Defending Otakar
“Reporters from both major Chicago newspapers were present before, during and after Richard’s custody surrender,” the Sun-Times confessed on its editorial page. “What business did they have there? None. But how could they refuse? Both sets of parents invited reporters to protect and project their own self-interest in the public domain. This has been a shameful case, and many people were used. But none more than Richard, the innocent child whose public suffering we were compelled to witness.”
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Voyeurism is a trespass journalists learn to live with in varying states of discontent. They readily keep secrets; privacy is iffier. A reporter will rot in jail rather than divulge the identity of the government official who for reasons that might be entirely self-serving blows the whistle on another government official. He’ll barge self-consciously into a life whether or not he’s wanted there.
There is a point, an elusive, shifting point, at which even journalists grant that privacy must be respected. Certainly the media did not go beyond that point two Sundays ago, when the TV cameras and scribbling reporters were the least of Richard’s problems. Much earlier the media had asserted Richard’s right to privacy by referring to his adoptive parents always as the Does. If the media now want to search their souls about their conduct, they should search them over that. Framing the story as Otakar Kirchner versus the Does may have been humane and right, but it subverted the coverage.
Byrne wrote: “Here is a 4-year-old child who is forced by his father to drop every shred of his life to come take care of the old man. To be the conduit for his seed. . . . We can no more put “Richard’s’ life back together than we can unscramble an egg. But we can prevent future cases in which one man’s obsession with his own “seed’ disrupts, perhaps even destroys, so many lives.”
The Tribune’s admirable flurry of articles reflecting on World War II serves as a reminder that no matter how loud the voices insisting it’s time to put the past behind us, it’s always easier to look back than to look around.
“Right. It was news by the victims. If I had seen that story on the bottom of page six–either I would have missed it or I would have said it can’t be true, because if it was true the editors would have given it much more play. So I would have dismissed it.”
