WAVE-TV got off to a great start in the November sweeps last night with a Troubleshooter investigation that got Parks Director Mike Heitz suspended for drinking and driving his city-issued Ford SUV. WAVE’s Eric Flack confronted Heitz in the parking lot of KT’s after using a hidden camera to record him buying and consuming three drinks in 90 minutes.
This time, Heitz decided not to drive. But this was the fifth day of the WAVE stakeout at KT’s, and on previous days Flack reported seeing Heitz have as many as four drinks in the same time period. And on one of those occasions the WAVE Troubleshooter team followed Heitz the 13 miles home, struggling to keep Heitz’s car in its sights going 70 miles an hour, over the 55 mph speed limit.
That calls into question an ethics question — should the reporting team have called in police, knowing a man who’d been drinking was operating a dangerous device, endangering the general public? Was the pursuit of the story more important than public safety?
News director Kathy Hostetter said the ethics question was thoroughly discussed in the WAVE newsroom. She said that the station was pursuing the story on a tip.
“We had several people observe him. The conclusion was that he should not have been driving,” she said of the night he was confronted. “We are not experts at determining drunkenness. We didn’t allude he was drunk. Candidly we had ethics discussions in the newsroom.”
I found a chart online that shows that a 200-pound man having 4 drinks in an hour would have an estimated blood-alcohol level of .075, just under the legal limit. There are a lot of variables, but it would have certainly put him close to breaking the law. The story, Hostetter insisted, was more about Heitz using a city-owned vehicle and driving, and Heitz’s past record (which included two DUI incidents, one of which occurred in 2007 while he was in his current job).
Jeanine Cherry, an instructor in the broadcasting school at Western Kentucky University, said the way WAVE went after the story presented some ethical questions. “My concern is that instead of alerting authorities, they’re videotaping. You’d think someone would put down the camera and report it to authorities. They assume he’s over the limit. Let the police determine that,” she said.
Anchor Scott Reynolds asked Flack about that on-air last night, who said the same thing Hostetter did about being unable to determine drunkenness. That doesn’t really cut it with our experts.
“”The methodology needs to be questioned,” Cherry said. “They put the cart before the Horse. If you look at our ethics, one of the tenets is to minimize harm. I’m not sure that’s the objective of this story. I think it’s being pursued for sensational reasons. That’s not what journalism is supposed to be. I still think ethics plays a huge role in how we conduct our selves in the storytelling process.”
Stacey Woelfel, a professor at the University of Missouri journalism school, also questioned the tactic. “It would be a problem to watch somebody get drunk enough that you’d have concerns and then let him drive anyway. It’s possible a reporter could not have expected it, but I think we have that responsibility to not allow someone we know would be driving drunk. If that’s the suspicion, we have no different responsibility than if we witnessed it at a party and didn’t say something or call the cops.”
Hostetter said the station chose to confront Heitz only after observing him for four nights. “We followed him one night on a night it was unclear how much and we were prepared to call the police if he did anything in appropriate,” she said.
When the station did report its findings to the Mayor’s Office, Fischer acted immediately on Tuesday. Mayor spokesman Chris Poynter told me that it was determined quickly that Fischer had to take immediate action, and Heitz was suspended and a news release was sent out.
That took some of the oomph out of WAVE’s story, and then the station had to sit on it an additional day because sweeps didn’t start until Thursday.
“We were not really disappointed. I’m glad it happened the way it did,” Hostetter said. “He needs help and is acknowledging that. You debate yourself – do you want to keep letting him be a danger on the road? Ultimately we thought we had something for sweeps and quite honestly we have follow-up questions for the Mayor.”
But the journalism community may have more questions for WAVE.
Here’s more than WKU’s Cherry: “If the man had a gun, would you follow him or alert the authorities? Authorities aren’t notified because you’re busy trying to scoop somebody on the story. Her’s a man driving a two-ton vehicle, where’s the minimization of the harm? They could have done it differently but they chose it for ratings. The public will have more distaste than they already do for journalists. In the end journalism suffers because of the methodology.”
