With a Child’s Life at Stake, Media Chose to Keep a Secret

Police Lt. Anthony Alba knew reporters didn’t believe him when he denied that there had been a kidnapping at the Simmses’ house. “I’ve been in police work 29 years, and I can read faces,” he said.

So Alba gambled on the humanity of the reporters he’d gotten to know in the little more than a year he had spent as the LAPD’s top press officer. He told them that 7-year-old Matthew Simms had indeed been kidnapped, just as the press suspected.

And he asked them to withhold the story to protect the child’s life.

Suppressing the news is not the journalist’s job. It’s contrary to all ethical standards of the news business. But the news media quickly, and with surprisingly little soul-searching, went along with Alba’s request, as generations of their predecessors have done in similar cases. They were bound by a higher standard than getting the news--the preservation of life.

The story broke early Friday afternoon. Reporters and photographers, constantly monitoring police communications, heard indications that a kidnapping had taken place and sped to the Simmses’ home in Sherman Oaks.

So did Alba, who is in charge of the Police Department’s media relations unit. Two masked men had forced their way into the boy’s home at gunpoint. After ordering the child’s mother and a maid to lie on the floor, they fled with the child.

All the ingredients of an L.A. media show were coming together, and, in a town where television goes crazy over a routine freeway traffic chase, this one would have been gigantic.

As the cops saw it, the minute-by-minute coverage on all stations would have put heavy pressure on the kidnappers and increased the threat to Matthew’s life. “It would have been everywhere,” Alba said. “They might have thought they were in over their heads, and they would have had to get rid of the kid. The kid was the evidence.”

The detectives asked Alba to tell the reporters that “it was a home invasion robbery and to leave out any information that it was a kidnap. But I felt the press was a little wiser than to believe the information that I was giving them. I had been working with the media for over a year, and I felt that I had to take them into my confidence.”

He called the media together outside the Simmses’ house, asking that they leave cameras and microphones behind. He told them about the kidnapping and about a call from the abductors threatening the boy.

When Alba asked them to withhold news of the kidnapping, it was like taking red meat away from a pack of dogs. But the reporters went along, he said. Two veterans, the venerable Stan Chambers of KTLA, Channel 5, and Pete Demetriou of KFWB radio, “helped me rally the forces.”

But the final decision was up to the newspaper editors and broadcast news directors. Alba and his aides talked to every one of them. “The reaction was very cooperative,” said Officer Jason Lee. “I stressed the point that the safety of the little kid is at stake.”

The news blackout lasted until Matthew was rescued--a good 18 hours after it began, through the 5 o’clock, 6, 9, 10, 11 p.m. newscasts, and the Saturday editions of The Times.

At The Times, John Arthur, editor of the San Fernando Valley edition, talked to Alba. He conferred with his boss, senior editor Carol Stogsdill, and with the editor of the paper, Shelby Coffey III. All agreed to go along with the police request.

“You have to take these things case by case,” Coffey said. “Our basic urge as journalists is to present just about everything we know. But I don’t have any hesitation in saying we did the right thing. The key point was the question of a human life at stake.”

That, traditionally, is the factor that drives journalistic decisions in these cases.

“It is not unusual in a kidnapping for the police to ask the press not to reveal something because they think they have a better chance of getting the person back, particularly a child but also an adult,” said USC journalism professor Edwin O. Guthman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and former national editor of The Times. “I wouldn’t hesitate on something like that. Not in a minute.”

There was a brief news blackout of the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst more than 20 years ago. When her chief abductor picked up the morning paper and saw there was no story, he was furious. The “pigs,” he said, “were trying to play games.”

One of the longest blackouts occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1954 when Leonard Moskovitz, a 36-year-old San Francisco real estate broker, was kidnapped. The intensely competitive Bay Area papers kept the story secret for 61 hours, until Moskovitz was rescued.

Gov. Goodwin Knight praised the press. But the San Francisco Chronicle, which went along with the blackout, had second thoughts afterward. “It would be easy, but we think fallacious, to take it as certain that secrecy was the principal factor in solving the case,” the newspaper said.

That’s the question editors ask whenever these cases arise. There is constant pressure on the press to withhold more. In 1985, then-U.S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III called for a possible delay of information during terrorist attacks--a proposal many journalists still feel would do more harm than good by keeping a frightened public in the dark.

When these situations come up, however, neither law enforcement nor the news media have time to philosophize.

That was certainly the way it was when reporters and LAPD press officer Alba confronted the kidnapping of Matthew Simms.

“I took a big chance and thank God, everyone went along with it,” Alba said. “It was the right call, and I really credit the media for this kid getting back to his parents unharmed.”