Thou shalt not

By Joel Thurtell

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If it wasn’t evident in my essay, “Watching them die,” about the Associated Press reporter who witnesses executions in Texas, I am opposed to capital punishment.

But as I later reflected on my reaction to the New York Times article about AP writer Michael Graczyk’s “lonely beat” on Texas’ Death Row, I realized I was missing a big part of the issue: The AP reporter is really a small part of the way journalists report on issues of great societal importance like the death penalty.

I found myself recalling an experience I had in 1966, when I was a college student attending the university in Bonn, West Germany. Sixteen of us Americans in Bonn had packed our suitcases onto a bus and traveled through the Ost Zone — East Germany — for a trip to West Berlin.

East Germany was a police state, its puppet  Communist government controlled by the Soviet Union in Moscow. East Germans were forbidden to go to the West. Machine guns in guard towers, mine fields and in Berlin the Wall with its barbed wire and Sten gun-armed Volks Polizei, or Vopos, would kill anyone who tried to leave. One of us knew someone living in East Berlin, and we decided to pay this person a visit. We’d been told that East Germans were hungry for news from the West, so one of us Americans packed issues of Der Spiegel, Time and similar forbidden magazines under her sweater and we all headed for Checkpoint Charlie. There, a female Vopo detained Laney, the student with the contraband magazines, for a couple hours while the rest of us sweated whether our smuggling might land us all in some Soviet gulag. In the end, the Vopo let Laney go, and we went on to visit the East German, one of three divinity students living in an apartment house in East Berlin.

What journalism there was in East Berlin was censored, and our new friends explained to us that’s why they were so eager for western publications. They gave an example of what censorship can do. Each of them knew somebody who had committed suicide. It was a  social phenomenon known through hearsay, because newspapers were not allowed to report on suicides. But the students explained to us that life in East Germany was hard: heating fuel was rationed, apartments were cold, food was scarce and the outlook was bleak. Repression was everywhere and it led to depression which they believed was what prompted people to kill themselves.

They were making a powerful statement against the government, which probably explains why such information was blacked out. Because the media were censored, there was no way for individuals to quantify something that everyone was aware of.

I recalled that East berlin experience years ago when I encountered criticism from other journalists for reporting on the attempted suicide of an elected official. Possibly because I never went to journalism school, I simply was not aware of this self-imposed prohibition. But I was lectured by one reporter for my tasteless disregard for people’s feelings and another newspaper person sent a letter to the publisher complaining about my impudence in writing about suicide.

I realized then that my critics were correct in one regard: Other journalists were not writing about suicide. But this was not East Germany. There were no state censors or government-run newspapers weeding out certain topics and bellowing about others. Yet there was general agreement, it seemed, that deaths by suicide should go unreported.

I remembered the complaint of those East Germans that they were being robbed of knowledge about their society because this particular phenomenon — suicide — was made to appear as a non-fact, something not fit for discussion. Here in the U.S., a similar prohibition was being enforced by a sort of unofficial peer review process.

I thought of the East German censorship as I  pondered the situation of the AP reporter covering executions in Texas. The reporter is only the first point of contact in a journalistic culture that intentionally or not weeds out articles, makes choices for readers who have no idea what choices have been made about the news they see.

I’m thinking of the editorial process that directs reporters to certain stories while ignoring others; a process that rejects some stories already written in favor of others that are, for whatever reason, favored.

“We actually put in to attend [an execution], and we were granted a spot, but when the editors explained the case to me, and the local connection was minimal, I said it wasn’t a compelling enough case,” a Texas newspaper editor told the Times.

Since 1976, Texas has killed 441 people. But there are lots more data for capital punishment in this country, and I don’t see newspapers reporting on it. For that, you need to go to an organization like the Death Penalty Information Center of the NAACP. On that site, we learn that there are 3,297 people on Death Row in the 38 states with a death penalty law. Before 1976, Texas put 755 people to death. In all, the state of Texas has killed 1,196 — equivalent to the population of the town where I grew up.

The Death Penalty Information Center also reveals a number for “innocent persons freed from Death Row” in Texas: nine.

That is a powerful number, because it’s an effective argument against state killing. Mistakes are made and the wrong person is executed.

Now, to compile and report these statistics would require more effort on the part of newspapers than simply running wire stories about executions — stories the Times equates to “writing up school board meetings and printing box scores.”

An interesting box score would be one for innocents put to death, but box scores on executions won’t be found in newspapers.

Why should this be important to readers? Well, the death penalty is a part of the image the United States presents to the world. Plenty of countries don’t execute convicted criminals. Some do, like the United States and 38 of its states.

Like China, which we generally equate with state repression..

More fundamentally, this is about killing human beings, which I think is more important than covering school board meetings.When we condone killing by the state, we demean human life. The fact that people can be wrongly accused, condemned and executed not only points out the all-too human weaknesses in our judicial system, but it instills fear, because given a bad set of circumstances, any one of us could be wrongly killed. Since the federal government has a death penalty, that is true even in states like Michigan that don’t impose capital punishment.

Isn’t it ironic that, according to the Times, fewer articles about executions are published now because there are more executions?

Kill one or two, it’s a story. Kill hundreds and, well, numbers numb.

That’s an expression of bias, though it seems largely undetected.

Going back to the AP reporter’s work, there seems to be another bias that he builds into his work practice — choosing to watch the execution from the victim’s side of the gurney, rather than from the vantage point of the executed person’s friends or family.

Supposedly, that’s “because I can get out faster and file the story faster.”

So the reporter’s production needs dictate always watching from the victims’ viewpoint? His productivity — writing the story, getting it filed before deadline — determine how he will be evaluated by superiors in the AP, in turn affecting promotions, salary raises and so on. All important to a reporter’s career, but just the same, might his perspective be different if once in a while he viewed the administration of lethal drugs from the inmates’ relatives’ vantage point? By viewing the execution with the victim’s side, doesn’t he open himself to subtle prejudices? You might say, well, the executed person harmed the victim and the victim’s family, except what if the man being killed is innocent? Besides, the family of the executed person is not guilty. What are their feelings? Wouldn’t the reporter be subject to subtle pulls for or against the accused if he watched from that point of view? Either way, biases are possible, and this is a reporting system that eschews bias, supposedly.

A commenter criticized me for calling the AP stories “sanitized,” and I now see that they are far from being cleansed. Always viewing from the victims’ vantage point incorporates a hidden-from-the-reader point of view. Reporting only on the event, as if it were a school board meeting, robs the reporting of context that could fit that single fatal event into a broader context that includes those 3,297 people waiting for the needle.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com