Louis Hampers: Reporting on indicted doctor mostly skips or obscures link to 9News reporter
Does the media treat journalists in the news differently than the average person? Consider the case of Dr. Louis Hampers, a Children's Hospital physician indicted yesterday on charges of writing hundreds of phony prescriptions. Pre-indictment, Hampers was the subject of a Westword feature about alleged harassment against two women who filed restraining orders against him, with one of them, 9News reporter Deborah Sherman, targeting him in a civil lawsuit. But Sherman's name is nowhere to be found in most reports about Hampers.
Louis Hampers.
The aforementioned Melanie Asmar feature, "When This Physician Gets the Fever, it's the Women He Dates Who Can't Shake the Bug," notes that Hampers met Sherman and another woman, Sandra Ebersohl, on a swingers website. Both ultimately filed restraining orders against him for alleged harassment, with Sherman winning hers in April, around the time Hampers took a leave of absence from Children's.
Last month, Hampers lost his medical license amid two investigations of him by the Colorado Medical Board.
The restraining orders filed by Ebersohl and Sherman, and Sherman's civil suit, don't directly pertain to the prescription charges for which Hampers has been indicted. But in the vast majority of cases, reporters writing about accusations against a person in the public eye will include information about other newsworthy incidents involving the subject. However, most local news outlets covering the indictment seem to be going out of their way to avoid mentioning Sherman.
Examples? Channel 9 alludes to the Hampers-Sherman connection generically in this passage, credited to reporter Jace Larson: "A 9NEWS employee has a restraining order against Hampers for stalking, in an unrelated matter."
The Denver Business Journal's Mark Harden takes a similar tack, writing, "The Denver newspaper Westword reported in July that, in an unrelated matter, Hampers was named in a restraining order brought against him by a local news-media employee after the two met. The employee has since filed a lawsuit against Hampers."
As for Channel 31, Channel 7 and the Aurora Sentinel, their online text makes no mention of the previous controversy that swirled around Hampers. And at this writing, a search for Hampers' name scores no hits on the Channel 4 website, even though Hampers, as former head of Children's ER, is clearly a prominent public figure.
That leaves the Denver Post as the only major mainstream outlet to date to specifically name Sherman. She's cited near the end of today's page one story.
The front-page play illustrates the size of this story -- one large enough to demand followups. It will be interesting to see if such pieces delve into the subject matter of Asmar's Westword feature -- or if collegiality or other potential factors continue to keep Sherman's identity on the down-low.
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