Posted on Fri, Dec. 26, 2003
 

Rising above the media blur
By Ken Parish Perkins
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

The phone call came well after 4 in the morning. From a hospital. From a chaplain.

Couldn't be good, Donna Compton figured, as she jumped out of bed.

It wasn't.

The truck in which her son was riding was rammed from behind. It went flying across the center median in the 1400 block of Pioneer Parkway in Grand Prairie. It hit a tree. Went into a tailspin. Rolled over twice before coming to a rest upside down.

"Tommy was pronounced dead at 1:50 that afternoon," Compton says. "They say he never regained consciousness."

Tommy Duane Compton was 26, the father of an energetic 4-year-old son. "Everyone who met him liked him," Donna Compton says of her son. "He always had a smile. He always had a wave. He always wanted to help people. He always wanted to donate his organs. So that's what we did.'

Compton wants you to know this about Tommy:

That he was a good guy. That he grew up in Arlington. That he struggled in school but eventually got his GED. That he and a buddy were remodeling homes to make ends meet.

That he's more than a highway-fatality statistic. More than a red truck turned upside down on the evening news.

You might say viewers watching a KXAS/Channel 5 newscast on Dec. 10 recall the image of the truck, but, of course, they don't. Compton said the news report about her son "was like a blur" and it wasn't until after the funeral that she contacted Channel 5 on the decisions made to "ignore a life."

"I'm trying to understand why a dog found in the highway got more time [during the newscast,] why a gecko scaring a grown man got more attention than a precious child being killed tragically," Compton says of the other stories covered by Channel 5 that day.

"He was just a number on a day. It was so impersonal," she says. "So cold. They felt it was good enough to show the wrecked truck but not to say anything about him."

Compton e-mailed Channel 5 staffers and called, after no response. "It was no longer about whether they would do a story about this," Compton says. "I just wanted to hear an explanation."

The explanation is this: News stations and newspapers often field dozens of calls daily, many of them dead ends and wastes of time, and because of it have often developed a rather detached demeanor with cold calls from the public. And not everything gets in. Nothing appeared in the Star-Telegram about Compton's death other than a paid obituary.

Journalists, always on a deadline, always on the run, always dealing with news sources, are often the most inept at dealing with the public.

Susan Tully, Channel 5's news director, wasn't pleased to learn that Compton got the runaround. But she did manage to track down e-mail conversations between reporter Kristi Nelson (one of the five whom Compton e-mailed) and the dayside executive producer Shannon Harris. They thought the story of Tommy donating his organs would make a good "Christmas gift" story. Nelson aired a moving report Monday night that told viewers (and Compton, who didn't know) that Tommy's heart, liver and kidneys had found matches.

"That's what we wanted," says Compton. "We wanted [Tommy's] life to mean something."

Truth is, it's a cruel, cruel world when it comes to our market value in the media. I learned that as a young cops reporter at another newspaper when my editor said write only about crime victims "who are somebody."

Somebodies are mayor's sons, for instance.

Compton learned it when Tommy's life was relegated to the split-second TV image of an overturned red truck -- until she asked why, and asked why loudly. After her many calls and e-mails, she got the attention she felt she deserved. That Tommy deserved.

The police report alleges that Tommy died at the hands of a driver who was drunk and speeding. It also says the driver tried to flee the scene. (A police officer witnessed the accident and arrested the guy.)

Still, even with those particulars, how a story is played "depends on the day and circumstances," Tully says. "There are no blanket answers. It depends on what other stories a particular story will be up against on that day, at that hour."

I relayed this explanation to Compton, which was of little comfort.

No story is more important than the death of your child.
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Ken Parish Perkings, (817) 390-7862 kpperkins@star-telegram.com