9001090576 DETROIT FREE PRESS 900307 Wednesday, March 07, 1990 METRO FINAL CHASER

SPT

1D MITCH ALBOM SEE ALSO METRO FINAL EDITION, Page 1D Copyright (c) 1990, Detroit Free Press TV ETHICS STAGGERED AS HANK GATHERS DIED He began to die in a grotesque fashion, dropping to the floor, convulsingas his teammates stared in horror. Like many people, I cannot get the image of Hank Gathers out of my head. The question is: Should it be there in the first place? Ask television. Gathers, a powerful center for Loyola Marymount, was not the first athlete to die of heart trouble after physical exertion. Why, two years ago, Pete Maravich, a name more famous than Gathers', expired in a similar fashion. But America did not buzz about Maravich the way it does this week. The reason: some 30 or 40 seconds of footage that aired on TV news across the country Sunday night, showing Gathers collapsing in a heap, his mother running from the stands. The look on her face. The violent jerking of his body. That footage did not belong on TV. Not in my opinion. No way. The story could have been told without it. Hank Gathers was not a president. His death did not bring down a political regime. It was a tragic slice of the real world that demanded a real tug of ethics. Yet few TV stations chose not to run it. "It's a news story," I was told when I called local channels. One weekend anchor said, "If we didn't air it, our viewers would have been cheated." Cheated? Of what? Voyeurism? I don't buy it. There are lines in everything, including journalism. Are they not crossed when it comes to a young man's life, his dignity, the grief that a broadcast might cause his family or friends? There are only so many subjects you can hide behind the curtain of "I'm only doing my job." Does death now fall into the category? We warned you to watch "I think there have been more gruesome things on the air," said John Walsh, managing editor for ESPN, which brought the story nationwide Sunday night. "Our policy is to warn people beforehand if something might be offensive. And we did that." Yes. This is a tidy tradition. We warned you. But in truth, such warnings often serve to whet the appetite, to make you curious. You end up watching anyhow. Meanwhile Sunday, ESPN also had a camera at the La Salle game, when Lionel Simmons, a close friend of Gathers, was told of the death. Simmons wept. The camera whirred. News? Or staged tragedy? Now, please. I am not placing print on some holy perch above TV. Many papers, including the two Detroit dailies, ran still photos of a dying Gathers on their sports fronts. I don't like that, either. But in this case, the footage was incomparably more disturbing. Especially Gathers convulsing on the court, and being wheeled to an ambulance. Some stations stopped the tape before that. Others did not. They ran it four and five times in the next 24 hours. Their justification was often to point to previous tragedies and say, "Well, it's not as bad as that." That is not an answer. Nor is citing the recent footage of executed Romanian president Nicolae Ceaucescu and saying: "That was worse." That was also different. His death signaled the end of a political era, it changed an entire nation. Ceaucescu's corpse became a national symbol. Hank Gathers was not a symbol. His death was medical and personal. It deserved some privacy. Sure, he was a great player and a good pro prospect. But to equate his fall, news- wise, with that of a Romanian dictator, is to balloon the importance of the NBA draft shamefully out of proportion. Anything to beat the competition Now, I know TV is a visual medium -- at its best, a great one. And I know this is a hard call. But somewhere, someone has to make it. Someone has to say, "We're not going with this. It's wrong. I don't care what the other stations are showing." That takes foresight. Courage. It also takes time. TV pictures are so powerful, they can glorify a moment or rape it. Yet the weighty decisions to air footage are often made -- as they were Sunday night -- by harried young producers who have little time to catch a breath, let alone debate ethics. And then there is the question of competition. Few stations want to be caught with their footage down. Said a candid Eli Zaret of Channel 2: "You get too esoteric in this business, you'll hurt yourself. . . . Everybody this morning is talking about 'Did you see what happened?' What if the person said, 'No. I watched Channel 2 and they didn't show it' ? Then you'd have made a horrible decision." I credit Eli with honesty. But a horrible decision? I don't think so. In dilemmas like these, maybe it's best to ask yourself a question you learned in kindergarten: Is it right or is it wrong? Somewhere inside, there should be a flame of conscience that separates the two. That Gathers footage -- which some stations, unbelievably, are still showing -- did little more than shock people and haunt his family. Can you imagine if you were a friend, living miles away, who flicked on the TV and watched that tragic footage? Sure, it brought home the tragedy of playing athletics with a heart condition. But did we really have to watch a man die to learn that? Have we grown that thick? Or have we just grown that insensitive? There are some TV people who swear America wants to see this kind of tragedy. And others with a late-blooming conscience who now say, "Maybe we shouldn't have shown it." But the fact is, at the moment of truth, everybody did. Sadly, that tells you all you need to know. BASKETBALL; DPISTONS; GAME;Pistons