Can Respect Mute Media’s Frenzy in Cosby Slaying?

CNN carelessly crossed a line Thursday by airing a tasteless close-up of the body of Bill Cosby’s murdered son, Ennis, lying in a pool of blood, chopper footage it later acknowledged was “inappropriate” and apologized for on the air.

Will another line be crossed by media badgering his famous father and the rest of his grieving family for comments about his death?

A little of that signature frenzy applied to breaking news was on display Thursday when TV crews closed in on Bill Cosby as he strode grimly and alone to his residence on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. As he was about to enter his building, Cosby was asked: “What about your loss?” Graciously and bravely, he turned his head back toward the staked-out media and gave his son a brief, eloquent eulogy: “He was my hero.”

Cosby’s TV series, books and comedy monologues offer a treasure chest of sage and sparkling parenting quotes that began making their way into coverage of his son’s slaying Thursday night. Yet none resonated with the emotional impact of that four-word sound bite he ad-libbed to reporters earlier that day.

Media stakeouts will surely continue, including at the Cosby home in Pacific Palisades where the cameras began digging in early Thursday as the family left their townhouse in New York, where the TV star’s present CBS sitcom, “Cosby,” is taped. Yet Ennis Cosby’s VIP father himself may be too much a hero to the media for them to invade his privacy at a time of such personal sorrow, as many of them so often do when the sufferers are less empowered and less known. Unlike many other celebrities, Cosby has earned wide affection by always conducting his private life with dignity and stressing education and other values that endear him to reporters and the public.

“This murder probably feels like family to much of the nation,” said KCBS-TV Channel 2 anchor Ann Martin. “Our hearts, thoughts and prayers go out to him, his wife and daughters,” said “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather.

Yet some of the usual carnivores appeared to be circling. KTLA-TV Channel 5, which had fed its news partner CNN that noxious raw footage of Ennis Cosby’s body (although the station wisely didn’t air the pictures itself), reported Thursday of getting inquiries about acquiring photos of it from the Globe and other shameless tabloids that rarely shrink from vulgarity.

“NBC Nightly News” also briefly aired footage of Ennis Cosby’s body, but only at a distance. Channel 2’s “Action News” blundered early in its Cosby murder coverage, which was easily the most aggressive on Los Angeles TV. “We’re going to protect her identity at all costs,” anchor Michael Tuck proclaimed about the unidentified woman who police said “saw at least a portion of this” and provided a description of a white male who may be the slayer. Reporter Harvey Levin had already said the woman was the person Ennis Cosby was en route to when he was shot apparently while stopping to change a flat tire.

Obscuring her image was responsible, for if she were, indeed, a witness, she could be a target of the slayer. Except that “Action News,” in contrast to other local stations, had previously shown the woman’s face as she spoke to police earlier in the day (as did the syndicated “Entertainment Tonight” and “Hard Copy”) before wising up and hiding her identity electronically.

Tragedy is one of society’s common denominators. Accordingly, in a statement issued Thursday by a press agent, the Cosby family expressed empathy for families of other murder victims. In fact, Thursday’s local newscasts also reported briefly about someone else’s child being murdered in Los Angeles. But this girl, a high school senior said to have been fatally shot as she sat on a bus, wouldn’t be earning the media wattage granted Ennis Cosby and his father.

Although her own family’s grief over her death is surely as great as his, it’s Bill Cosby who has become extended family for much of America. And it’s his suffering that the nation now shares so intensely.