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George Orwell Has Moved to Cleveland. (Or Is It Common Sense?)
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”
– George Orwell (1984)
On July 10th The Cleveland Plain Dealer and it’s online presence, cleveland.com, announced a new policy: The right to be forgotten. Writes President and Editor of Advance Ohio, Chris Quinn:
Not a week goes by anymore, it seems, that several of us in the newsroom don’t hear from people who are blocked from improving their lives by the prominence of cleveland.com stories about their mistakes in Google searches of their names. They don’t get jobs, or their children find the content, or new friends see it and make judgments.
I started asking the question in columns a few years ago: How long should someone have to pay for a mistake?
…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, and in most cases, we will remove their names from the stories about them on cleveland.com. Google of their names will stop finding those stories.
Furthermore, they promise to stop using mugshots. Mugshots, you see, reinforce racial stereotypes. “Because many crimes we cover are borne of poverty, which disproportionately involves African Americans, the mug shots are disproportionately of African Americans.” There’s a lot to unravel in that sentence, not the least of which is the soft bigotry of low expectations.
But to what extent is it a newspaper’s responsibility to hide or alter truths? Doesn’t The New York Times constantly remind us that “The Truth is Hard,” and the Washington Post tells things “die in the darkness?” On the other hand, is this just really common sense?
Earlier this month I questioned the coverage that The Capital Gazette gave of the person that eventually entered their newsroom with a shotgun and murdered five of the paper’s employees. How much attention should local papers even give to the police blotter? The glare of the spotlight does strange things to people that are not prepared to deal with it.
For The Plain Dealer these are the new rules:
“We will greatly curtail our use of mug shots, restricting them to the most notorious of crimes. Generally, if we believe news value exists in a photo of an accused criminal, we will go to the court appearance and shoot our own photo.
We will stop naming most people accused of most minor crimes.
And we will consider requests for removal of names from dated stories about minor crimes from people who have had their records expunged. This is an experiment for us. We don’t know what to expect or how it might affect our resources. We might have to adjust the process based on experience.”
Should online media do this pro-actively? Or is this something that the courts should coordinate with the search engine companies? Who really has the right to rewrite and expunge history?
Published in Journalism
I think history should stand as-is. If you committed crimes, or made huge mistakes in your youth, you should own it as an adult. How well would it play out if someone served prison time for molesting children (not necessarily a violent crime), got their record expunged, and a Google search doesn’t tell you “Hey! It might not be safe to let your kids be around this person because s/he molested other kids back in ’97!” Also, how often does someone, with an expunged record, not get a job due to Google search results where they went to prison for X non-violent crime?
This is an attempt by the media to hide crime, because too many of these mug shots are of blacks, as you state. But there is something worse . . . the elimination of criminal records for non-violent crimes. There are two problems with this:
This is being done under the guise of “Let’s help those who have paid for their crimes get back into society.”
It sounds noble, but it’s not. As another Ricochetti pointed out in an earlier comment on another post, losing some of your rights (owning a gun, voting) is part of the punishment. It should be the same for creating a criminal record. Individual businesses should have the right to decide if they want to take a chance on a former felon, or not . . .
I should point out South Carolina is looking at this, and it stuns me that some of our Republicans think it’s a great idea.
Can you say, “pander”?
The media these days ….
They really do try tell the truth. And mostly nothing but the truth.
But The Whole Truth? Not so much. No, the whole truth is a dangerous thing. The readers might draw uncomfortable deductions and come to conclusions at odds with the recommended narrative.
Examples. The WaPo recently reported on a 91 year old Hispanic man attacked with a brick here in the US. His assailant reportedly shouted “Go back to your own country!”
A clear hate crime, right? You can picture the angry white guy in a MAGA cap.
Not until the fifth paragraph do they tell the reader that the assailant was a black woman.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/washington-post-article-buries-race-of-hate-attack-culprit-in-fifth-paragraph/
A week or so there was a knife attack at an apartment complex in Idaho. The complex is home to many resettled refugees. And refugees, including children, were among the victims. The perpetrator was at large. It lead the news here in NYC. Again, you were invited to picture the angry anti-immigrant white guy going ballistic. There were frequent updates. Then … nothing. Crickets. The next day I had to Google the incident to find out that the perp was apprehended and identified as a black man from LA who had been staying at the complex. He’d been asked to leave the day prior and he came back for revenge. The story never re-appeared when, a day or so later, one of the children died. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Once you realize they they do it … you notice it all the time. Everywhere. I’m actually kind’a surprised the Cleveland paper admitted it up front.
But if they are going in this direction they should curtail the use of perp walk photos, too, given the ways the DOJ and other prosecutors have abused the judicial system in order to create those photo opportunities.
Actually, it wouldn’t be bad if newspapers would go back to the policy of the WSJ in the 80s; no photos of people except for standard half-tone straight-on images from the shoulder up (if I remember correctly). Nowadays they do too much propagandizing with photos.
There’s no right to be forgotten, but I have little problem with news outlets deleting old articles from their websites.
In Orwell’s 1984 it was the government deleting and altering state documents. State documents belong to the people, therefore the state arguably has a duty to preserve them.
A privately-owned newspaper’s articles, by contrast, are the property of that newspaper. If the newspaper doesn’t want to archive its own property, that’s the prerogative of that newspaper.
So, no, at the end of the day I don’t see that anybody’s rights are being violated by a newspaper deleting their old content. Other people are still free to archive the newspaper’s output.
This probably isn’t going to happen much.
This is not a routine process, and to my understanding these petitions are not routinely granted. This goes beyond they served their time and were paroled or otherwise released from prison.
We can still argue the merits of the newspaper’s policy, but we should do so on the basis that it will be a rare event.
I have a bigger problem with the new policy of not using mug shots because I believe it is being done with a motivation to deceive the public by hiding from the public information about the people committing crimes.
When I subscribed to the newspaper for the city I live near, I was struck by the lengths the newspaper would sometimes go to avoid identifying the race of the person arrested. I believe they did so because the people who put the newspaper together were ideologically uncomfortable with the fact that persons of one race committed a highly disproportionate share of the region’s crime, particularly violent crime. Putting in mug shots would highlight that ideologically uncomfortable fact.
It’s their newspaper. They can publish what they want. Presumably, if there was sufficient demand for the kind of coverage you prefer somebody would step in to publish a competing newspaper that delivers that kind of coverage.
Like Marshall McLuhen once said, “the content is the audience.”
It is an interesting idea if it was enforced uniformly, unfortunately it will not be. What will happen is this will be used to cover / hide the indiscretions of Left allies while Left opponents will have their info amplified and easier to locate. It will also make the Rights oppo research harder if not impossible as the locked away info is used as leverage against various people.
No, it isn’t practical to expect a competing newspaper to survive these days. And even if it did survive, we have to live with other people, most of whom read the misbehaving one if they read one at all. It’s better to criticize and hound the newspapers we have as though they have an obligation to behave better. They seem to think they are in a privileged position, so let’s hold them to the greater responsibilities that come with great privilege.
My wife and I actually live in Cleveland and we are constantly on the lookout to identify known criminals or suspected criminals in our neighborhood. Our neighborhood block club, despite being made up heavily of far-left liberals, has an ongoing battle with the local hoodlums who burglarize our homes. Many neighbors have security cameras on their property, and as soon as a crime is reported, they all scurry to search their surveillance tapes to see if we have a picture of the varmint.
Pictures and film footage of possible thieves is considered gold in our neighborhood. Our cameras, coordinated with police work, managed to capture something like nine burglars last year. The Plain Dealer Newspaper is also considered a valuable source for finding out data and pictures of some of these culprits. It would be a great loss to the community if they start deleting their information on the criminal element.
Yeah, I think your assessment is correct.
I object to the disappearing of criminal activities, but I’ve gotten to the point where I think our society needs to figure out what to do about stupid tweets or regrettable Facebook post and the like. People do dumb things that aren’t criminal. They shouldn’t be stuck with it like a scarlet letter all their lives. People have done horrible but legal things since Adam. If they really screwed up, they could go to another town and start over,,, and do well. I bristle when people say “too bad, people have the right to know.” Why? I don’t agree. Human nature hasn’t changed, we just figured out how to archive our every utterance, That shouldn’t shackle us forever. This is America and we believe in second chances. We left the Old World for freedom and opportunity, not to get locked into a debtor’s prison for our words.
If you are a Republican your words follow you forever. They can and will be used against you. Privacy laws and rights to be forgotten do not apply in those cases.
I don’t doubt you a bit.
Some truths are eternal while others have a surprisingly short shelf-life.
______________
“I have been accused of caring nothing for the truth, but on the contrary, I value the truth so highly that I make sure it is hidden away someplace safe, where it is not soiled by dirty hands, embarrassed by prying eyes, or worn out through overuse.”
– Trevor Goodchild
I’m less disturbed by the notion that someone’s “petty” crime may come back to haunt them years later as by the possibility of somebody with the same name/biography as a criminal being confused with that person.
There are plenty of examples of people with squeaky clean backgrounds and fairly strong resumes who have difficulty getting invited to an interview (let alone a job), only to find out at some point that they coincidentally share the same name (and possibly a few other biographical tidbits) as somebody with lots of Google hits for criminal activity.
I wouldn’t trust some HR type with hundreds of resumes to scan to do due diligence on an issue like this. Heck, I almost fell prey to it myself once when hiring.
If newspapers want to prevent their articles from hurting people, this topic would be a good place to start. And including more pictures of perpetrators might actually be helpful here.
On a somewhat tangential point, could we stop using Orwell as a rhetorical crutch?
For starters, while Orwell had some great insights into human psychology and behavior, he also missed the mark (either slightly or wildly) on a few things. Which is fine for fiction, but not if we’re going to be constantly using him as a wise oracle for real events.
To give just one example, I don’t think Orwell would have predicted that not only would humans not object to having flat-screen devices in their homes that recorded their every move, but indeed that we would pay good money for such devices and even share information with them that wouldn’t share with our spouses or close friends.
Second, this announcement by the Plain Dealer isn’t Orwellian. In fact, it’s the opposite: they’re being completely transparent. In an Orwellian scenario, the Plain Dealer would simply pull all of these articles from their site without a peep, and whenever someone asked “hey, what happened to your article on XXX crime from last year?” they would respond “What article? We never published an article on that”.
Answer: When it stops giving me the opportunity to photoshop a Chief Wahoo hat on a famous dead Englishman. (How’s that for transparency?)
No, we couldn’t. We need all the rhetorical crutches we can get.
I always think of Orwell when I hear of famous people in the tech industry who’ve put a piece of tape over the camera on their flat-screen devices. And of course, some of the people at my workplace did, too.
Edit: Here’s the URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/technology/personaltech/mark-zuckerberg-covers-his-laptop-camera-you-should-consider-it-too.html
They also tend to withold the names of the perps when they are something like “Mohammed”, “Abdul”, “Khalid” . . . you get the idea.
You mean, a Cleveland Man?
If I understand correctly, the newspaper is eliminating the source that would be found in Google searches. The criminal record is still there and findable in the court records for anyone who does a reasonable background check.
No, it’s just the opposite. They’re claiming that the official records have been expunged but the newspaper record survives.
I find these private background check companies to be mostly horrible. I have a rather common and boring name and when being checked by Little League as a coach for my son’s team their “investigators” sent me a snail mail with the arrest records of two different sexual predators that share my name and demanded that I submit proof that I was neither one of those. Now, they had a copy of my driver’s license and the mug shots of the two perps. Even if the perps hadn’t been black there was no reason to believe I was either of the “gentlemen” depicted. But it was up to me to prove it.
Every large institution in America from the Cleveland Plain Dealer to Harvard University to any company with 500 or more employees is currently tying itself in knots trying to right the historical wrong done to African Americans, and Native Americans, and uh, Mexican Americans, and uh LGBT Americans…. I believe their efforts do some good, but it is unclear to me that they do more good than harm. I am kind of a second law of thermodynamics person and because of the various transaction costs and loss of productive work, I suspect more harm is the natural answer. Even to the groups we are trying to provide help to.
When we say this policy is helpful in this way, or I have no problem with this part of it, we are just virtue signalling. It is not enough that we can point out that some, or even any, good might come of this. Unless we know more about the bad, the wise policy is to stop.
Of course the Cleveland Plain Dealer can make bad decisions if it wants. Its a free country.
Doesn’t a hard copy remain? Are scanned images retained?
Online articles that contain errors are sometimes corrected (that’s good), not always with notice.
Bias in presentation is another story.
That’s a good question. One of the leading suppliers of microfilmed newspapers now only archives 40 newspapers worldwide.
The Plain Dealer still prints a paper every day (but only delivers to homes four days a week) but some papers are embracing digital content only. But that’s not that many at present. How the paper chooses to archive would be interesting to explore.
I would hope that the Cleveland Public Library and/or the college libraries in Ohio archive the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but in this day and age when many libraries are redirecting resources away from archivism in favour of providing “community services” I’m not sure I’d be comfortable placing a wager on it.
Commercial services like LexisNexis might also archive the Plain Dealer, but again I wouldn’t be comfortable putting a wager on it.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, hmm? Orwell himself could not have come up with a more Orwellian name.