The Associated Press moved a troubling story over the wire Monday about the site of the plane crash that killed 50 people in western New York last week.

State police closed a road that leads to the crash site in Clarence just a few hours after they had it opened it up. The decision to shut off the road a second time came after residents along the street complained that people were parking cars in front of their houses and trespassing through their yards to try to catch a glimpse of the crash site.

Troopers had already arrested a few people trying to get to the site, the AP reported, including someone hiding behind a house while videotaping the site.

The news made me wonder what motivated those gawkers to act that way. Some of them, I would bet, were hoping to get a photo or a video that they could sell to a tabloid. Some of them may have even been journalists so caught up in their mission to get an exclusive, that they compromised basic human decency values.

That kind of behavior is often typical of these types of tragic events. We saw it on Sept. 11, 2001 and we saw it with Hurricane Katrina. Inevitably those stories bring out the worst in a handful of journalists, whose actions can tarnish the whole industry.

It's a shame because the truth is that the overwhelming majority of the men and women who are covering this crash, as well as the stories I mentioned above, do remarkable work under difficult circumstances.

I'm interested in how readers and TV viewers feel about the coverage of the crash.

Has there been too much coverage or not enough?

There's no question it's a story that requires a substantial amount of coverage, from the details of the investigation to the stories of the people who lost their lives to the work being done by search and recovery teams.

But then I noticed last week that a Syracuse-area TV station (there could have been more than one) sent a crew to Clarence to file their own report from the scene. I guess it looked good to have one of their personalities there, but they really said nothing that wasn't said already by the national report they had already used with their reporting package.

And if local reporters are going to the scene to do nothing more than put their name on the same report that can be obtained through wire services, aren't they really just adding to the chaos on the ground?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Executive editor Jeremy Boyer's columns appear Tuesdays in The Citizen and he can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 231 or jeremy.boyer@lee.net