Physical descriptions
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The Dec. 9 expose told of a man who, as the opening line said, ‘spent six months looking for a boy who didn’t exist -- and found him.’ It had one reader admiring the story but also raising a point that other coverage occasionally brings as well: Why do news articles include certain physical descriptions?
The question here had to do with a talented detective -- who happened to be ‘short’ and ‘balding.’
Los Angeles Sheriff’s Det. Mario Loffredo was searching for a potential victim of former Roman Catholic priest and pedophile Michael Stephen Baker. As the story by John Spano reported, ‘The boy had a common Hispanic surname, the incident had occurred nearly a decade earlier and nobody from the parish knew who the youngster was or how to find him.’
It took six months, but Loffredo found him. And near the beginning of the extraordinary tale was this paragraph: ‘A short, balding man who was born in Ecuador and speaks Spanish fluently, Loffredo is known for finding people others can’t.’
Diane McDowell of Los Angeles asked about description: ‘Was it necessary to describe the Det. Mario Loffredo as a ‘short, balding man’? These are traits over which an individual has no choice, and certainly not germane to the story. By deleting them, the story loses nothing. His almost heroic status in tracking down this abused boy and the family, with the readers attending admiration, need not be diminished by the unnecessary descriptive words.’
Continues McDowell, ‘Am I nit-picking? Perhaps. Is it insensitive of writers to have included ‘bald’ and ‘short’? I think so. While being of short stature or lacking in a full head of hair on a male should be of no significance, we all know that in our society these physical descriptions tend to have a negative and hurtful connotation. Why else would hair restoration and, to a lesser extent, shoe lifts be million-dollar industries! If one is putting out a report on a crime suspect, physical traits, warts and all are acceptable and helpful, however for Mr. Loffredo, who tenaciously and cleverly attained that which he set out to do, merely telling us he was born in Ecuador and speaks Spanish fluently would have been adequate background information.’
In an e-mail back, California editor David Lauter writes that he fears that taking out such descriptive details in profiles could make articles ‘flat and bland. A story should engage readers on multiple levels. One of those is to allow readers to visualize the characters one is writing about. That’s what John did here with an admirable economy of words.’
The editor adds: ‘As a short, balding man, myself, I find the description unobjectionable.’