By Terry Hadaway

How appropriate at this time of year to think of the news media as an insatiable monster, prowling the countryside, demanding to be fed. Remember the outraged villagers and shopkeepers in all those classic horror flicks? Somebody had created a monster and let it loose in their world. Now the villagers had to pay the price for someone else’s lack of constraint and judgment. Just like those villagers, businesses, governments and non-profit organizations across this country are getting pretty tired of feeding the speculations of a demanding and arrogant army of American news monsters.

The real-life horror of the Washington D.C. serial murders brings this frustration into newly sharp focus. Cable/satellite-delivered news networks are taking the brunt of the criticism, and rightly so. During the three weeks of the story, the reporter hordes continuously demanded information that didn’t exist or could not be released. Meanwhile, anchors sat in studios with make-believe “experts” offering one guess after another. And they were just guesses.

Washington Post Staff Writers Paul Farhi and Linton Weeks, writing on washingtonpost.com, say that “Almost everything the sniper ‘profilers’ and pundits told the media over the past three weeks turns out to have been off the mark. … The important question is, was the orgy of speculation harmless — or was there a very dangerous undercurrent to it? By saturating the public’s consciousness with phantom images of thirtyish white men, did the media profilers distract attention from a more general and possibly open-minded search for the perpetrators?”

An editorial in the LA Times observed, “several times the sniper appeared to react to coverage,” a possibility many of us considered.  One night, “news reports” discuss the concentration of sniper attacks in a given area. Soon enough, the murders take a victim outside of that area. Fox News Channel reported, that at the time, no murders had taken place on weekends; all too soon, a Sunday shooting. And did the excessive on-air discussion of the ubiquitous white van, prompt the sniper to wait for the coincidental appearance of one before pulling the trigger?

Am I suggesting less than full cooperation with the news media? What I am suggesting is that the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news hole is entirely the creation of the cable/satellite delivered news industry. If there is insufficient news to fill it, that in no way creates an obligation on the part of law enforcement, businesses and other organizations to manufacture content. What I am suggesting is that the news media stick to legitimate newsgathering techniques and report what is known when it is known without manufacturing possibilities or involving themselves in the story.

What I am also suggesting is that the intense competition among media members is also their own creation. The fact that you are in a death-struggle competition in no way obligates me to short-circuit my process of releasing information. Especially in the case of law enforcement, that information must be verified as accurate and rigorously judged as to whether it will compromise an investigation or a prosecution. If news media are unwilling to maintain professional levels of conduct, then organizations will be forced to take a harder line in dealing with them.

Want an excellent example of news media restraint and sound business judgment? Okay. Atlanta has no radio station dedicated exclusively to news on a 24/7 basis. Why? According to the experts, it’s because the market simply won’t support such an operation. Rather than build the thing and then attempt to wheedle manufactured content from news sources to fill up the time, they just didn’t go there. Well, that makes good sense.

The LA Times editorial offers excellent questions that all in the news industry must ask of themselves and their operations: “Each news outlet should reexamine its decisions. Were they true to a mission of delivering news, not speculation, of reporting facts, not hyped promotional opportunities? Though marketable, is it proper to give a disturbed, unidentified killer the same blanket celebrity coverage as less lethal personalities?”

“Here’s the real decision,” the editorial suggests. “Are there enough facts to warrant continuous coverage?” In the case of the D.C. sniper murders, the answer was definitely “no.”

One sheriff’s department spokesperson put the matter correctly and succinctly, “There is a time and a place for release of information. This is not it.”