Newspaper Apologizes p. 15

By: M.L. Stein

California daily says it made an error of judgment when it
prominently played up the 1974 child-molestation conviction
of a former teacher found murdered in his home last month
A 61-YEAR-OLD man is murdered, stabbed to death in his home.
Nearly 20 years ago, as a respected high school teacher, he was convicted of sexually molesting two male students and sentenced to six months in jail. How should his past be played in a news story of the slaying?
The Daily Pilot, which covers the Orange County, Calif., coastal area, grappled with this question and decided it had made a grave mistake.
The headline on its Aug. 13 story said, "Convicted child molester found slain." The lead said, "A 61-year-old man who was found stabbed to death in his home Wednesday has been identified as the former Corona del Mar high school teacher convicted of molesting two of his students in 1974."
In the sixth paragraph, the past of the victim, Alan Schwalbe, was picked up and detailed for another seven paragraphs. It was noted that Schwalbe denied the charges at the time.
The story brought a storm of protest from relatives and friends of the well-to-do property owner.
Laura Schwalbe, one of Schwalbe's five children, phoned the paper to complain that her father's life amounted to much more than his criminal conviction.
As reported by the Daily Pilot, she added, "This is sensationalism at its worst. It's tabloid stuff like some paper in London. He was a good man and deserved much better than this. This really hurt . . . . "
Costa Mesa Councilman Joe Erickson, a self-described friend of Schwalbe, accused the paper in a letter of exploiting a "juicy story even after the passage of time."
The Pilot, Erickson continued, "did not speak of Alan's many years of service to his community. He volunteered to deliver lunches to housebound senior citizens, served meals to homeless people, arranged for jobs for prison inmates upon their release . . . served the Orange County Fair Housing Council and cared for AIDS patients in his home."
Although the jail sentence cost Schwalbe his wife, his job and most of his friends, "he continued to protest his innocence to the day he died," the letter said. However, even if guilty, Schwalbe had paid his debt to society, Erickson contended.
The protests did not go unheeded.
In its Aug. 14-15 weekend edition, the Pilot carried a front-page "Apology" box by editor William S. Lobdell, who called the previous day's story "one-dimensional and distorted."
"He was a murder victim and we focused almost entirely on a 19-year-old conviction," the editor added. "The treatment we gave the article ? including its headline and placement ? represented an error in judgment. He deserved better. Our readers deserved better."
Next to the apology was a column by managing editor Steve Marble, who conceded that "it was unfair to portray [Schwalbe] as a child molester and leave it at that." The column appeared in the same spot as the murder story and was approximately the same length.
Marble recalled, however, that the reporter who wrote the story had tried to talk to Laura Schwalbe at the murder scene but was refused. Pressed by a deadline, the reporter turned to the newspaper's library where the file on Schwalbe "began and ended with the child-molestation case."
Subsequently, the paper learned that Schwalbe had been a respected member of the gay community, an activist who had marched for gay rights and a worker in Democratic politics. He had helped establish a chapter of a veterans' group for gays and lesbians.
In judging the murder story, Marble concluded, "The article, of course, was accurate. It was factual. It was a neat synopsis of a very miserable point in Schwalbe's life.
"But in the cold light of the morning, after listening to a murder victim's daughter and staring down at the huge headline that had dredged up an event that had lost any semblance of news value, I realized it was possible to be accurate and inaccurate all at once."
Marble, a 15-year newspaperman, said, "This is a lesson we have to relearn. The situation keeps coming back. We should not have let a 20-year-old conviction become the whole story. We should have tried harder to get more background on the man."