The following is a paper I wrote regarding the ethics of removing or disregarding names in stories about minor crimes.
I believe that people have a right to move on from past mistakes.
I don’t think it is fair to leave stories accessible that are no longer relevant. Prior to the internet, these things would have been long forgotten. Columnist from the LA Times, Nicholas Goldberg, shared similar sentiments.
“In the old days, a story like that would appear in the print editions, but a few days later all those papers would be lining birdcages or wrapping fish, and the article would only be findable in archives, often on microfilm or microfiche,” Goldberg said. “But now, nothing goes away. Everything can be found online, instantly.”
People should have a right to move on and their mistakes forgotten. Lexington Herald-Leader Editor Peter Baniak shared why they implemented a similar policy.
“We know that years-old news stories about such things as minor criminal offenses or early news stories about cases that were later dismissed can follow people around in the digital world forever,” Baniak said.
The Boston Globe shared an un-bylined article explaining their reasoning for the 2021 policy.
“We are also working to better understand how some stories can have a lasting negative impact on someone’s ability to move forward with their lives,” the Boston Globe said.
I believe the best way to institute a ‘right to be forgotten’ policy is to change the way we report going forward. As Goldberg said, it is not a good idea to change history.
“But they shouldn’t muck around with history,” Goldberg said. “Trying to rewrite the past, or even trying to hide from view what has already been reported, is almost always a mistake.”
That being said, it is still important to be fair. In that regard, I agree with Associated Press Media Relations Manager Nicole Meir.
“In keeping with AP’s commitment to fairness, we now will no longer name suspects in brief stories about minor crimes in which there is little chance AP will provide coverage beyond the initial arrest,” Meir said.
If the story is minor and it is likely that we will not write a follow-up, it is unfair to name suspects. Suspects named in such stories are likely to be assumed guilty by readers. These people do not deserve to be seen in a bad light, especially when there will be no additional article(s) to clear their name.
Beyond that, I believe people have a right to be forgotten through expungement of their crimes. For this, it makes the most sense to follow the lead of the criminal justice system. Cleveland.com Editor Chris Quinn does a good job explaining this.
“Because we don’t believe we are in a position to judge which people are deserving, we will rely on a longstanding court process that people use to clear their records: expungement,” Quinn said. “People who have committed non-violent crimes who successfully petition the courts to permanently delete all records of their criminal cases will be able to send us a request, along with proof of the expungement, & in most cases, we will remove their names from the stories about them on cleveland.com.”
I believe the simple removal of their names is not changing history. It is simply changing the wording of a story to protect people from this new technology that remembers everything.