Richard Jewell says he is not the Atlanta bomber, so he wants an apology for being relentlessly snooped by the FBI and having his bland life laid out to the world by the media.
If he is right, then the question seems to be, who is supposed to do the apologizing?
There are obvious apology suspects all over the place, and we can probably begin with the FBI, which has been sifting through everything there is to know about Jewell almost since the bomb smoke cleared.
But isn’t that the FBI’s job? Jewell was a logical suspect, although he was initially portrayed as a hero because he was the security guard who spotted the knapsack that turned out to contain the bomb.
He helped make himself the prime suspect by the way he immodestly chased publicity and recognition, offering himself to news organizations for interviews and TV appearances.
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Yes, but there are those who say the FBI did wrong because it “leaked” the fact that it considered Jewell a suspect and was investigating him.
I doubt that. And so would most reporters who have unsuccessfully tried to pry information out of the tight-lipped FBI.
The FBI has always made a practice of dealing only with a handful of reporters they trust, and only when it is to the FBI’s advantage.
And there was no advantage to the FBI in suddenly being overrun by a stampede of media crews outside Jewell’s apartment.
No, it is far more likely that the leak came from one of the Atlanta and Georgia police agencies. That’s the way these things usually happen. The FBI shares information with the local cops. And one of the local cops blabs to a pal on a local paper.
In this case, the paper was the Atlanta Journal, which put out a special edition to break the Jewell-as-suspect story. The editors at the paper figured that if it didn’t do the story, some other news shop would.
That evening, the networks grabbed the story and Jewell was instantly famous. What made the story even juicier was that the TV world had all that footage of the earlier interviews with Jewell, in which he described his role in spotting the suspicious green knapsack and his various windy observations about life in these United States.
And the next morning, Jewell was on the front page of almost every American newspaper.
The story was a natural–yesterday’s hero was suspected of being today’s villain.
So who was at fault? The Atlanta paper says that if it didn’t run with the story, someone else surely would have, which is true.
The broadcast networks can say that once the Atlanta paper broke the story, and the wire services picked it up, they couldn’t very well ignore it.
And newspapers around the country can say that once the networks made it a worldwide story, it would have been silly for newspapers to pretend it wasn’t there.
Of course, journalistic goody-goodies will say that every news organization violated professional ethics by identifying Jewell as a suspect before he had been charged with a crime.
But that isn’t realistic. There is no standard code of journalistic ethics. Every news shop has its own. And in the network business, the only real rule is that if it is lively and it moves, put it on the air.
Besides, there are special rules for those considered “public figures.” And rule one is that a public figure really has no privacy rights. Just ask Gary Hart.
And Jewell, the obscure security guard, had turned himself into a public figure of sorts when, in his hero role, he grabbed as much media attention as he could get.
So it is doubtful that he will get apologies from anyone–the FBI, the networks or the newspapers.
If the FBI decides not to bring charges against him, he should look at the bright side of the entire affair.
Millions of people crave even a moment of fame. Think of all the times you have seen them crowd in close to on-the-street or stadium TV interviews to mug and wave at the camera.
Look at the many who offer to go on daytime TV talk shows and share their most shameful secrets.
So here we have someone who came out of obscurity to be hailed as a hero, eyeballed as a possible villain and maybe sympathized with as a victim.
Come on, Richard, count your blessings. You might be the media’s first triple-threat. Go get an agent and hit the speaker’s tour. You might never have to be a hired gumshoe again.
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