No apologies for Haidl coverage, but keep us on our toes

TONY DODERO

A few years back, we had a young reporter here by the name of

Christopher Goffard.

Goffard was a born wordsmith, a detective-novel writer disguised

as a reporter. He loved detail and described it in sometimes graphic

fashion.

At one point, his assignment was to cover the murder trial of

Denise Huber. The young Newport Beach resident had disappeared years

before while coming home from a Morrissey concert, her car abandoned

on a freeway overpass in Costa Mesa.

Her body was found several years later in Arizona. She had been

murdered by a man named John Famalaro, who beat her on the head with

a crowbar and left her body in a freezer.

The details of her murder were enough to make all the readers lose

their morning muffins, so I took it upon myself to heavily edit each

and every one of Goffard’s news stories as they told of her murder in

gory, graphic detail.

Trust me, dear readers, I saved you from a lot of queasiness.

That sense of concern for the readers carries me to this day, so

much so that I have a reputation in the newsroom for being something

of a prude.

It was with that in mind that I asked our readers two weeks ago to

give me their thoughts on our coverage of the trial of Gregory Haidl.

Haidl is the teenage son of Orange County Assistant Sheriff Don

Haidl, who is accused, with two of his friends, of gang-raping a

16-year-old girl in his dad’s Corona del Mar home two years ago.

The details of that event were also very graphic and laden with

sexual content.

How, I wondered, was it being received in Newport-Mesa?

Here are a few responses:

“Is it the journalist’s duty to report all the graphic details of

a trial about the alleged rape of a young woman?” asked former school

board trustee Wendy Leece in an e-mail to me. “I don’t believe it is

necessary to tell all the explicit sexual details to write a good

news account, and I believe the Pilot went beyond the bounds of

ethical reporting by consistently repeating the pornographic

descriptions given in the courtroom. The everyday recounting of the

details just feeds into prurient instincts. For what purpose? To

shock? To win an award? To sell more newspapers?”

Here was another response from Newport Beach resident George

Jefferies:

“Editors of community newspapers should seriously consider turning

down the volume during the trial period while reporting with reserve

in the inner pages the respective contentions, which the jury and

judge must resolve,” he wrote. “Among the dozens of criminal and

civil cases tried weekly in this county, editors should look to

consider all readership, including younger readers, when deciding

which ones, if any, should be emphasized before judgment by

sensational headlines and front-page reporting. Editors are judges in

the court of public opinion. They should ask themselves, if one of

their family members were similarly accused, how would they want the

community newspaper in his or her city to cover the trial?”

When I began writing this column some four years ago and attempted

to defend some of our news decisions, a local resident of some note

gave me some advice. “Quit apologizing,” he said.

He was right. I’m not going to apologize for our Haidl coverage

either.

To be fair, I had a number of readers tell me that they thought

our coverage was just fine.

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be introspective and more

careful the next time around. And unfortunately, as we’ve seen, there

will definitely be a next time around, where young Greg Haidl is

concerned.

So that’s the main message I want the readers to take away from

this.

We do not try to appeal to prurient interests just to sell

newspapers. In fact, journalists really have nothing to do with the

sale of the newspaper. And we do consider how we would feel if it

were us. We have lengthy discussions and debates about news coverage

every day.

Newspapers and the people who write and edit them are constantly

searching for ways to better tell the stories.

Your comments and feedback will just make us that much better.

Please keep them coming, before, during and after the next Haidl

trial.

* TONY DODERO is the editor. He may be reached at (949) 574-4258

or by e-mail at tony.dodero@latimes.com.