Information Standoff

A prison hostage standoff lasting 15 days. Government requests for and media compliance with a selective news blackout. And a plethora of ethical questions about whether a cooperative media violated its duty to, as the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics puts it, “seek truth and report it.”

The standoff happened in Arizona from Jan. 18 to Feb. 1, but there are lessons and cautionary notes aplenty here for journalists everywhere.

The Society of Professional Journalists explored the topic during a panel discussion at The Arizona Republic last week. The title was “Locked Out: The Ethics of Withholding Information at Government’s Request.”

Three months after the standoff’s end, the questions still simmer.

A quick review: Two convicts, Ricky Wassenaar and Steven Coy, stormed a guard tower at the Lewis Prison complex (25 miles or so southwest of Phoenix). They took two correctional officers hostage. The officers were later identified as rookie Jason Auch and more veteran officer Lois Fraley.

Coy is a convicted violent rapist, Wassenaar a convicted armed robber.

During the crisis, Coy raped a female kitchen worker before fleeing to the tower. He then raped the female correctional officer once he was in the tower.

The Republic didn’t name the second rape victim until she identified herself, most notably in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The kitchen worker has yet to be identified nor has much been written about her.

During the crisis, the state government would not release the names of the convicts or the hostages and asked the media swarming the story to not report the names in case they came upon them independently.

The government also withheld other key facts, claiming that bad news coverage might enrage the inmates and endanger hostage lives.

Once the standoff ended, the media, my newspaper in particular, continued to aggressively pursue the story, disclosing much about how the crisis unfolded and the conditions that allowed it to occur.

The bottom line from even a casual reading: The prison was a mess. There were security breakdowns because a lot of people didn’t do their jobs. Low pay, bad management and poor training contributed. Clearly, the standoff shouldn’t have occurred.

The coverage was intense during the crisis, despite government stonewalling (even to the point of keeping the media about a mile away from the prison).

Simply, it was huge news. A slew of stories were printed and broadcast. They just lacked key facts, notably the names of the convicts and the hostages and other details that prison officials said would hinder negotiations or the prosecution of the inmates afterward.

The Republic explained this all to readers in boilerplate language in many of the stories and with one story devoted entirely to the blackout. It appeared on the last day of the standoff.

At issue are those 15 days and whether the media was too compliant and trusting in generally agreeing to government blackout requests.

The Republic‘s Dennis Wagner was the only one on the panel directly involved in the coverage. Joining him were John Dougherty, a writer for the New Times, an often hard-hitting alternative weekly in Phoenix; Donna Leone Hamm, founder and volunteer director of Middle Ground Prison Reform; and Camilla Strongin, a former spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections.

The current DoC spokeswoman agreed to be on the panel but withdrew about a week before. SPJ was unsuccessful in convincing anyone else from the state to replace her.

Fred Brown, a former SPJ national president, moderated the discussion.

Wagner, a veteran reporter, cut to the chase. He acknowledged that he had an immediate gut reaction to government requests for the media to withhold information.

“Hell, no,” he said. But, he added, whether to comply really wasn’t his call.

Editors at The Republic instructed reporters to withhold the names of those in the tower and to not contact relatives. It’s clear that other media outlets had similar rules.

The state told the media that negotiators contended that unrestricted reporting had a strong likelihood of getting the hostages killed. They said it might also cause more problems from other inmates at that prison and in other prisons.

Wagner didn’t particularly buy the story, but asked the audience, what if the chances were 1 in 100 or even 1 in 1,000? Would you take the chance?

Hamm, the prison reform advocate, argued that media cooperation “smacked of state control of the Fourth Estate.”

She questioned whether the media was skeptical enough, whether it asked the government how, precisely, releasing the names endangered lives.

Inmate families were unnecessarily kept in the dark, worried that their husbands, fathers, or brothers were the hostage takers, she explained.

The inmates already knew the correctional officers’ names. So, how would releasing those names endanger their lives, panelists asked?

What if there was even a slim chance that unfettered coverage would have goaded the inmates into killing the hostages? After all, editors, news directors, and journalists aren’t hostage negotiators.Strongin, the former DoC official, said she feared that perceptions of department stonewalling could poison the state-media relationship.

It’s a legitimate fear. Even after the crisis, the department still appeared to be stiff-arming the media. During and after the standoff, it cited government regulations for withholding documents that really didn’t pertain.

Dougherty said he feared a bad precedent had been set. He talked about a “slippery slope.”

During the crisis, reporters knew that one of the inmates was a convicted rapist. There was also general knowledge that one of the officers was female and that she had likely been raped.

As for not releasing the name of the female correctional officer because she was a rape victim, Dougherty seemed to make the case that an officer who, by definition, has a dangerous job is different than, say, a youngster assaulted in a K-Mart.

There was a selective news blackout but this doesn’t mean that the media wasn’t trying to get information. During and after the crisis, the media submitted a rash of FOI requests. There are differing accounts of how responsive state government has been.

The press has said not very responsive and the state is saying it is as responsive as it can be given the time frame, the volume of requests, and what it is permitted to release.

To my eye, full and immediate compliance was one way the government could have reassured the media that its cooperation during the crisis was not in vain. It failed to give this reassurance. The well, in my view, has indeed been poisoned.

But should there have been media cooperation at all?

The panelists suggested that, in other major metropolitan cities with major competing dailies, such cooperation simply wouldn’t have occurred and to the extent it did occur, it would’ve ended as soon as one outlet released a name.

But the cooperation generally held up across the board in Phoenix, where news organizations do, in fact, compete, though not to the degree as in, say, New York.

A reading of the post-standoff coverage reveals that most major questions have been answered. One key question hasn’t, however.

How would releasing the names, particularly of the convicts, have endangered lives? Stories during and after the crisis haven’t credibly answered this.

Still, we have to come back to Wagner’s question.

What if there was even a slim chance that unfettered coverage would have goaded the inmates into killing the hostages? After all, editors, news directors, and journalists aren’t hostage negotiators.

We’re not experts.

So, if you’re in charge, do you gamble?

Well, I’ve been a managing editor and an executive editor. And, frankly, I wouldn’t have. If that makes me unethical, I guess I can live with that.