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After 9/11, how do you find balance?By ERIC DEGGANS, Times TV Critic
© St. Petersburg Times Now that the dust has cleared -- we know the three Muslim men detained for 17 hours along Alligator Alley were not terrorists but medical students and we've seen how much better Florida's terrorist alert system works than its election system -- a question looms. Have we, the media, learned anything? It's a query I can't help asking after seeing how some news outlets, most notably radio and TV stations, echoed the hysteria of the moment Friday -- serving up continuous coverage of police closing down Interstate 75 near Naples to search the cars of three "men of Middle Eastern descent" a Georgia woman said talked of committing a terrorist act during a restaurant stop. For the media, the incident raised important questions: Were we too ready to to cast suspicion on three Muslim men based on a woman's tip and police reaction? Is it possible to cover such an incident while giving fair weight to the idea that suspicion does not equal guilt? Government officials have said the system worked the way it should, post-Sept. 11. That's also what some in the local media say, noting that terrorist concerns combined with police moving to shut down one of the state's busiest roads for hours justified aggressive coverage. "It was the right decision, and I'd do the same thing again," said Bill Berra, news director at WFTS-Ch. 28, which offered continuous coverage of the police search from about 9 a.m. Friday until about 12:30 a.m. Saturday. (Cable news channel Bay News 9 and WTSP-Ch. 10 also offered expanded news coverage during the morning.) "The police did what they did. ... It's not my job to second-guess them on the spur of the moment. They thought there was a clear and present danger, and we covered their actions." Berra noted that their reports drew, at peak, about 18 percent of the available audience, beating most of the morning's other programming. "We received an overwhelming amount of phone calls (from viewers) and it was all positive," he said. Likewise, WFLZ-FM 93.3 radio personality MJ Kelli, who interviewed tipster Eunice Stone on Friday morning, resisted any notion that racial profiling may have provoked a media and police overreaction, saying he still believes the students were trying to provoke Stone as a joke. "I believe these three Muslim men put themselves in the position of being profiled by their practical joke that backfired," said Kelli, whose interview with Stone was later featured during a segment on CNN's Larry King Live with the three students. The three students, Ayman Gheith, 27, and Kambiz Butt, 25, both of suburban Chicago, and Omar Chaudhary, 23, of Independence, Mo., were driving to internships at a Miami hospital. All three men have said they did not discuss Sept. 11 at the restaurant, saying Stone may have misunderstood their talk about bringing a car down to Miami from Kansas City. Hard as Americans have tried to avoid racial profiling post-Sept. 11, incidents like these seem to strain our resolve. Listening to Stone's interview with Kelli, I was struck by how her account was not seriously challenged by the host; he seemed to assume Stone heard the conversation correctly. This isn't a new issue: Late last year, 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft reported a story suggesting airport security officials "would be crazy" not to consider race and ethnicity in security screenings of potential passengers. Anchor Brian Williams once made the same observation while hosting an edition of Meet the Press. But what happens when innocent "men of Middle Eastern descent" can't even have a conversation in a public restaurant without risking serious police attention? Doesn't that create the kind of fearful environment terrorists desire? Keith Woods, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute, which owns the St. Petersburg Times, didn't object to Friday's continuous coverage, given the situation. But he did suggest ways to ensure such coverage doesn't unfairly inflame tensions in similar situations. Woods suggests news outlets avoid idle speculation, continually emphasize the possibility of a subject's innocence while reporting on police activity and use ethnic and religious identifications carefully. This critic would like to see more restraint -- perhaps news updates instead of continuous coverage until a clearer picture emerges during such an event. But Berra said expecting the news media to counter anxieties fed by government alerts and Sept. 11 is probably expecting too much. "We can sit there and say ... 'These guys might not be guilty of anything,' but that's lost," he added. "Everybody's acutely aware of who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks ... and as long as that's an issue, people are going to be suspicious."
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