The Bay Citizen reported this week on the personal bankruptcy of Lt. John A. Pike III, the campus policeman who gained worldwide notoriety recently for pepper-spraying a line of protesters at the University of California, Davis.
I was one of the editors at The Bay Citizen who approved and edited the story. It didn’t take long for critics to question the journalistic propriety of reporting details about Lt. Pike’s personal life. One critic, Shawn King, the host of “Your Mac Life,” a radio show broadcast on the Internet, wrote on Twitter: “So this is what we’re doing – reporting on cop’s private life? Isn’t that as despicable as what he did?”
“Uh, no,” I responded via Twitter.
Mr. King replied, “You have 140 characters – you’re allowed to use them all …”
What followed was a demonstration of how inadequate Twitter is for conducting a thoughtful debate.
In a volley of 140-character-or-less tweets, I said that no, reporting on the cop’s private life was not as despicable as methodical assault on nonviolent protesters by shooting them in the face at point-blank range with pepper spray.
Mr. King answered that the cop’s personal life was not relevant to the incident.
If words came out in a concentrated spray of oleoresin capsicum liquid, he got me right in the face. Was it really in the public’s right to know details of Lt. Pike’s personal finances? After all, he has not been charged with any wrongdoing, except in the court of public opinion. He was following orders from the chancellor of the university, Dr. Linda Katehi, to use force if necessary to remove protesters who were blocking a public walkway. He warned them several times to move, and warned them that if they did not move, he and the other police would remove them by force. They did not, and he did.
Mr. King and other critics felt that we did not uphold the standards of responsible journalism. Some said we violated Lt. Pike’s right to privacy. Others said we were no better than the tabloid journals that feed on the private details of people’s lives.
This is one of those times when a blog is more useful than Twitter for hashing out ideas. Here goes my argument:
Lt. Pike’s personal bankruptcy — in which creditors seized his house, pickup truck, collection of handguns, barbecue grill, wedding ring, and even some clothes — is relevant to the context of the protest.
The students were peacefully protesting tuition and fee increases at UC Davis that many students can no longer afford. The Davis protesters expressed sympathy with Occupy Wall Street protesters and allied protests at Berkeley and Oakland, where a main grievance is the growing income gap between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the “other 99 percent.” A prominent focal point of the OWS protests is the collapse of the housing market in which banks and other financial companies got rich by peddling toxic mortgages while millions of Americans lost their homes or were forced into bankruptcy. It turns out that Lt. Pike was one of those who foolishly borrowed heavily against the artificially inflated value of his house, and lost it all when housing prices collapsed.
From a journalism standpoint, it is a case of weighing the policeman’s right to privacy (even though all documents were in the public record) against the “public interest” in knowing more about the central character in a news event that had captured widespread local, national and global attention. The “pepper spray cop,” as Lt. Pike now and probably forevermore will be known, has more in common with the 99 percent than with the 1 percent, despite his $117,000 annual government salary. (By the way, these days it takes an annual income of about $350,000 to qualify for the 1 percent. UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi, who ordered the forceful removal of protesters, is a 1-percenter.)
“Self-evident, obvious,” Mr. King tweeted in response. “Reporting personal details” of the policeman’s off-campus life was “move vengeful than ‘public interest.’ ”
In other words, he’s not buying it. Neither is “Mission Rosalind,” a Bay Citizen reader who posted the following on the Comments section:
How does this story add to our understanding of what happened at UC Davis?
=>It doesn’t.How does revealing financial information about Pike shed light on his motivations and reasoning behind pepper spraying the protesters?
=>It doesn’t.How does publishing information about Pike’s family affect readers’ ability to judge whether UC Davis handled the protest appropriately?
=>It doesn’t.The Bay Citizen has now officially moved to TABLOID status. Articles like this one make the Bay Citizen no better than the National Enquirer. Perhaps Rebekah Brooks should be asked to join the Bay Citizen’s Board of Directors.
I disagree. What do you think? I look forward to your comments, which don’t have to be limited to 140 characters.
In the meantime, I think Lt. Pike might be able to augment his income by signing an endorsement deal for “Defense Technology’s 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray.” He’s certainly done more than any traditional marketing campaign to raise the profile of professional-grade pepper spray.
Imagine how successful your Black Friday shopping at Wal-Mart would be if you packed a canister of Mike-9.
It’s available on Amazon.com, of course. Here’s the product description:
“The world’s most widely used pepper spray in law enforcement and corrections, First Defense® has just gotten better. With our complete line of aerosols, we are able to offer an OC level of intensity ranging from .2% Major Capsaicinoids to 1.3% MC. The variations in the MC % means that you can now select the level of intensity of OC for the environment required. We use independent laboratory testing to ensure consistent quality of each product. Formulation Weight: 12 oz.; Delivery System: Stream.”
Thanks for taking the time to flesh out your Twitter comments. I better understand your tweets even if I still disagree with some of them.
You say, “The “pepper spray cop,” as Lt. Pike now and probably forevermore will be known, has more in common with the 99 percent than with the 1 percent” and use that partly as justification for the story. You are correct when you say I wasn’t buying it. I can’t imagine many people not realizing the cop was part of the 99% – after all, by definition, the vast majority of us are.
I still feel that the story has more “vengeance” than “public interest”. If the story had used the details of his personal life to make a point about his mental well being at the time of the incident, that *might* be an excuse for those details. Or, if the cop were in fact a “1 percenter”, that might also be pertinent to his actions.
To be perfectly clear, I believe his actions were despicable and maybe even inhumane and I in no way, shape or form accept or excuse his actions. But I don’t believe holding him to *additional* ridicule that doesn’t shed further light on the incident or his actions serves any purpose. The well worn cliche of “the “public interest” is not the same as “an interested public”" holds true here in my opinion.
I think anybody would want to know, what kind of man would follow that kind of order. The first ‘who was that guy’ reports in the Los Angeles Times were about his commendations.
Once that is reported — and I didn’t see Shawn King or anybody else object — then every verifiable scrap of information is publishable.
Does his bankruptcy (financial) ‘explain’ his bankruptcy (decency)? No.
Does Katehi’s side-switching explain her orders to her goons? Maybe.
Less information will always result in a less-informed judgment.
“Once that is reported — and I didn’t see Shawn King or anybody else object…”
I wasn’t consulted on the The Bay Citizen report so I couldn’t very well object, could I?
But as soon as I did see it, I raised my objections/concerns.
You say, “Does his bankruptcy (financial) ‘explain’ his bankruptcy (decency)? No.” I think a bigger/better question is, “Was it relevant to the incident?” I would argue no.
“Less information will always result in a less-informed judgment.” Perhaps but how does information about the cop’s personal life result in more “informed” judgement? Isn’t it prejudicial? And where do the revelations of his personal life and past end? Does the media report on his relationship with his wife? On his associations? Maybe we can dig back far enough to find out he was truant in high school…
It’s a slippery slope and I would prefer to err on the side of privacy when it doesn’t directly impact the events under discussion.
We cannot evaluate its relevance till we know about it.
It’s true that the motivations of this man are less important than those of Katehi or Ailes. But he was at the sharp end, and the incident itself is getting more attention than other, worse ones, for reasons described here;
Sorry, link here<
“We cannot evaluate its relevance till we know about it.” But by that logic and taken to its absurdist extreme, you “want” his grade school marks in Phys Ed to be published in order for the public to judge the relevance.
That’s where “responsible journalism” comes into play. A good journalist makes that call *for* the general public. As I said originally, just because we the public may have an interest in something does not mean it’s in the public interest for us to know it.
I am a good newspaperman. Once you start publishing items about what a commendable guy the guy is, you have to publish the other stuff, too. Otherwise, you’ve misled your readers.
Nobody to publish the commendations, but unless you are content to let the cop be a black box, through which pepper spray mysteriously gets applied to peaceful protesters, then it’s Katy-bar-the-door once the first breach into his previous life is made.
We heard a lot of pissing and moaning from the right wing about revelations about the private life of Joe the Plumber, but it turned out that those were important in demonstrating that he was a scofflaw and not the upstanding citizen he was being presented as.
Till you know, you don’t know.
“Till you know, you don’t know.” The corollary to that is “Once you know, you can’t un-know…”
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