Post-Jonestown Media Coverage

"Raven" passages. Tim Reiterman reflects on the media coverage after Jonestown, when he had been shot and critically injured and three of his fellow journalists were killed.

"It was a normal slow, Saturday afternoon at the San Francisco Examiner. Weekend editor Dexter Waugh had just hung up the phone when another one rang. Assistant city editor Fran Dauth was typing a memo while waiting for a story from Tim Reiterman in Guyana. There was plenty of time to make the last deadline for Sunday's paper. Waught motioned Dauth to the phone...

There had been a shooting at the airstrip near Jonestown, he said. Ryan and others, possibly nine or ten. were dead...

Reporters from all over the country immediately began calling for information. A long–– agonizingly long–– night of waiting had started...

Unlike some other big stories, this one was no fun. Everyone hoped against hope that neight Reiterman nor Greg Robinson would be listed among the dead or injured.

There was still no news about Reiterman or Robinson. Around 3:00a.m., word came that the last unidentified victim had been wearing three cameras. The real chill set in..."

Page 549


"Amid an initial whirlwind of checkbook journalism, many publishers bought and commissioned books on the tragedy. Jonestown was not a fleeting news event; public opinion polls ranked it only behind Pearl Harbor and the John Kennedy assassination in terms of public recognition. Magazines, newspapers and tabloids scrambled for stories, some offering money to survivors for exclusive rights. There were instant books by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. A number of ex-members began drafting manuscripts...

Immediately after Jonestown, the bidding by publishers probably was most intense for a nearly completed book by Jeannie Mills, formerly Deanna Mertle, one of the major sources for earlier exposés and co-founder of the Human Freedom Center in Berkeley... Then, fifteen months after the tragedy, she and her husband Al were shot to death, execution-style, in their Berkeley home.

Other media sought to capitalize on the Temple tragedy, sometimes with incredibly poor taste, distortions and blatant exploitation. The Jonestown affair was immortalized in several calypso records, including one with the refrain," Why Shot Jimmy Jones?" A film made in Mexico and called Guyana, Cult of the Damned drew the scorn of critics and was repulsive to anyone familiar with church history. CBS followed with a highly rated two-part "documdrama" depicting Jones as a good man victimized and corrupted by others, mainly by women and a black man named Father Divine. Unfortunately, such partially fictionalized and sensationalized accounts reinforced myths about the Temple and created new ones, and they retarded public understanding of Peoples Temple."

Page 575


“Then in July 1977, Jim’s predictions came true. Rosalie Wright, the editor of New West magazine, called our headquarters to read Jim the articles set for their August 1 publication. As was our procedure, I picked up the extra line in Jim’s room and proceeded to tape the conversation...

Rosalie’s voice was flat and unemotional.

‘Our cover line is ‘Inside Politically Potent Peoples Temple’ and on the Table of Content page our lead-in reads as follows: ‘Inside Peoples Temple’... ‘The story begins on page thirty with the following: ‘Jim Jones is one of the state’s most politically potent leaders. But who is he? And what’s going on behind his church’s locked doors?’’

‘Beginning two months ago, when it became known that New West was researching an article on Peoples Temple, the magazine, its editors, and advertisers were subjected to a bizarre letter and telephone campaign. At its height, our editorial offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles were each receiving as many as fifty phone calls and seventy letters a day.’

Jim scratched out another note in bold lettering and held it up to the delight of all of us in the room.
guess we didn’t scare them enough.”

-by DEBORAH LAYTON, Seductive Poison. Pages 111-113



“Some of us remember catching the first snatches of the story breaking on the radio. Then the television replays of the tractor pulling the flatbed flowly out onto the airstrip. The camera going wildly out of focus as the gunfire rakes the area. The film ending as cameraman Bob Brown dies. And the now famous aerial footage of the hundreds of bodies, like colorful flowers, spread across the countryside of Guyana.”

-by CYNTHIA KISSER, Cult Awareness Network News, Jonestown edition 1987.

“Few events have etched tehmselves into the minds of Americans as did the mass murder-suicides at Jonestown, Guyana. A year later, polls showed that only the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were remembered by more Americans one year after they occurred.

Tens of millions of people looked with near disbelief at the pictures of row upon row of bodies that were published in newspapers and run on television news shows the world over. They were appalled as each newscast gave a new body count: at least 300, then 450, then 650, finally 913 bodies bloating in the jungle heat.
...

Ex-members turned to local news organizations for help, but some editors and reporters did not believe their stories. Those who did were harassed into dropping their investigations by members of the Temple or pressured to do so by local businessmen and politicians whom Jones had asked to intervene on his behalf.

Finally in July 1977 New West magazine published a report that was based on the stories of ex-members that exposed much of the child and sexual abuse and other misconduct in which Jones was engaged.”

-by STEVE STANEK, Cult Awareness Network News, Jonestown edition 1987.