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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
If you re-read the piece you’ll also find a link to my post on the Capital Gazette shooting. These two things are linked for a reason: One one hand you have a newspaper that’s trying to have it both ways, to cover the news and yet memory-hole it all at the same time. On the other, you have a newspaper that took a crime (stalking), hyper-covered it on the front page of the Sunday Metro Section and set a previously anonymous member of the community down a path that led to murder.
@jameslileks could wax poetically about newspapers needing to be hyper-local to survive. But are there limits?
Since the sex offender classification is not likely to get reformed, expungement of such things is needed.
The kid clearly wasnt quick enough to realize, that should say “I self-identify as homeless” and he would not have been charged.
Yes, the sex offender database has been abused to turn process into punishment.
No one looks at hard copies – hell, no one knows where to find them – but the scanned images are often found on sites like newspapers.com. If news organizations go back to alter those copies, we’re really in Winston-Smith territory.
EDIT: having read subsequent columns, I see other references to newspapers.com. EJ asked:
Can’t say, but I’d guess it’s low-priority for chain newspapers with penny-pinching ownership that doesn’t regard the newspaper as anything but a creaky, broken-down machine for making money. They’d be content with pdfs.
Newspapers farmed it out to companies that transferred the print product to spools of tape. Over the years the tape gets brittle – there were days when I was loading microfilm into the reader that I held my breath, thinking the leader would break and eventually a front page would be rendered inaccessible to future generations. Our entire archives have been digitized at newspapers.com, and judging from the quality they scanned the bound editions. They don’t have the tell-tale lines that indicate age and use.
Everyone I know in the biz – I mean, everyone – would be horrified at the idea of altering the old records. No one would stand for it.
There are limits to what you can cover. Space is tight, there are only so many reporters – minor crime gets a pass unless there’s a Wave. (One broken window doesn’t make the paper; 50 broken windows on one night will.) In a way, the lack of crime news – big bad stuff and small-beer trouble – isn’t just a function of shrinking space, it’s the result of the evolution of newspaper design. Papers today are clean and visually appealing, with big headlines and legible type. Go back 90 years and you’ll find pages crammed with tiny type, damn near agate, relating every single act of miscreant behavior that happened – often with the names and addresses of everyone involved. You punched a guy in a hotel lobby, it made the paper.