KU Med, KCTV split over crime victim coverage
KU Med has severed ties with KCTV, and other hospitals may follow suit if Channel 5 doesn't stop reporting where crime victims are being treated.
At issue is a long-held understanding that TV, radio and print media will refrain from naming the hospitals involved when they report on violent crime, including domestic assaults.
Channel 5 news director Regent Ducas says it is the station's right to report all relevant facts to a crime story. Health care providers respond that giving a victim's whereabouts rarely adds anything to a story and potentially puts everyone in the named hospital at risk.
Local broadcasters have respected the hospitals' privacy requests for so long that area PR directors couldn't remember it ever being an issue. That changed June 10, after five people were murdered during a shooting spree in Kansas City, Kan. Another person was wounded and taken to KU Med for treatment. Other TV crews stayed away from the hospital, and most broadcast reports that day said the victim was at "an area hospital," the phrase often used in cases where privacy is requested.
KCTV, however, sent crews to KU Med. Its reporters appeared on-camera in front of the hospital on four separate newscasts that day, according to an independent TV monitoring service. Dennis McCulloch, the chief spokesman for KU Med, was alarmed. His concern grew after people identifying themselves as "associates" tried to visit the victim at the hospital. These people, McCulloch said, learned of the victim's whereabouts from television.
McCulloch called KCTV to complain. Later that day he issued a memo to all local media, citing "renewed concerns" over patient privacy. "When the victim of a crime is brought to any hospital, that victim is in danger," McCulloch wrote. "By reporting the location, you place the victim and our staff in jeopardy."
The memo did not name KCTV or the specific incident. In an interview this week, McCulloch said his conversations with KCTV officials had not been reassuring. Still, he hesitated to lower the boom on the station because, he said, "I thought that rationality would take over eventually."
On Sept. 16, it happened again. KCTV sent a reporter to KU Med to file a live story on a 16-year-old shooting victim. The girl's boyfriend, who was wanted in the assault, was still at large when the report appeared on the station's 10 p.m. news. This time McCulloch sent a letter to Ducas, informing him that since KCTV was "the only news outlet in Kansas City that does not put patient and staff safety first," the hospital would no longer give out medical conditions on any of its patients to Channel 5.
Ducas made no apologies for the reports. He said his reporters were simply doing what the station promised to do in its slogan: "live, late-breaking, investigative" news. "Our assignment desk has been around a long time," Ducas said. "People know we would never put people at risk. We just wouldn't do it." There has been "no overt change in (station) policy," according to Ducas, who worked in TV news in Detroit and Miami before joining KCTV earlier this year.
But he has a hard and fast rule: no deals with anyone. "We're not going to negotiate our journalistic ethics," he said. Doing so, he added, could compromise Channel 5's ability to release relevant medical information to the public. For instance, "if the president is shot and he's at KU Med," Ducas said, "we're going to go live in front of KU Med, even if the shooter is at large."
McCulloch replied: "That is the most ridiculous argument I have ever heard. The president of the United States, if he is injured, will be so well guarded that no one will come near him. Nobody will be intimidating the president as a witness. "However, if they revealed three names of people who saw the shooter, and the name of the subdivision in Overland Park where they lived, then those people would be in danger. That's the correct analogy here." McCulloch said that since Channel 5 hasn't replied either to his letter or one written by hospital president Irene Cumming, KU Med has extended its ban to include all health care information. He admitted that he occasionally returns Anne Peterson's phone calls - "just because she is Anne" - and KU Med remains a supporter of KCTV's broadcast of the Children's Miracle Network telethon.
Ducas doesn't see why KU Med is so upset. He said McCulloch was "on a campaign" against Channel 5, convincing others to write letters of protest to the station, including a local prosecutor and an executive of the Kansas Hospital Association. "There's no reason for it," he said. "It's a mountain out of a molehill."
Perhaps, but that molehill is getting larger. On Oct. 30 the station named one of the hospitals of Health Midwest in a story about a shooting victim. Health Midwest vice president Chris Whitley called Channel 5 to complain and came away "perplexed" by the station's intransigence. "If this sort of thing persists, we might have to look at taking the same sort of action KU Med has taken against 5," Whitley said. "I would really rather not do that because, frankly, we need each other."
Other area broadcasters sided with the health care providers. "We don't identify the hospital of a victim of a shooting - ever," said Michael Sipes, news director of top-rated KMBC, Channel 9. KMBZ-AM (980) news director Scott Parks called it "common sense" not to give out a victim's location "if the perpetrator is still alive." Spokesmen for the Kansas Association of Broadcasters and Missouri Broadcasters Association say their groups do not have guidelines on releasing patient information.
The industry's leading professional organization, the Radio-TV News Directors Association, addresses the issue generally in its code of ethics: "Treat all subjects of news coverage with respect and dignity, showing particular compassion to victims of crime or tragedy." The Kansas City Star typically refers to crime victims being treated at "an area hospital." Steve Shirk, managing editor for news at The Star said, "We want to avoid putting innocent people in harm's way." The hospital where a victim is treated, Shirk added, "is rarely germane to the story."
Next spring new federal guidelines on patient privacy take effect. Hospitals that disclose any patient's condition without the patient's written permission could be fined up to $250,000 and individuals sentenced to prison time. Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-TV News Directors Association, said she is concerned that the rules, as laid out in the new Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, are too sweeping. For instance, the new law may make it illegal to report the physical condition of persons entrusted with public safety, such as airline pilots, or of public officials - say, the president. The federal guidelines could put hospitals and local media on a collision course over freedom of information.
But another news director in town thinks the opposite will happen. The hospitals "understand our frustration with these new rules," said Debbie Bush of KSHB, Channel 41. "They're working with us. And if they're concerned about patient safety and staff safety, we're going to work with them. It's a give-and-take relationship."
