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The next day, Barbara Coombs Lee, a leader in Oregon's death with dignity movement, invited Colin Fogarty, a radio reporter for OPB, as well as local members of the Associated Press, to her office. Fogarty and a trio from AP arrived around 2 pm and were told then of the woman's suicide. Fifty-five minutes later, Fogarty filed the story from his car. At 3:04 it was on the air. OPB radio, rarely one to break news, had a scoop of significant proportions. It was, as Fogarty says, "a great radio story." And Coombs Lee had managed to keep the largest daily newspaper in the Pacific Northwest in the dark about one of the biggest stories of the year. By the next morning, of course, The Oregonian had the story, blaring it across the top of Page 1. The Death With Dignity Act, it seemed, had worked just as it was supposed to. No vomiting, no convulsions, no lingering death--in short, none of the awful consequences Portland's newspaper of record had threatened us with last year during the rerun of the Death With Dignity campaign. There was, however, a lot of gagging and convulsing at The Oregonian, which spelled out its reaction in an editorial that appeared Friday morning: "Even if you support the right to assisted suicide, you should be troubled that a single advocacy group is the first source of information about this use of Oregon's law." The same editorial also said, "The doctor who attended the woman...cannot be considered a truly independent source, either." The overall message was: Don't trust anyone involved with the death with dignity movement. Such skepticism only adds to the difficulty of ending life. The Oregonian's editorial was an unusually mean-spirited attack on people in this state who are attempting to help terminally ill patients play out their lives in a humane and civilized fashion. It's hard to explain such small-mindedness from the paper that prides itself--weekdays at least--for being "The Largest Newspaper in the Pacific Northwest." Did The Oregonian rail against news sources in public simply because it had been beaten on a significant story? Or was Portland's daily still smarting after its defeat last year when it went for broke in an attempt to defeat Oregon's ground-breaking Death With Dignity Act? The paper had not experienced such humiliation since the capture of the Bob Packwood story by The Washington Post. Although Oregon's first physician-assisted suicides evidently were textbook cases of how the procedure should work, something is bound to go wrong sometime in this process. Given The Oregonian's leadership role in the state, the paper should now be using its journalistic resources to make the new law work, not tear it down at every opportunity. |
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