Jeanine L’Ecuyer, journalist and former Director of Communications and Press Security for the Governor of Arizona, visited journalism students at the University of Oklahoma to discuss her role in the Arizona prison hostage situation of 2004.
L’Ecuyer spoke to the students about how the media reacted to this devastating event.
“Was I happy with the way the media handled this?” she asked. “95 percent yes, for the most part I thought they did a good job. They handled it respectively.”
The scene of the hostage situation, Arizona State Prison Complex- Lewis in Buckeye, AZ, became a camp ground of media. Trucks were parked there for the entire two weeks of the standoff so that they would not miss anything as it happened.
“The challenging aspect of this case for the media was that there was not a lot of information given,” L’Ecuyer said.
L’Ecuyer explained that she had to hold information from the press, such as the victim’s names and certain situations that happened. This was done because they did not want the prisoners to know how much information they had.
“Advantages are hard to come by, and you need to preserve them as long as you can,” she said.
The Arizona prison hostage situation lasted for 15 days in Jan. and Feb. It is the longest prison hostage situation ever. Two inmates, Ricky Wassenaar and Steven Coy, tried to escape the prison, but instead took two of the guards, one female and one male, hostage.
The female hostage, Lois Fraley, said that the voice of radio host Andy McKinney kept her alive throughout the situation.
After 15 long days, the prisoners surrendered their weapons because of the negotiations that were made between them and the government, including food, beverages, cigarettes and airtime on news channels. Fraley was released to the police and taken to a local hospital to be treated.
L’Ecuyer said that had this have happened now, social media would play a large role with the media.
“If I was doing this today, I would go straight to Twitter and release as much as I can from the Governor’s office,” she said.
Jeanine L’Ecuyer told students that monitoring social sites like Twitter and Facebook could possibly change the outcome of a situation like this in today’s time.
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