Serial Killer overkill ???

Pickton trial coverage should be respectful: poll

Wency Leung
CanWest News Service
Monday, January 22, 2007

VANCOUVER - A slim majority of B.C. residents say they're interested in the media's coverage of Robert Pickton's murder trial, but most believe news organizations should refrain from reporting salacious details, while one in five say the media have reported "too much" about the case already, according to a poll to be released by the University of B.C. today.

The results of the poll, conducted by Mustel Group for the UBC School of Journalism's Feminist Media Project, found that 52 per cent of the 806 adults surveyed by telephone earlier this month said they are interested in media coverage of the case, compared with 46 per cent who said they are not.

Only one per cent said they are not aware of the trial.

Despite the split in public interest about the case, 53 per cent said the amount of coverage so far is "just right," though 21 per cent said there has already been "too much," according to the poll. Fifteen per cent said there has been too little coverage about the case to date, while the rest did not know.

Pickton's long-awaited trial begins at the New Westminster Courts today, and some 358 members of the local and international media have been accredited to cover the proceedings.
The Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farmer will be tried on six counts of first-degree murder. He has pleaded not guilty to the murders of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Marnie Frey and Georgina Papin.

According to the UBC poll, 75 per cent of respondents said the media have so far behaved responsibly in covering the case. Only nine per cent think the media have been irresponsible in their coverage to date.

However, the poll showed that 56 per cent believe the media should restrict violent and sexually explicit details that arise at the trial, compared with 37 per cent who believe the public should know as much detail as possible. The remaining seven per cent did not know.

The survey results indicate that the public isn't as interested in sensational crime stories as the mainstream media might expect, said Mary Lynn Young, assistant professor at UBC School of Journalism.

"There's a disconnect I think," Young said Sunday.

She said the media have largely assumed that crime stories sell newspapers, when, in fact, she said, "there's no systematic data that crime stories sell media over a certain length of time."

On the contrary, she said, the public often prioritizes other issues, such as the environment or health, ahead of crime, and as the poll suggests, when it comes to the Pickton trial, "the clear message was that the public felt less was more."

Young said media should consider the potential impact that revealing violent details from the Pickton trial will have on the public, noting that widespread media coverage surrounding the Paul Bernardo trial in the mid-1990s exacerbated the trauma the Toronto-area community experienced.

"Is it worth putting these details out in the public realm?" Young asked.

"As media, we have not respected the intelligence of our audience enough," she said. "Education levels are rising and I think these (poll) results are signs that people want better quality of information, not just daily trial stenography."

She said that while the trial itself is important, she believes more emphasis should be placed on the larger social issues that led to the disappearance of dozens of Vancouver sex-trade workers, which prompted police to search Pickton's farm in 2002.

For instance, the community and local institutions must bear some responsibility for not addressing the issue of their disappearance, she said.

Young said the UBC poll also showed Vancouver residents are significantly less interested in the Pickton trial than those who live outside of B.C.'s Lower Mainland, in part, because Vancouver residents tend to be younger and are less likely to be consumers of the mainstream news media.

But, she said, another factor may be that Vancouver residents have already heard about the case for several years.

Before the trial even begins in earnest, people may already be experiencing "Pickton trial fatigue," she said.

The survey was conducted between Jan. 3 and Jan. 10, Mustel Group said. The margin of error for the poll is 3.4 percentage points at 95 per cent confidence level.

Vancouver Sun