Elián raid puts editors on tightrope

Wendell Cochran
Special to The Freedom Forum Online

04.25.00

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	Juan Miguel González holds his son, Elián, after reunion at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., on April 22, as his wife, Nersy, and 6-month-old son, Hianny, look on.

ARLINGTON, Va. — The headlines screamed at America on Sunday morning, April 23:

"TAKEN BY FORCE" — The Day in New London, Conn.

"RAID, THEN REUNION" — The Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger

"REUNITED" — San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News

"ELIAN SEIZED, REUNITED WITH FATHER" — Dayton (Ohio) Daily News

"ELIAN BACK WITH PAPA" — The Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel.

And the stories were accompanied by powerful images:

• Six-year-old Elián González looking frightened as he faced a machine-gun-brandishing Border Patrol agent in full SWAT uniform.

• Another federal agent running for a waiting car, Elián clinging to her in what appears to be terror.
• A beaming Elián captured on film a few hours later in the arms of his father, whom he hadn't seen since before Thanksgiving.

For months, Elián's story has waxed and waned on the nation's front pages. At first, what captured editors' attention was simply the drama of his rescue in the Straits of Florida after his mother and other refugees had drowned in their attempt to flee Cuba. Then came the almost irresistible pictures of Elián: visiting Disney World, playing in his relatives' yard in Miami. Finally, an emotional political and legal battle, as his fiercely anti-Castro relatives sought to prevent his being returned to Cuba and his father.

But when editors arrived at their desks on Saturday, April 22, they found themselves dealing with a bewildering set of practical and ethical issues that tested their ability to tell a dramatic story while maintaining some allegiance to the critical professional guidelines of accuracy, fairness and balance.

For starters, how big a story was the federal action that took Elián out of the arms of one of his rescuers and put him back in the embrace of his father? For most editors, the answer was simple: It was Big, with a capital "B."

And it didn't matter that the story blanketed television news shows for much of the day Saturday and would be more than 24 hours old by the time readers opened their papers Easter Sunday.

Of the 42 Sunday papers displayed at the Newseum, 37 led with the Elián story. Editors in San Jose and New London decided to devote their entire front pages to Elián coverage.

"It was a major story that had been building for months," says Lance Johnson, managing editor of The Day. "It is one of the major stories of the year. Why not make the decision to go really strong with it because the material is so strong?"

In fact, in New London, the Elián coverage knocked out two page-one candidates: a local standoff between police and an armed man and a major enterprise package the paper had been preparing for several weeks.

By far the most intriguing question for editors was which images to use to illustrate the story.

The most provocative pictures were taken by Alan Diaz, a Miami free-lancer, who has covered the whole Elián saga on contract for the Associated Press. Diaz managed to get inside the house just in front of the federal agents and fired off a powerful sequence of images of an armed agent confronting Elián, in the arms of one of the fisherman who had plucked the boy from the Straits of Florida five months ago.

The pictures clearly show a keyed-up agent, trigger finger at the ready — but not on the trigger — on his machine gun, his other hand reaching out for the boy, who is on the verge of tears.

Another AP photographer, Wilfredo Lee, captured a compelling sequence showing a photogenic female federal agent dashing out of the house, carrying the terrified child, who is reported to have asked repeatedly, "What's happening?"

And, not to be outdone in the image war the Elián story has become, Juan Miguel González, the boy's father, released a series of pictures showing a happily reunited family. In the picture he is holding a smiling Elián. Other pictures show the boy and his father playing.

Deciding to run the "gun" picture apparently was not difficult. "It's a great frame," says Stephen Brown, who teaches photography at American University in Washington, D.C. "You've got to run it." And 35 of the 42 editors of papers on display at the Newseum agreed with Brown.

Says John Rice, Sunday editor of the Houston Chronicle, "There was no question that was going to be our dominant photo."

The dilemma editors faced was finding a way to balance that strong image with the rest of the story — the reunion between father and son.

At 32 of the newspapers that the Newseum received for its front-pages display, the decision was made to run both the gun picture and the father-son reunion portrait. But at most papers, such as The State of Columbia, S.C., the picture of the gun-brandishing agent got by far the most space. Only a few papers, notably The Washington Post and the Newark Star-Ledger, ran the two images at nearly the same size.

Six of the Newseum papers ran the father-with-Elián picture but not the gun photo. One of those was the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette. Rosalie Earle, managing editor of the Gazette, says, "I got some angry calls about it" from readers accusing the paper of bias.

But she pointed out that Charleston is one of the relatively few cities that still has a Saturday afternoon paper. That means that many of the Gazette's Sunday readers had already seen the photo in the Saturday Charleston Daily Mail. And "that's not counting the ones that saw it all day Saturday" on television, Earle says. "We can't just have what TV has. We have to move the story forward."

In hindsight, Earle says, the gun picture should have been used inside because the paper ran a story discussing how the picture was taken.

Three of the newspapers received ran the gun picture alone, but not the father-son picture, on page one. One, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette of Little Rock, chose to use neither, letting the picture of the agent running from the house with Elián in her arms carry the story.

Rice says editors in Houston talked about balance, but decided to use the father-son reunion shot smaller so it could go higher on the page. "If we went smaller with it, we could get it above the headline and give it more prominence. We were able to give it top of the page."

The New York Times ran the gun photo on page one in its early edition, but moved it inside for later runs, putting the father-son picture at the top of the page and also running the photo of the agent carrying Elián out of the house.

El Nuevo Herald, The Miami Herald's Spanish-language daily, published an "extra" on Saturday, covering most of its front page with the gun-wielding agent and the headline, "QUE VERGUENZA"! — "How shameful." The paper's editor told The New York Times the headline and photo reflected the community's feelings. But by the Sunday edition, the El Nuevo headlines were much more muted. "Day of mixed emotions," read the banner. The gun picture was gone, and the father-son photo made the cover, along with the photo of the agent carrying the boy out of the house.

Within a few hours after the raid, the gun picture was made into a banner that was carried by Cuban protesters in Miami and elsewhere.

And even though they didn't know under what circumstances the father-son picture was taken, editors trying to achieve some balance felt they had no choice. "It's the only thing we could have used … even though it was a handout," says Rice.

Editors faced other issues. For example, what should the federal action have been called?

Most papers chose to describe the action as a "raid," which Webster's defines as, among other things: "a hostile or predatory incursion," "a surprise attack by a small force," or "a sudden invasion by officers of the law."

That seems accurate enough, and from a headline writer's point of view, "raid" has the additional advantages of being an active word that is short. Cleveland's The Plain Dealer also made a reference to "pre-dawn assault," and several referred to a "lightning raid."

Once they were in the house, what did the agents do? According to the headlines, they "seized" Elián. According to the dictionary, "seize" can have relatively passive meanings such as "to take possession of," or more-active meanings: "to possess or take by force." The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun said, "Feds grab Elian in early morning raid."

There was also the question of how to balance the raid with the reunion. The language of the headline was problematic because any tilt would be interpreted by readers as evidence of bias either toward the government or the Miami family.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's attempt to capture the day said: "Guns, tears and a reunion."

And there's always got to be one thing that will drive an editor crazy. Columbia, S.C.'s The State had a factual error in its headline: "Elian with his dad; Miami, Cuba calm." But the paper's front-page also carried a story about the Miami protests that led to more than 200 arrests.

Freedom Forum Fellow Wendell Cochran, who teaches journalism at American University in Washington, is conducting a study of the content of the front pages received daily at the Newseum.