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The Canadian Press - ONLINE EDITION
Williams coverage poses questions, causes conflict in Canadian newsroomsTORONTO - Disturbing evidence documenting the heinous crimes of Col. Russell Williams is giving rise to consternation and even conflict in newsrooms across Canada as journalists struggle to cover a sensational murder case without alienating the readers they serve.
A barrage of graphic images released Monday by a court in Belleville, Ont., left newspapers, TV broadcasters and online news providers struggling with the best way to illustrate the sordid story of a once-rising star in the Canadian military and how his shocking sexual proclivities led to robbery, rape and murder.
One of the most dramatic examples came courtesy of the Toronto Star newspaper, which splashed across its front page the two faces of Williams: one of a decorated Air Force man in full military dress, the other a closeted fetishist clad only in skimpy, stolen pink lingerie.
Star editors could not reach a consensus in assembling Tuesday's front page, communications director Bob Hepburn admitted in an interview.
Some felt the photo of Williams posing in garments stolen from a bedroom in 2007 to be inappropriate, he said. Others considered it vital for a proper understanding of the man, particularly when juxtaposed with an image of Williams as base commander at CFB Trenton, complete with a brisk salute.
Editors knew they were courting controversy by running the graphic photo, but believed the public good of doing so outweighed any potential harm, Hepburn said.
"(The editors) felt this was an extraordinary and disturbing story," he said.
"We didn’t do it to sell newspapers, we didn’t do it deliberately to disturb readers. It will probably hurt our circulation — we’ve got a lot of people calling in about it — but we feel the public does have a right to know what sort of person that Williams is."
On Tuesday, Williams was formally convicted on two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Jessica Lloyd and Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, as well as two sex-assault charges and 82 charges of breaking and entering.
He admitted to having had a fetish for women's underwear since his 20s, and to giving in to those urges in 2007 when he began breaking into homes and photographing himself wearing stolen lingerie while masturbating. Two days of graphic evidence have documented just how that fetish escalated to sexual assault and murder.
A heated discussion broke out in the office of CTV News president Robert Hurst moments after the photos were released.
"Whenever we have these issues about showing pictures or not, we have very heated, hard, fascinating exchanges across the entire spectrum of, ‘Use 'em all, don’t use any of 'em,'" Hurst said. The network opted to run a selection of the images as part of their television newscasts, he added.
Producers were asked to make sure the pictures ran for a limited amount of time and to ensure they were depicted as key pieces of evidence in a trial of national importance, he said.
CBC News opted Monday to run just a single photograph of Williams indulging his fetish; a number of other cropped photos showed only his head and shoulders.
In a statement released Tuesday, CBC News executive editor Esther Enkin said the network grappled with its coverage plan for weeks prior to the hearing, which ended up proving more shocking and sensational than anyone anticipated.
The picture CBC chose to show was tame compared to other exhibits shown in court, and reflected the network’s desire to tell the story through a "minimalist approach," Enkin said.
Most of the country’s other news outlets took a more guarded position, choosing either to place disturbing images in less prominent locations or to omit them from their coverage altogether.
Sylvia Stead, associate editor at the Globe and Mail, said the paper felt the public could gain insight into Williams’s character through less explicit pictures.
The front page of Tuesday’s paper featured a close-cropped image of Williams staring into the camera with what Stead described as a malicious expression. The picture was sufficient to give readers a glimpse of his dark side, she said.
Graphic photos were kept off the front page out of sensitivity to readers, she added, and were instead relegated to an inside page and made available online for those who wished to seek them out.
"Readers have no choice in what photographs they see on the front page," Stead said. "They can choose to read the articles and to stop when it might become difficult, but not so with photographs."
Globe reporters who are blogging about the hearing from inside the courtroom are providing another source of graphic information, one that Stead cautioned squeamish readers to avoid in a note posted on the newspaper’s website.
A similar note appears on the Ottawa Citizen website, steering readers who wish to see the evidence in detail to a specially-labelled photo gallery.
Yahoo Canada readers, on the other hand, have to click elsewhere. The website has opted not to print any explicit pictures, saying the images would likely upset some readers, said senior news editor Andrew MacDonald.
"We don’t want to do anything to shock or offend loyal readers who come with the expectation of a certain quality of content and standard of coverage," MacDonald said.
"The temptation was there. We could download a bunch of these into a gallery and get a billion clicks in terms of traffic, but we resisted that and will continue to during our coverage of this."
Regardless of the varied approaches different outlets are using to tell the story, they agree the story is an important one that justifies both the editorial struggles and likely blowback from readers.
Some may question the need to share such horrific details, but extensive, detailed coverage is essential to maintain transparency in Canada's justice system and to help prevent such horrific attacks from happening again, Enkin said.
"We cover it because we can be your eyes and ears in a courtroom, and we are committed to as open a justice system as possible," the CBC statement said.
"We cover it because there is a strong public interest (and yes, maybe some of it is prurient) as well as a real need to understand how someone in a position of such authority, a senior member of the Canadian Armed Forces, could also commit these crimes."
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