The fatal drug overdose and the suicide of two respected staffers stunned
the Las Vegas Review-Journal's newsroom. The way the paper covered the
tragedies raised serious questions.

ON AUGUST 22, 18 DAYS before he died, Rafael Tammariello published his last
column decrying the war on drugs.

One of several libertarian voices on the decidedly conservative editorial
page of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Tammariello had written before about
what he called the "failed war on stupidity." In May he had urged Oscar
Goodman, who was about to be elected mayor of Las Vegas, to summon the
courage to call for legalizing drugs.

In his final anti-drug-war column, Tammariello outdid himself. He compared
the drug war to the Holocaust, its warriors to Nazis. "Drug users,"
Tammariello wrote, "are the Jews of 20th century America - hounded,
persecuted, shipped off to prisons and labor camps by the hundreds of
thousands. Like Hitler's anti-Jewish laws, our Drug War compels people into
depravity and criminality - and then we persecute them on the grounds of
their depraved criminality."

He called for a return to the sensibility of the 19th century, where opium
dens were centrally located, heroin could be ordered through the mail and
narcotics were purchased legally by the famous and the obscure. Drugs, he
concluded, were a mere "eccentricity," "causing a 'problem' no more serious
than skipping church."

Readers of the Review-Journal were to soon learn Tammariello was a man who
lived what he professed. On the night of September 9, Tammariello's wife
Joan, the training/systems editor for the Review-Journal newsroom, found
her husband on the floor of their bathroom. Blood stained the crook of his
left arm and the tip of a syringe that Las Vegas police investigators found
in a wooden box on the bathroom counter near his body. The residue in the
syringe was heroin.

Just hours after he had declined to write his close friend's obituary,
Kenneth James Evans, a feature writer at the paper, shot himself in the
head with a .38-caliber revolver. Evans' wife told police her husband "was
extremely despondent over losing his friend and coworker, Rafael
Tammariello," according to the police report. The report did not disclose
the contents of a one-page note, written by Evans and found near his body.

Rarely has a newsroom suffered so much loss so publicly. Jane Ann Morrison,
a veteran political reporter for the Review-Journal who took over the
somber duty from Evans, says she sobbed through the reporting and the
writing of Tammariello's obituary. Police reporter Glenn Puit, who
assembled Evans' obit, says he seriously considered getting out of the
business after writing a follow-up story detailing Tammariello's
drug-related death. The paper's best-known columnists, John L. Smith and
Jon Ralston, offered up written tributes to their colleagues before
attending back-to-back funerals. Publisher Sherman Frederick hired a grief
counselor, who conducted group and private sessions and remains to this day
on retainer for the paper's 117 editorial employees.

For an excruciating week, the staff of the 158,541-circulation
Review-Journal struggled through its anguish while continuing to produce
stories for a city inured to excess. While city boosters are yoked, for
better or worse, to the lurid image, many of the journalists on the R-J
staff detest the Las Vegas stereotype that would have trivialized the
deaths of their friends, Managing Editor Charles Zobell says. The
leadership of the Donrey Media Group-owned newspaper decided early it would
not let that happen, acquitting itself professionally, maybe even
courageously, under the circumstances, Zobell says.

"I don't know that we would have handled it any differently than we did
it," Zobell reflected two months later in a coffee shop booth at the Palace
Station Hotel and Casino.

But the question, say observers and critics - the people Zobell has come to
refer to as "our enemies" - is whether the paper should have handled it
differently. The Review-Journal has taken fire for waiting nearly a week to
report that Tammariello's death was drug-related, doing so only after a
local television station broke the news. Some staffers are disappointed
that, months after the traumatic deaths of two top writers, the paper had
yet to do a major piece putting the tragedies in context. A former R-J
reporter-turned-investigator complains that a proponent of drug
legalization who died using heroin was lionized in a manner befitting a
national hero.

"I've thought it over a hundred times and, given the dynamic of the
situation, I don't know that I would have done anything differently," Puit
said over lunch at a Caribbean restaurant in Las Vegas. "I don't think a
single reader thought we should have handled these stories any differently.
I believe deep down in my heart that we intended all along to cover these
stories as news. But I think we became so distracted putting these people
to rest that getting a newspaper out became secondary."

Crucial from the very start was an overarching desire to protect Joan
Tammariello from any further hurt, Zobell says. Mary Hausch - a former
managing editor of the Review-Journal, an assistant journalism professor at
the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a friend of Zobell's and others in
the newsroom - says she believes this noble but misplaced desire
compromised the coverage and the newspaper.

"Perhaps there is this loyalty to Joan, but you have to be willing to cover
yourself like you would cover anybody else," Hausch says. "You have to be
willing to ask yourself, 'Had any other public person died of a drug
overdose, would you cover it in the same way?' I don't think the R-J can
say they'd do it the same way." Regardless, the deaths in Vegas and their
aftermath shine a spotlight on the challenges of covering a story
all-too-close to home while coping with the overwhelming grief of a
newsroom in mourning.

RAFAEL TAMMARIELLPO HAD A devoted following for his acerbic and incisive
columns on the front of the R-J's Sunday Focus section. Those who agreed
with nothing Tammariello wrote admired him for his clear, consistent
thinking and prose. The announcement of his death brought accolades from
local and state elected officials, who lauded his erudition and civility.

"Nobody called and asked me to say nice things," says former Nevada Gov.
Bob Miller (D), now an attorney in Las Vegas. "It wasn't that I agreed with
what he wrote. In fact, I almost never agreed with Rafe. It was that he was
sincere in what he wrote." In the column that led the Focus page the Sunday
after the columnist died, the paper's editor and Tammariello's friend,
Thomas Mitchell, wrote, "the collective intellectual candlepower of the
city of Las Vegas dimmed" the night the 48-year-old columnist died.

Zobell described Tammariello as intellectual, introverted and respectful of
the political opinions of others. Tammariello was generally well-liked
throughout the newsroom, social but preferring to keep the company of a
small group of close friends, he says.

Evans, 46, was less broadly known in the community and in the newsroom than
Tammariello. Evans had once worked for the Nevadan, the now-defunct
Review-Journal Sunday magazine, but he had left in 1992 to manage media
relations for the Nevada Commission on Tourism. He returned early in 1998
to work with Special Projects Editor A.D. Hopkins on a three-section,
196-page project profiling 100 people central to the development of Las
Vegas and southern Nevada.

The first section ran February 7, the second May 2 and the final
installment on September 12, two days after Evans' suicide. The series,
expected to be published as a book called "The First 100: Portraits of the
Men and Women Who Shaped Las Vegas," played to Evans' gift for native
Nevadan storytelling.

"K.J. was a gifted feature writer whose sense of humanity was matched only
by his sense of humor," wrote columnist Smith. "Oh, how that man loved to
laugh."

Evans was particularly valuable to the Review-Journal because he had served
his apprenticeship at little Nevada newspapers in towns like Tonopah,
Lovelock and Elko. He knew the Nevada the tourists who couldn't see past
the lights on the Strip never see, Zobell says.

"Those were the stories he could tell," he continues. "He had a superb
knowledge of Nevada. He appreciated the color of the state, and he could
convey that in his stories. It's hard to find another like K.J. Evans."

To the small circle at the newspaper who had any contact with him, Evans
seemed delighted to be able to harness what he did best for a project like
"The First 100," Zobell says. That is what Evans allowed people at work to
see. Because he worked from home and researched zealously at the University
of Nevada, Las Vegas, most of the staff knew little about him.

"Rafe's the one they knew," Zobell says. "That's part of the sadness, that
people didn't know [Evans] better. He was so cheerful, so enthusiastic. It
caught me off guard that there was so much pain in his life."

No one interviewed for this story admitted to knowing of the pain behind
the laughter. Hopkins and Mitchell declined to be interviewed. Mitchell,
who was close to both Evans and Tammariello, prohibited AJR from coming
into the Review-Journal newsroom. City Editor Annette Caramia, Joan
Tammariello's close friend, says, "I don't want to talk about my personal
grief for some newspaper publication."

Joan Tammariello was also not ready. "It's too close to my husband's death
for me to want to comment. I hope you can understand," she says. "I am
trying to work here. You can understand how hard that might be, and it
doesn't seem to be getting any easier."

ON THE NIGHT OF THURSDAY, September 9, Joan Tammariello made a 911 call
around 7 p.m. and followed it with a call to Caramia. The Clark County
coroner pronounced the columnist dead at 9:40 p.m. From the descriptions in
the police report, it was clear Joan Tammariello made no attempt to hide
the evidence of what the coroner would later conclude was a death by
accidental "opiate intoxication."

The police report noted finding a spoon with residue in it near the wooden
box where the bloodied syringe was found. Also near the box was a black
substance on wax paper. Inside the box was a baggie containing "a green
leafy substance" and two prescriptions for Valium, one for Tammariello and
one for his wife. A Dr. Ramirez in Mexico prescribed the Valium for the
Tammariellos, according to the report.

The report also noted that, in 1995, Tammariello had pleaded guilty to a
misdemeanor charge of attempted possession of dangerous drugs after an
arrest for possession of dangerous drugs and a forged prescription, both
felonies. When asked by police whether she knew about her husband's drug
use, Joan Tammariello said Rafael used to smoke opium, but she had not seen
him do it recently. Rafael had been drinking heavily, she said, and had
been depressed for about 18 months following the suicide of his daughter.

The Review-Journal deadline would have given the paper around two hours to
report on Tammariello's death. Caramia, who had come to the Tammariello
home, would have had to inform or have another editor inform a police
reporter, who normally would not have asked about what appeared to be an
accidental drug overdose or a suicide.

Caramia told at least one other editor about the columnist's death that
night, but says "I recused myself from making decisions on this, because I
was just too immersed in other things at the time. I certainly wouldn't
second-guess what they decided to do on this."

What the newspaper did the first night was nothing. In the morning,
according to several reporters who were in the newsroom, word of
Tammariello's death began to circulate. Because of his age, rumors spread
that he had died of a heart attack. The rumor became part of the first
printed report on the death. Ed Koch of the Las Vegas Sun, the afternoon
paper and the Review-Journal's partner in a joint operating agreement,
reported in a short story that Tammariello had died of "an apparent heart
attack." While Koch's story said the Clark County coroner confirmed the
time of death, the coroner did not confirm the speculation in Koch's lead.

Review-Journal Editor Thomas Mitchell told readers in a September 26 column
that he called Evans the morning after Tammariello's death to tell him the
columnist had died. He asked Evans to accept the honor of writing his
friend's obituary. "I reasoned he had the time, the ability and the
sensitivity to do justice to such a difficult and personally daunting
task," Mitchell wrote.

"I was wrong. So damnably very wrong.

"K.J. broke down crying on the phone and said he could not handle the
assignment. He had been too close to Rafe. I was unaware of other problems
he was battling."

Mitchell turned to Morrison, who in 19 years with the Review-Journal had
become a specialist in writing the obituaries of well-known political
figures. As she worked through the day, Morrison did not learn the cause of
death - but she did hear that the police report included mention of drug
paraphernalia found near Tammariello's body.

Rather than track down the police report or pursue the drug angle, Morrison
focused instead on collecting comment from Mitchell, Publisher Frederick
and several of the state's top political figures.

Inside the newsroom a kind of catatonia set in, with people wandering by
Morrison's desk to say how sorry they were that she had drawn the
heartbreaking assignment.

"I do a good job with obituaries. I give you a good send-off. But I wasn't
thrilled to get this one. I cried throughout the day," Morrison says. "In
hindsight, I do wish I had put a simple sentence in saying that drug
paraphernalia was found, but I was getting that information thirdhand. Am I
beating myself up for not calling Joanie, who had the firsthand knowledge?
Absolutely not. But I was probably not as aggressive as I should have been."

Before Morrison's obit had been put to bed that night, Evans also had died.
The coroner pronounced him dead at 9:10 p.m. Friday, September 10, an
apparent suicide. The Evans police report revealed Tammariello and Evans
had shared not only friendship but depression and drug use. Evans' wife,
Kathy Reardon, told police that Tammariello and Evans had on several
occasions crossed into Mexico from San Diego to buy Valium. Police found a
half-filled bottle of Depakote, an anti-depressant prescribed to Evans, and
two empty Valium containers in the trash at his house.

But because the Tammariello and Evans police reports had not yet been read
by Review-Journal reporters, readers, as well as most of the staff of the
paper, had no idea just how tightly intertwined were their deaths. While
Puit assembled a news obituary for Evans similar in tone to Morrison's for
Tammariello, Mitchell was putting together a tribute that filled the R-J
Focus section on Sunday, September 12.

Mitchell compared Tammariello's place in Las Vegas to H.L. Mencken's in
Baltimore and Mike Royko's in Chicago, calling him "the scribe of its
gamboling gospel and the champion of its contrariness." Columnist Ralston
echoed what many on the staff thought of Tammariello: While they seldom
agreed with him, they respected and liked him.

On the front of the Nevada section that Sunday was a column in which Smith
admitted to readers that he was "awed by the irascible brilliance of Rafael
Tammariello's intellect for nearly 15 years." Above Smith's column was
Puit's obituary, disclosing Evans' suicide.

BUT THE REVIEW-JOURNAL had not yet reported the cause of Tammariello's
death, a fact that caught the attention of Glen Meek, an investigative
reporter with KTNV-TV (Channel 13) in Las Vegas. He began to suspect that
Tammariello had died from something other than a heart attack. Still, Meek
says he had higher priorities early in the week.

"On Wednesday I had run out of excuses, and I called the cops to ask for
the report," Meek says. "They said, 'That's funny, you're the first person
to ask for this.' "

On Wednesday night, September 15, Meek led his report with the irony that a
columnist who had battled for drug legalization had died of a drug
overdose. Meek's story hewed to the facts disclosed in the police report.
They were the same facts Puit got when he picked up the Tammariello report
that same day. In fact, Meek and Puit, who had been friendly, passed each
other in the hallway at the police department. Each reporter knew why the
other was there.

After seeing Meek's report, Puit was furious. "It made me sick to my
stomach," Puit says. "The way he did it, using Rafe's column, was all
self-promotion. I usually respect what Glen Meek does. He's a good
reporter. But this went too far."

After replaying the tape of his report two months later, Meek defended the
reporting. The connection between Tammariello's columns and his manner of
death was more important to the story than his place as a public figure in
Las Vegas, he says. Never once did Meek consider using some of the more
notorious television tabloid methods, he insists.

"There were no shots of me standing over the corpse, no shots of me getting
thrown out of the R-J trying to get comment. I wasn't doing Sam Donaldson,"
he says. "If I had wanted to, I could have gone over to the victim's house
and gotten shots of me knocking on the door."

At least as galling for Puit--whose story ran the following day - was the
impression that a TV station goaded the Review-Journal into giving up
unpleasant details about one of its own. The newspaper had earlier decided
to wait until the coroner's office completed its toxicology report on
Tammariello. The toxicology testing alone is a warning to a reporter, but a
check of the police report would have provided a clear indication of what
toxicology was looking for.

"It was a simple, stupid mistake," Puit says. "The most basic thing you can
do is get the police report, but we had no idea [of] the cause of Rafe's
death. You always expect tox to take weeks to confirm anything.

"We hardly ever get beat on a story, but we got beat on this one. You know,
this sounds funny, but this might not be the worst story to get beat on.
... I don't think a lot of people in the newsroom care whether we got beat
on that story or not."

As for what he did report, Puit says, "Maybe this is going to sound
self-serving, but I think I was the only one who had the guts to do the
[Tammariello drug death story] after everything that had already happened.
People were legitimately worried other people in the newsroom were going to
blow their brains out. The newspaper business is already a depressing
business. I had to take a day off after I wrote the [Tammariello story]. It
put me in a two-week depression."

REVIEW-JOURNAL STAFFERS might not have cared that they had been beaten on
the story, but some Las Vegas journalists outside the newsroom did.

In a four-paragraph brief September 16 for Media Watch, a regular feature
in the weekly alternative newspaper CityLife, Managing Editor Geoff
Schumacher reported Tammariello had died of a suspected heart attack and
Evans of a self-inflicted gunshot. The following week, Media Watch reported
the details Meek and Puit had reported. And a week after that, Schumacher
ran a commentary by Al Tobin, an investigator in the Federal Public
Defender's Office in Las Vegas and a much-respected former Review-Journal
reporter.

Tobin excoriated Tammariello for "profound intellectual and journalistic
dishonesty," for writing about legalizing drugs without admitting he was a
user. He was the writer of the kind of editorials "that left you wondering
if they were written by a right-wing Libertarian on smack," he wrote. After
apologizing for any feelings he might have hurt, Tobin concluded the column
hoping Tammariello was "someplace where your soul is being bathed in God's
warm, loving light, and the smell of death and drugs no longer surrounds you."

Tobin apologizes for neither the tone nor the message. As far he is
concerned, Tammariello and the Review-Journal had it coming after a Sunday,
September 26, column written by Mitchell with the headline "Reporting
honestly in the face of grief."

"Were they guilty of covering up anything? No, I don't think that at all,"
Tobin says. "They were guilty of overkill. What frustrated me was the
pedestal they put him on. I understand he's one of your own. A little
tribute is all right. But three columns and all the politicians saying
these glowing things. I don't think Mother Teresa got that much ink when
she died."

Miller, who served as governor of Nevada for 10 years, says he believed the
Review-Journal accorded Tammariello a tribute commensurate with his
importance to its readers. And although he didn't know about the heroin
overdose at the time, Miller's eulogy for Tammariello would not have
changed had he known beforehand, he says.

"As bizarre as it sounds, I think the way he died probably establishes his
sincerity," Miller says. "He lived what he believed. I think it makes him
the opposite of a phony. It also makes me more fortified in my opposition
to what Rafe espoused."

In his September 26 column, Mitchell acted as a kind of compassionate
ombudsman, walking readers through the decisions he made in covering the
deaths. He challenged the external and internal whispers that the paper
withheld the police reports. And he attempted to sweep away the contention
of Tobin and Meeks that Tammariello compromised his libertarian views by
the way he died. He did not, however, explain to readers why the newspaper
took six days to pick up a police report that would have confirmed what
several people in the newsroom knew from the day Tammariello died.

"There is no rulebook for how to commit journalism," Mitchell told readers.
"It is truly the first and last bastion of situational management. All
things are relative. No decision is completely right or utterly wrong. One
can defend or condemn either side of an argument as to what to report and
when."

The decisions were made, he wrote, about friends and co-workers "who died
too young and incomprehensibly.

"This double shock enveloped the newsroom in suffocating numbness. There
were the usual feelings of grief, disbelief, blame, self-blame, guilt,
self-doubt, and, yes, anger. The devastation was compounded by the fact
that Rafael's wife, Joan, is a longtime Review-Journal employee."

Publisher Frederick came to Joan Tammariello as a friend on the night her
husband died. The decisions Frederick made in the aftermath were made to
protect and comfort Joan and the rest of the staff, he says. He says he is
incensed that the newspaper was portrayed as negligent in its coverage and
wounded that critics failed to consider the circumstances.

The newspaper's critics "missed the story," Frederick says. "It's a story
about a newsroom that got knocked on its ass and is still trying to recover
from it." To assist in the recovery, Frederick moved quickly to bring into
the newsroom Steven C. Kalas, an Episcopal priest and grief specialist.
Kalas met with editors and managers on the Monday after the deaths and told
them to look out for absenteeism, missed deadlines, short tempers and a
general malaise that is the first sign of clinical hysteria.

The first group session drew about 10 people, Kalas says. While protecting
the confidentiality of individuals, Kalas says group members had difficulty
reconciling the professional images of Tammariello and Evans with the
manner of their deaths. He assured the group that both men had demons and
that there was no shame in being unable to reverse the fatal decisions they
made.

Private, individual sessions with employees followed. In all, about 15
percent of the staff met with him, no better or worse than in the
corporations and the schools he has visited in the wake of other tragedies.
Internally, the newspaper is doing about as well as can be expected, Kalas
says. Some dealt with the shock of having learned of the deaths by reading
it in the paper.

Kalas says the paper moved quickly, as it should have, to disseminate the
news to its employees but should have moved more rapidly in its reporting.
The newsroom didn't need to add professional doubt to personal agony, he says.

"Anecdotally, I know staffers who were aware of all of this from the
start," Kalas says. "There had been discussion of the cause of Rafe's death
among staff members before they saw the cause of his death in the paper.
They knew something was awry, and I think some were looking for answers.
Whether or not the newsroom is divided over how the paper covered these
deaths, I can't say."

BONNIE BUCQUEROUX ISN'T so sure the paper has been as sensitive as it
should be, either to its employees or to its readership. Bucqueroux, the
coordinator for the Victims and the Media Program at Michigan State
University's School of Journalism, says the Review-Journal has left its
reporters with at least two dilemmas.

If the paper pulled any punches to protect staffers, will the newspaper
apply its usual standard or its exception when reporting the next time on a
peccadillo or tragedy involving a public figure? Bucqueroux asks. One
standard is not necessarily better than the other, she says, but the
Review-Journal risks its credibility by failing to be consistent.

Newspapers should not choose to be more compassionate, says Carl Gottlieb,
deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. No one would
suggest papers refrain from doing stories on child abuse, racism or sexual
assault because they are hurtful, he says. And although there has been no
suggestion of it, what if, through its benign neglect, the Review-Journal
ignored the possibility of heroin dealing or other criminal activity in its
newsroom? Gottlieb asks.

"Sometimes this job hurts," Gottlieb says. "While it is probably human
nature to protect or think you are protecting your own, a newspaper doesn't
do itself any favors by not reporting or delaying the reporting of
something it knows it should report. We as journalists don't deserve
special treatment by affording ourselves special standards. In my mind,
they took advantage of an incident to go all touchy-feely when they have
left a lot of issues unexamined."

Gottlieb also struck at Bucqueroux's second dilemma - deciding what moral
obligation a newspaper has to find meaning in tragic stories. Bucqueroux
teaches a model for newspaper coverage in three acts: the initial coverage;
the inevitable follow-up; and, finally, the story or stories that place the
horror in its human context. "It is our contention that if we are to delve
into the lives of individual victims, it needs to be done for a purpose,"
she says. "There is a nobility in Act Three stories, and newspapers have a
vested interest in doing them."

A review of what followed the initial reporting in Las Vegas suggests that
the local newspapers and television stations covered the stories in a
straight, albeit delayed, fashion in Act One. The Review-Journal Act Two
follow-up ended September 22 with a four-paragraph story, on page 9 of the
B section, on a Clark County coroner's ruling that Tammariello died of an
accidental drug overdose. After its initial heart attack story, the Las
Vegas Sun ran an editorial tribute to Tammariello and Evans and two
Associated Press stories on the police report disclosures and the suicide
of Evans. Meek did not deem the Tammariello story significant enough to
follow.

The relative silence of the Las Vegas Sun was perhaps the most surprising,
given the animosity between the two newspapers and their editors, Mitchell
and Sun Editor Brian Greenspun. Or perhaps not. Sun Managing Editor Michael
J. Kelley, who was in charge of the coverage, says he didn't believe the
two Review-Journal employees were big enough public figures to merit more
coverage. Besides, Kelley says, he has no taste for trashing the dead.

"Then we would have had everybody doing the wrong thing for the wrong
reasons," Kelley says. "I was taught that the people who read obituaries
keep them as family treasures. I'm not here to trash Tammariello and Evans.
I'm here to write news stories."

The Sun took a stab at an Act Three news story on October 24. Kim Smith
wrote a lengthy piece on the rise of heroin deaths and the spread of
addiction in Las Vegas. Smith mentioned Tammariello and Evans once in
paragraph nine and never again.

One Review-Journal reporter, who asked to remain anonymous, says she is
hopeful the paper can reach the place where it can write in depth about
what happened.

Natalie Patton, an education reporter for the Review-Journal and a longtime
colleague of Joan Tammariello, expressed her disappointment that some
fellow staffers found out about the writers' deaths by reading about it in
the newspaper or seeing the KTNV-TV story. "I can't understand why Mitch
[Editor Mitchell] won't talk about it, and I told him so," Patton says. "We
preach openness. We demand openness as reporters. We should be willing to
talk about this openly."

BUT WHILE FREDERICK told a Review-Journal newsroom gathering that there
would come a time for the paper to tell its story, Zobell says that time
wouldn't be soon. "It is still pretty raw, and our biggest worry is still
for Joan," he says. "We'd like for her to be comfortable here. We want very
much for Joan to stay with the Review-Journal. She's a very important part
of our staff, and we like her very much."

Joan Tammariello is unlikely to suffer from public scrutiny, according to
almost everyone familiar with the story. In a town where murder and drug
abuse are commonplace, in a state with the nation's second-highest suicide
rate, Tammariello and Evans "were a blip on the screen and gone," former
Review-Journal Managing Editor Hausch says. "The public didn't care about
it more than 15 minutes after it happened."

Nor was Hausch surprised that no one wrote to the newspapers questioning
the coverage. This semester, Hausch had to convince some of the students in
her media ethics class that Tammariello ought to be covered. The consensus
had been that he had a right to privacy, she says.

"Journalists hold people to higher ethical standards every day. They don't
allow people ethical lapses," Hausch says. "You can use the cloak around
Joanie to cover your ethical lapses, and maybe the public wasn't paying
attention this time. But you have to be careful because you don't ever know
which ethical lapse is going to blow up on you."