On November 10, in a modest suburban yard in Springfield, Oregon, a horrific scene unfolded in front of the local press. A police sergeant rushed from a doorway carrying the limp body of two-year-old Shelby McGuire. She had been smothered in a plastic bag by her father, Allen McGuire, who then used gasoline to set himself on fire. As the policeman began futile efforts to revive the child, her dying father lay, naked and blistered, in the background. Shutters clicked and videotape rolled.

The early newscast that Wednesday evening on KEZI-TV, the ABC affiliate in neighboring Eugene, began with an anchor warning of "graphic" footage, followed by a report that included ten seconds of disturbing video.

The next morning, Eugene's Register-Guard (circulation: 75,000) displayed a color photo of the same scene -- showing the police, the child, and the father -- that took up a full quarter of page one, as well as a smaller photo of the attempt to resuscitate the child. Both outlets knew this was strong stuff; both elected to use it prominently. What is curious is the difference in the public's reaction to the same images in print and on screen.

At KEZI, the staff had intense discussions before airing the videotape. "We all agreed it ought to go on the air," says news director Rebecca Force, "but we all had reservations. We even got into a conversation about whether we should digitize the [father's] genitals. Then somebody said, 'Hey, wait a minute, that's not what people will be looking at.'" In the end, although the station decided not to show most of the CPR activity and the child's body being brought to an ambulance, KEZI did show the rescue attempt.

According to Force, the station received only about half a dozen calls about the footage from its 22,000 viewers. Most complained; one or two supported the video as a harrowing glimpse of child victimization that might spur action against child abuse.

At The Register-Guard, meanwhile, editors, photographers, and reporters also discussed their options before the decision was made to run the photos of the scene at the McGuire house on page one of Thursday's paper. As managing editor Patrick Yack put it in the paper's Friday follow-up on reader reaction, "The overriding sentiment was that the pictures . . . showed the real heartache and heroics." All the elements, Yack said in an interview, were judged too important to crop out -- the police sergeant running from the house, the limp child he carried, the officers watching helplessly, the dying father on the ground. "By removing pieces," he said, "it would start to unravel."

But by then it had become clear that many readers did not agree. The Register-Guard received 450 calls, most of them negative; it eventually received forty-four subscription cancellations. The letters column, meanwhile, turned vitriolic. Readers branded the coverage gratuitous, sensationalistic, unfit for children, indigestible at the breakfast table, and aimed solely at selling papers or winning prizes. One letter to the paper invoked nineteen straight adjectives, from "lurid" to "nauseating."

Among the letter writers was Kim McGuire, the dead child's mother. "Maybe showing photographs of criminals helps keep innocent people from entrusting themselves to them," she wrote. "But showing pictures of innocent victims and their immediate family only complicates their already traumatized lives. The media hounded Allen's family and my own, and they are the last people we wanted to talk to.

"I worry that I'll be found and harassed -- or worse, that my son will be. . . . Every day my son wants to know where his father and sister are. What will I say to him if a stranger tells him what they saw and read in the paper?"

All the while, the twice-weekly Springfield News (circulation: 11,000) was keeping an eye on the backlash in Eugene. On Saturday, the News weighed in with its package on the tragedy, including one picture not seen before -- of the father tumbling through a screened window, his body aflame. But the front-page coverage began behind an extraordinary half-page wraparound bearing the words CAUTION TO READERS, plus an explanation of the coverage and a list of agencies that try to combat domestic violence.

Managing editor Steve Collier says the News's late deadline allowed staffers to carefully consider the options; the idea of running all of the photos inside -- "a real cop-out," he says -- was rejected. The notion of a front-page wraparound was seen as a way of "putting a plain brown wrapper" on content that might offend many readers.

Reader response, according to Collier: about ten calls and half a dozen letters, mostly positive, and only a couple of canceled subscriptions.

Why the strikingly different reaction to the different reports? Looking back, KEZI's Force thinks the televised version of the scene got less reaction, in part, "because of the brevity, the way we sandwiched the scene in between other elements, and the warnings we put out in advance." The Springfield News's Collier thinks that his paper's warning flap helped blunt criticism and that by the time his readers got to the story, many had already seen the television or Register-Guard coverage and were cooling off.

Yack says that Register-Guard readers reacted most strongly to the page-one images of the dead little girl -- images they weren't prepared for. He also thinks people may hold the newspaper to a higher standard than television: "When we violate it, they're more apt to come down on us." But he notes that the calls and letters weren't all negative; many praised the coverage for awakening readers to the horrors of domestic violence. "This was immediate, heartfelt opinion," Yack says. "It can't help but make us more thoughtful about how we do our jobs."

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