No Life Support for You

By Brian Montopoli, CJR Daily. Posted March 23, 2005.

For honest reporters, the Terri Schiavo case is something of a nightmare. Not so for ratings-obsessed cable news directors, of course, who must be delighted with the timing: they can now shift from the lives and deaths of Scott and Laci Peterson to the life and death of Terri Schiavo without missing a beat.

Real reporters and editors, by contrast, have to decide how much, or even whether, to anchor their reports in a larger context – a tricky decision when reporting about an issue that inflames cultural and political passions. And they know that media bias warriors are scrutinizing every sentence, ready to attack at the first sign of reporting that doesn't square with their worldview.

Example: Most everyone in Washington (and, for that matter, elsewhere) believes that grandstanding politicians are using the issue for political gain. But should that information be included in every story, or should news consumers be allowed to come to their own conclusions?

One option is to simply put forth incontrovertible facts – say, by including in each story quoting a Republican lawmaker, the fact that a one-page GOP memo leaked last week called the Schiavo case "a great political issue" that would appeal to the party's base and potentially result in the defeat of Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida.

That's not to say that there are not genuine values at stake for congressional Republicans, many of whom truly believe that removing Schiavo's feeding tube would be a moral wrong. If their actions are cynical, they aren't completely so, and reporters would be doing a disservice by suggesting as much – just as they would be by ignoring the memo all together.

There is one bit of context, however, that seems particularly salient, and it involves a six-month old boy named Sun Hudson. On Thursday, Hudson died after a Texas hospital removed his feeding tube, despite his mother's pleas. He had a fatal congenital disease, but would have been kept alive had his mother been able to pay for his medical costs, or had she found another institution willing to take him. In a related Texas case, Spiro Nikolouzos, who is unable to speak and must be fed through a tube because of a shunt in his brain – but who his wife says can recognize family members and show emotion – may soon be removed from life support because health care providers believe his case is futile.

The Hudson and Nikolous cases fall under the Texas Futile Care Law, which was signed into law by then-governor George W. Bush.

Bush, however, flew from Texas to Washington early this week to sign legislation authorizing federal courts to review Schiavo's case. The president felt that the Florida courts, which had reviewed the case several times over the past seven years, had failed in their duty: "In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life."

As Mark Kleiman, who brought the Texas cases to our attention, points out, "An argument of some sort could be made for the Texas law, based on some combination of cost and the possibility that an impersonal institution will sometimes avoid mistakes that an emotionally-involved relative would make." But, he adds, "What I can't figure out is how someone could be genuinely outraged about the Schiavo case but not about the Hudson and Nikolouzos cases."

The specifics of each case are different, but the central issue remains the same: whether the state should be able to sanction the removal of a human being from life support.

Brian Montopoli is a staff writer at CJR Daily.

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