The Press: The Higher Duty

Is it the first duty of the press to print the news at any price, no matter what the injury? Or should newspapers, in compelling circumstances, acknowledge a higher duty by holding up a story? Last week the New York dailies, though most of them sided instinctively with humanity, failed their severest test.

Like most well-tended babies in the well-tended homes of Westbury, N.Y., brown-haired Peter Weinberger was sleeping off his midday bottle when his mother stepped into the house for a fresh diaper one afternoon last week. Fifteen minutes later, Beatrice Weinberger walked outside and found that 32-day-old Peter had been kidnaped. On the ground was a neatly written note demanding $2,000 ransom, to be placed near a neighbor’s garage. Wrote the kidnaper: “I’m scared stiff. Do not notify the police until noon tomorrow or I’ll be forced to kill the baby.”

A few minutes later Morris Weinberger, drug salesman, got home from a drive with his other son, was told the news by his distraught wife. He promptly called Nassau County police headquarters. Neighbors and a swarm of detectives quickly spread the news through the fashionable Long Island suburb. Inevitably, someone called the New York newspapers.

Broken Date. The first paper to hear about the kidnaping apparently was the New York Times—at 7 p.m., four hours after Peter’s abduction. Half an hour later the tip reached Manhattan’s tabloid Daily News. Soon the wire services and

Manhattan’s other major morning papers, the Herald, Tribune and Hearst’s Daily Mirror, picked up the story. As clamoring rewrite men and reporters called Nassau County headquarters to check their tips, they were, asked by police to hold up the story until after the ransom deadline next day, in hope the kidnaper would collect the ransom and return the baby.

For editors, the blackout request raised the question: Should the press ever abrogate its duty of reporting the news? All wire services and morning dailies except one readily promised to observe the police deadline. The holdout: the Daily News, where a reporter promised to relay the police request to the city desk and call back. By 8 p.m. Police Secretary John MacDonald started telephoning the other morning papers to get formal confirmation of their pledge to withhold the story. But, said police, at about 8:30 p.m., the News had called to say it could not hold the story; by then a small early edition of the News was on the street with a brief bulletin on the case. Half an hour later the tabloid’s big second edition bannered the kidnaping on Page One, ran a full account inside. MacDonald promptly called the other morning papers to release them from their pledges. The News, for what it was worth, had scored a clean beat.

Next day the Long Island countryside swarmed with reporters, photographers and TV cameramen. Newsmen interviewed the Weinbergers’ neighbors and the neighbors’ children, besieged the parents with calls. At 10 a.m., when Weinberger placed the ransom at the nearby spot specified in the note, three newsmen were allowed to watch from a car. To no one’s surprise, the kidnaper did not keep his date.

“Cut Your Throats.” Thereafter, the Manhattan press did its best to cooperate. Most papers printed little Peter’s formula daily, relayed messages from the Weinbergers to the kidnaper (with no apparent success), ran detailed descriptions of the missing child. But the damage had already been done. Interviewed by three reporters, Peter’s sobbing mother cried out: “I could cut all your throats.” Fumed Chief of Detectives Stuyvesant Pinnell: “We would have got a hell of a lot further if there had been no interference from the press.”

On his part, Detective Pinnell, whose clumsy handling of the Woodward killing (TIME, Nov. 14, 1955) had earned him little respect among newsmen, could have averted any possible misunderstanding if he had briefed the press and pledged it to secrecy immediately after the crime. Later he jeopardized further attempts to pay the ransom; he blabbed to reporters that the packages left by Weinberger contained little real money. When the kidnaper upped the ransom from $2,000 to $5,000, Pinnell’s cops asked most papers and wire services not to print the information, but apparently neglected to call the Times and the News, which published the story. Later press and TV carried Mrs. Weinberger’s promise that police and ministers had pledged cooperation if the kidnaper would leave the baby in a church; that there would be “no trap.”

The Humane Thing. When the kidnaper gave no sign of responding to the appeal, police admitted to newsmen that Peter Weinberger’s survival was now “a matter for conjecture.” At week’s end, with little to report, newsmen had time to do some earnest soul-searching. Though other dailies continued to print pointed explanations of why the blackout had failed, the News stuck to its story that the police request for secrecy had been made too late. Other newsmen were outspokenly skeptical.

Said the Times in an editorial: “Sometimes a newspaper finds it the necessary, or at least the humane thing to do to stop and ask whether a given story should be reported, and when, and whether a life may be put in jeopardy by premature publication of all or certain details. We cannot blame the grief-stricken parents or the police for the indignation they have expressed.”