NBC’s Abdication of Responsibility

What a difference a rape charge makes.

Not long ago we were hearing this: Trust us. We can keep a secret.

That’s what the U.S. news media said when they urged the Pentagon to loosen rigid press restrictions during the Persian Gulf War, vigorously arguing that journalists could be relied on to report nothing that would compromise the allied military effort.

But here is what NBC News President Michael Gartner said on ABC’s “Nightline” recently: “We’re in the business of disseminating news, not suppressing news.”

This time, of course, Gartner was referring not to the Gulf War but to NBC’s spacey decision to break an unwritten tenet of ethical news organizations by airing the name and picture of the 29-year-old woman who says she was raped in Palm Beach, Fla., by William Kennedy Smith, nephew of Sen Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). The woman had not wanted to be identified.

Sensational case, sensational media blunder.

NBC’s stated rationale for going against the alleged victim’s wishes was this: She had previously been named by a London tabloid and a Florida-based supermarket sheet, the Globe, and, Gartner said in a prepared statement, “The more we tell our viewers, the better informed they will be in making up their minds about the issues involved.”

A principle that’s selectively applied.

As it turned out, NBC had kicked open the legitimate media door wide enough for the tabloid-come-lately New York Times to immediately burst through with its own titillatingly detailed profile of the alleged rape victim.

Time to flash back.

Return to late in the Gulf War when NBC Pentagon correspondent Fred Francis was one of the few reporters said to have figured out the battle plan for the U.S. land offensive against Iraqi forces. Not wishing to undermine U.S. forces, these reporters wisely withheld the story.

Time to hypothesize.

Suppose that somewhere amid its comic pages of screaming, goofy stories on UFOs and talking fish, the Globe itself had done the irresponsible thing and disclosed the U.S. battle plans in advance. What then?

Evoking its hallowed The-More-We-Blab-the-Better principle that it applied to the case of alleged rape, would NBC have used the Globe as an excuse to follow suit with its own story on the battle strategy, blasting U.S. plans across the airwaves?

At what point does legitimately secret or classified information become public knowledge? Exactly when does the media free-for-all kick in like a barroom brawl where everyone cracks everyone else on the head with a chair or whiskey bottle? When a tawdry tabloid goes first?

In the Palm Beach case, NBC in particular dived in without cause or ethical grounds. There was no real news gain in publicizing the woman’s name against her wishes. This was not a public figure whose name would be recognizable. Just as the other networks and most newspapers did, NBC could have withheld her name merely on principle, making a statement that it would not be provoked into an unethical shootout by trigger-happy tabloids.

This is not an issue of suppression. Please, no high horses. The media suppress information continually, whether sitting on stories or trimming stories from two minutes to 90 seconds or protecting the identities of anonymous sources when it works to the media’s advantage. So if NBC is so determined to disseminate information at all times, no more nameless sources. Tell us their names. And no more “on background only” sessions with faceless government officials either.

No, not suppression. This is an issue of responsibility.

Unfortunately, we live in an age of ignorance where there is still a stigma to being raped, just as there is something allegedly shameful about being gay. Undoubtedly, if every victim of stigma burst from the closet, the blemish would fade. But that’s their call, not the media’s, which shouldn’t be in the business of “outing” innocents against their wishes.

Part of the fault here lies with a public that, through its actions or inactions, is encouraging the tabloiding of America.

We’re a society of snoopers, giving lip service to privacy (when we’re affected personally) while ravenously gobbling up gossip a la Roseanne Barr or Nancy Reagan. We won’t televise executions, because that supposedly would invade the privacy of the convicted criminals whom we are killing, but we tolerate the naming and arbitrary televising of criminal suspects who may never even be charged. Talk about your unfair stigmas.

We voyeuristically watch the Fox series “Cops” haul in suspect after suspect and irresponsibly reveal the first name, age and hometown of a 14-year-old rape victim, data that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department says it released inadvertently.

We wouldn’t tolerate anyone invading our private grief at times of tragedy, but we watch ghoulishly as TV cameras invade the private grief of others, all in the name of the public’s right to know. Is that the same as the media’s right to abuse?

And what new horizons of snooping lie ahead in the age of that electronic keyhole, the videocam?

Amateur cameraman George Holliday’s taping of the Rodney G. King beating by Los Angeles police turned out to be crucially beneficial. But Holliday has said that he had no idea precisely what he would be recording in the middle of the night when he switched on his new videocam and pointed it out the window. What if there had been no beating, but cops merely arresting a motorist for speeding? Is any candid dramatic footage fair game for TV?

With thousands of amateur videocam operators now probably aiming their lenses at everything that moves, and TV ever-famished for pictures, who can be counted on to be the guardians of privacy? With NBC’s recent capitulation, the list gets shorter.