W. Joseph Campbell

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‘Richard Jewell,’ pack journalism, and a cinematic disappointment

In Debunking, Error, Media myths, New York Times, Newspapers on December 23, 2019 at 8:22 am

It’s not terribly surprising Richard Jewell the movie has fared poorly in its opening days, grossing about $9.5 million since its debut December 13.

Richard Jewell, which revisits the case of the eponymous, media-maligned hero of the deadly bombing at the Atlanta Summer Olympics, is a disappointment on a number of levels.

The lead character is a beefy, 33-year-old security guard who on July 27, 1996, raised warnings before a pipebomb packed with screws and nails blew up at Centennial Olympic Park, killing one person and injuring more than 100 others. Jewell’s warnings surely saved dozens of lives.

Jewell, who is played by Paul Walter Hauser, is quirky, officious, and rather heavy-handed — the kind of irritating, self-important security guard who routinely oversteps his position to boss people around.

Likewise unconvincing is the portrayal of Kathy Scruggs, the police beat reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who, in an extra edition published July 30, 1996, disclosed that Jewell was a focus of the FBI’s investigation into the bombing.

Scruggs is presented as a loud, hard-edged floozy, willing to trade sex for information from a FBI source, who tells her the agency suspects Jewell planted the bomb. But Jewell was never charged in the bombing. Time was when journalists wouldn’t identify suspects by name until they had been formally accused.

The film, directed by Clinton Eastwood, has been assailed for its portrayal of Scruggs, which is too bad because the controversy has dimmed the spotlight Richard Jewell tries to direct to the perils that can arise when the news media are in league with federal investigators.

After Scruggs and a colleague, Ron Martz, wrote their unattributed story that Jewell was a suspect in the bombing, a media pack took after the naive and beleaguered security guard, staking out the apartment where he lived with his mother. The pack mostly made his life hell, until federal authorities told him three months later he was not a target. (The day after that, the Journal-Constitution published seven stories that dissected “everything about the case except its own role in starting the media lynching of the hero turned suspect,” Atlanta magazine reported in December 1996.)

Jewell may have been exonerated, but his reputation never recovered. He died in 2007. Scruggs died in 2001.

Pack journalism and its close relative, group think, are deep flaws that mainstream American journalism is little inclined to explore. They contributed to the media’s failure to anticipate Donald Trump’s election in 2016. For more than two years afterward, the news media touted and pursued a dubious narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election  — a narrative for which the Washington Post and the New York Times shared a Pulitzer Prize.

The Pulitzer citation praised the newspapers for their “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.” The citation seems utterly risible now, given how the Trump-Russia narrative came such a cropper.

Eastwood’s movie could have been withering in portraying the media pack that hounded Jewell, a pack motivated by thin suspicions, a vague stereotype, and the Journal-Constitution’s unsourced, but authoritative-sounding, extra-edition article.

From time to time, the pack was shown in massed and menacing pursuit of Jewell. But the portrayal is not especially searching or nearly complete.

The movie doesn’t much consider the AJC’s follow-on reporting. Steven Geimann recalled in 2003 in an article for Media Ethics magazine that as “the scramble intensified to get the story, the AJC stayed in front of the pack, running countless stories not only about the investigation, but about Jewell’s personal life, work history, and potential motives as the ‘lone bomber.'”

Geimann, a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, also wrote:

“Legally, the AJC may have been allowed to treat this private citizen as a public figure. But was it the right thing to do? In the frenzy to stay in front of the pack, the editors and reporters of the AJC stopped asking themselves that simple, yet all-important question.”

Howard Kurtz, then the media writer for the Washington Post, made similar observations three weeks after the Centennial Park bombing.

In the aftermath of the attack, Kurtz noted, “few journalists asked the hard questions about the lack of physical evidence or the unwillingness of any federal official to make an on-the-record case against Jewell. In the hyper-competitive world of news gathering, such details are often lost as everyone chases the latest hot scoop.”

Kurtz deplored the “pack mentality” which he said “makes it all too easy for each news organization to blame its behavior on others. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put Jewell in play by rushing out an extra edition July 30, with a 378-word story saying he ‘is the focus of the federal investigation’ ….

“CNN quickly followed suit. Major newspapers — including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and USA Today — checked with their sources and trumpeted the allegations on the front page.”

Had he emphasized such criticism about the media’s pack-like conduct, Eastwood would have given his movie a sharper, more powerful, even devastating focus.

Notably absent from the media frenzy that swept up Jewell was the New York Times.

From time to time, Media Myth Alert  has called out the Times for its questionable judgment and its invoking media-driven myths. But in the Jewell case, the Times merited praise for declining to run with the pack. It not as easy decision, as Kevin Sack, the Times’ Atlanta-based reporter in 1996, pointed out several years ago.

Sack recalled that Joseph Lelyveld, the Times‘ executive editor at the time, “decreed that we would not join the news media herd in reporting that Mr. Jewell was the leading suspect. Nor would we in any way suggest that Mr. Jewell’s actions or personality merited suspicion, as The [Atlanta] Journal had in publishing, without attribution, that he ‘fits the profile of the lone bomber.’

“Instead,” Sack said, “I was to write a modest article — 642 words, as it ended up, less than half the length I figured it merited — about the media riot that followed The Journal’s revelation. In stark contrast to front-page coverage with screaming headlines around the world, my article would be buried deep inside the next day’s newspaper.”

Sack disagreed with the decision to downplay the suspicions about Jewell.

But in retrospect, Sack said, “the rabbinical wisdom” of Lelyveld, “in the face of intense competitive pressure, provided one of the greatest journalistic lessons of my career. While The Times has demonstrated over the years that it is not immune to misjudgment … we stood out in the coverage of the Jewell story for our restraint. Mr. Lelyveld’s call saved the paper, and me, from embarrassment and perhaps from the litigation that Mr. Jewell later pursued against several news organizations. There but for the grace of Joe went I.”

The Olympics bomber turned out to have been Eric R. Rudolph. He arrested in 2003 after hiding for years in remote reaches of North Carolina. Rudolph was accused of three other bombings and sentenced in 2005 to four life terms plus an additional 120 years in prison.

Rudolph is jailed at the SuperMax federal prison in Colorado. His infamous fellow inmates include Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Terry Nichols, principal accomplice to Timothy McVeigh in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

WJC

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