You’ve heard the old saying, “Names are in the news.” But when shouldn’t they be in the news?
We’ve had that discussion twice this week.
In general, I believe news organizations should use as many names as possible. Associating a name with an action gives readers more information. It also bolsters our credibility. If I told you a city official attended a meeting, that would be vague and tough to verify. But if I said Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle was at the county jail task force meeting, you could check it out. (She goes to just about every meeting in town, by the way, so this one is particularly credible.)
But sometimes names are left out of stories. We consider this an exception to the rule, so we make a point to discuss it beforehand.
Names of juveniles accused or convicted of crimes is one of these sensitive areas. In Washington, juvenile criminal proceedings are public information, and we often print the names of teens who are charged with or convicted of violent acts. To me, this goes both to the credibility argument and also to public safety. If a student in your daughter’s high school had been convicted of a sex crime, wouldn’t you want to know it? As a parent, I know I would.
The issue came up on Tuesday when the sheriff’s office sent a news release saying that a Hockinson High School student had been arrested after he was overheard by classmates quoting a line from “Avengers: Infinity War” and talking about shooting up the school. Although he was arrested on suspicion of a Class B felony called “making threats to bomb or injure property,” he had yet to be charged, and there was no allegation in the initial court documents that he had taken any affirmative steps toward hurting anyone. To me, it sounded more dumb than dangerous. So we left his name out of our story, at least for now.
Another sensitive area is around the names of crime victims. In the four decades I have been in this business, there has been a general consensus to not publish names of sexual assault victims. But it’s not uncommon to use names of victims of other types of crimes.
This is a staple of TV news. Someone’s security camera gets video of a thief stealing a package from the porch. They call the TV station and tell them they have video, and a reporter produces a segment where the victim is interviewed on camera and the video of the thief is shown about three times. No big deal.
But what if the victim is unusually vulnerable? If we find this out, we will generally leave out the names of the victims and/or identifying details.
That happened this week when we got an unusual, although not unprecedented, request from a police agency about a case. Officers had made an arrest in connection with a violent felony, but the investigation was incomplete and detectives were concerned about the victims’ well-being. When we wrote about the arrest, would we mind not mentioning their names or identifying them in another way?
Although we certainly would be within our rights to quote anything in the court paperwork, we want to be good citizens. So when we wrote about the arrest, we tried to comply with the request. I hope it helps bring justice to the accused and comfort to the victims.
Though others might disagree, I think we made the right decision in both of these cases.
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