those other stations, Channel 8, said on that basis that it would not pay its roughly $2,000 share of the trip’s cost.
And, at about the time the TV stations were turning on each other, Cheryl’s father was entertaining offers for national publicity and – in some cases – money from TV talk shows. There was a rumor of a book deal, and Barnes said he frankly hoped the family could make some money off the story, because he had lost his job due to all the time he took off work while Cheryl was missing.
Is it possible the Barneses were manipulating the media? The police? Did they know more than they admitted?
Broadcast news pros told journalism ethics students that, under deadline pressure and amidst heavy competition, they were forced to make crucial decisions in less than a minute. Some chided the students (who were critical of the choices made) for not having a sense of the “real world.” In fact, aren’t all such decisions made on the experiences of a lifetime, and not within a vacuum in a minute? What are the values, pressures, loyalties, and principles involved, and how do they relate, if at all, to reality? And shouldn’t those journalists be able and willing to articulate such variables to satisfy legitimate inquiries from students, viewers, news sources, and other stakeholders?
Some Principles and Protocols:
Drawing from work developed by The Poynter Institute and Society of Professional Journalists, a thoughtful set of resolutions to the above issues could be managed by balancing some conflicting principles and answering a set of questions.
Seek a balance among sometimes conflicting principles.
First, journalists should recognize that doing an ethical job entails seeking a balance among three guiding principles:
1) seeking and reporting as much truthful, accurate, and significant news as possible by using honest, fair, and courageous newsgathering and reporting methods;
2) acting independently from sources, subjects, and others who would unfairly manipulate the news coverage to their own advantages and counter to the public interest;
3) minimizing the harm and discomfort that journalism often entails, and treat sources, subjects, and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect, not merely as means to journalistic ends.
These three principles are often in conflict with one another. Such was surely the case for the six weeks during which the Cheryl Ann Barnes story was being played out.
Ask good questions to make good ethical decisions.
1) What do I know? What do I need to know?
2) What is my journalistic purpose?
3) What are my ethical concerns?
4) What organizational policies and professional guidelines should I consider?
5) How can I include other people, with different perspectives and diverse ideas, in the decision-making process?
6) Who are the stakeholders – those affected by my decision? What are their motivations? Which are legitimate?
7) What if the roles were reversed? How would I feel if I were in the shoes of one of the stakeholders?
8) What are the possible consequences of my actions? Short term? Long term?
9) What are my alternatives to maximize my truthtelling responsibility and minimize harm?
10) Can I clearly and fully justify my thinking and my decision? To my colleagues? To the stakeholders? To the public?
Conclusion
As we write this, the case of Cheryl Ann Barnes remains open, an active investigation by several law enforcement agencies eager to question Cheryl herself once her doctors say she can handle it. The ultimate findings of that investigation may make clearer how appropriate the media’s handling of this case was. But journalists must make daily deadline decisions based solely on what they know at the time — not on what might or might not emerge eventually.
The audience will rule on the media’s performance. Viewers, as Channel 28 news director Bob Jordan says, “vote with the remote (control),” and, in the free market of commercial television, those votes count more than all the academic analysis in the world. Subsequent, separate controversies have arisen among the same TV news operations from stories unrelated to the Barnes saga even since we started work on this case study, giving viewers even more opportunities to judge those who compete for their business. Ultimately, the signals the audience sends back to the broadcasters will determine the direction in which this market’s mass media head from here.
