In this article, which ran last week in the Washington Post, the paper’s ombudsman looks at the Post’s reporting of a tragic crime in which a gang of four men shot and killed two victims, separately, in the course of committing a spree of robberies.
The story reported:
The paper went on to report that:
However, the ombudsman’s article points out that the police press release was a bit more specific:
The Post did not report the race of assailants or the personal appearance details about one of them. When the ombudsman questioned this, he was refrred to the Post’s internal style guidelines concerning race:
The editors in response opined that “black males, possibly late teens or early twenties,” was too vague to be helpful; it described, they said, too many young men in the area to be of much use.
A reader from the area sharply disagreed. He pointed out that once you add in the kind of car they’re driving, any additional descriptors are useful. And he pointed out that the police obviously think the racial information is useful enough to include in their press release, and the Post was being overly paternalistic to remove it.
The editor may have not seen this as a “crime lookouts” news report, but just a general crime report. Note the news report also left out “One of the suspects is about 5’7”, 22-25 years old, wearing a gray long sleeve T-shirt, and cornrow hairstyle." If this was a crime lookout story, surely the height and what the suspect’s shirt looked like would also be relevant.
I noticed that when I was reading the story, too. I found it odd because of the completely irrelevant nature of the description: “. . . described as being in their late teens or early twenties, driving a newer-model tan or light-colored sedan.” That’s simply not enough information to help people find the perpetrators. It appears the Post cares much more about being politically correct than actually trying to help solve a crime. I don’t really expect much more out of them, frankly.
Or, that they were more interested in slapping a sensational story on the front page to sell papers rather than help people find the perpetrators. If it bleeds, it leads.
Then why put in any description of the perpetrators? As it is, they put in a half-ass description that leaves out racial details and does nothing at all to describe the men responsible. Either put it in or leave it out. Don’t try to put it in but leave out the fact that the two guys who did it were black. It’s not racism if the guys really were black.
The Post’s policy is a partisan and presumptuous one, assuming as it does the burden of defining what is “clearly relevant” and what isn’t. Even then, the arbitrary nature of these oracular pronouncements as to what is relevant is evident – if race is “clearly relevant” to “problems or achievements of minority groups,” why can’t we argue that the persistence of a significant criminal underclass is a “problem” that plagues the black community (or, why is it per se irrelevant to mention race in the contexts of “problems of majority [or minority] groups” when they are targeted as victims by criminals?)?
By positing a priori definitions of when race is or is not relevant, the newspapers substitute their judgment for that of the readers, which strikes me as more than a bit arrogant. Race and ethnicity form a substantial part of who people are – that is, how they live, how they think of themselves, how they define their relationships, and how they are perceived by others. This is never going to change – we’re always going to want to know more about both the victim and the perp in order to put the transaction in context based on our past experience. Is it “relevant” how old the victim of a crime is (outside a case of, say, child abuse)? I guess I could argue no, you’re not supposed to rob anyone, whether they’re 17 or 85 – but the media do frequently report these and other personal details about perps and victims, and readers do seem to find relevance in them.
Only in a few instances (basically, race of perp and identity/sexual history of alleged rape victim) are these “incidentals” deemed per se irrelevant. The “relevance” argument quickly collapses, if you press it, into a “relevant but more prejudicial than probative” argument (not that the media would ever admit this).
I’ve always thought: why not let’s try reporting all the basic identifying details of the victim and the perp., and let the jury (viz., readers) decide what is or isn’t relevant to them, and let the chips fall where they may. Erecting artificial denials of “relevance” is patronizing. As the lawyers say, the objection goes to weight and not to admissibility.
I agree. Leave the description out entirely if you feel it’s too sensitive, or include it fully if you want to help find the men responsible.
I would say that the height, age, and hairstyle of the man was at least as important as his skin color for identification purposes. Skin color is pretty pointless.
This is not unique to the Washington Post. I had to deal with the same issue for a crime lookout-type story at the newspaper where I work just a week ago - crime involved four young males, some description given for two of them, and nothing except race for the other two. They were all the same race, but when I asked if I should include that, my editor told me not to bother because it would be removed by someone else anyway. I felt this was stupid for the same reasons everyone else here does. It is less a PC issue than a ‘not offending our readers’ issue, I think, and “partisanship” has nothing to do with it. I would have to look through back issues to see if this policy is consistently applied, because I just looked at a newer issue and saw a suspect was described as “black.”
I used the word in it’s broader sense (beyond its current use as Democrat/Republican party favoritism):
OED:
It seems The Post has taken sides in a contest that it perceives as taking place between a potentially-race-conscious readership and a potentially-disproportionately-ethnic perp. population by declaring that race (and in this case, we all know that this means minority race membership – political orthodoxy rarely kicks in when the group associated with negative behavior is of the perceived ruling class) must be off the table in most crime stories. That’s patronizing to both the readership and the perp. population.
I tend to disagree with the OP - even in this case.
The Post article also left out the height and clothing of the one suspect, which would lead me to believe that this is more of a “what happened” story than a crimewatch story. And while race is useful if the Post is asking readers to be on the lookout for the criminals, it isn’t really relevant if the post is just reporting the crime.
I know, however, that I’m biased due to one of the local papers in my area which consistently only reports a criminal’s race if she or he isn’t white, and then repeats the information multiple times in case the reader didn’t get the point that it was one of those people who committed the crime.
Except in this case, apparently the Post wasn’t even following its own style guidelines, as reported by the ombudsman in the first post: “They [race and ethnic background] are also relevant and should be used in crime stories when we have enough specific identifying information to publish a police description of a suspect who is being sought.”
There was obviously enough information given to provide a more precise description, but the Post only chose to run with a vague description that really told nothing (except, of course, that the Post is beholden to political correctness).
Which aspect of that definition were you saying this fits? “Prejudiced?” This instance by itself is not enough to prove to me that there’s prejudice going on.
I’m in favor of putting the most information possible in the article, and they should’ve done that. It’s true, though, that this was a full article and not a police blotter-type story.
Moving into the past for a moment…
Part of being in the news business is making judgments about what’s newsworthy, interesting, and relevant. It might be arrogant, but it shouldn’t be a shock.
Renob, if the Post is beholden to political correcness, why does their policy say to include race when it’s relevant? Shouldn’t it say something more sensitive or ambiguous? They may have made the wrong call here, but I agree with them that it’s a judgment call.
Well, they obviously have a policy to include race when it’s relevant, but how well do they follow it? As a casual reader of the Post, it seems to me that they tend to ignore their policy more than follow it.
Of course, as Bricker pointed out, when it comes to the mostly-white lawyers Supreme Court nominee John Roberts hung out with, race is all of a sudden relevant. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the Post trying to subtly smear Roberts by planting the idea in the mind of readers that Roberts is out-of-touch with minorities. . .
I think that the Post should have included all relevant information about the suspects. For example, I’m fairly tall, have hip length hair, and drive a green 4-door sedan. If the suspects in a crime fit any part of my description, I have no right to complain about being stopped. That’s just law enforcement doing its job, even if they stop me, an innocent person. But I’m known for being willing to be inconvenienced myself if it means helping to solve a crime.
I’d say it’s indicative of “supporting a cause [or] person” in “one-sided” or “blind” fashion.
Viz., supporting the cause of succoring the presumed hurt-feelings of minority criminals/suspects whose race might otherwise be reported and give them a “bad name,” vs. the cause of (1) victims who want maxmial information about the alleged perps to be disseminated in order to maximize the chances of their apprehension; and (2) the gen. pop., who may (invidiously so you say, but I claim it’s invidious for the gen. pop. to pry into Brad and Jennifer’s marriage, yet no one in the Washington Post internal policy division tries to stop reporters from writing about that) want to know what types and classes of persons are committing (or being alleged to commit) various crimes.
So yeah, the apodictic principle that race is “not relevant” in crime stories (except in a limited number of ID-the-perp scenarios) is a “blind” one that is motivated by favoritism for a particular cause (the cause of minorities who the papers fear will be stigmatized by (accurate) reporting of criminal perpetration trends). “Relevance” ends up being a chickenshit way to claim that some sort of lofty news judgment, rather than special-pleading, is going on here. As any lawyer knows, just about any true fact could be relevant to a jury, and it is comparatively rare for a relevance objection to be upheld, for that reason. Given that the newspapers are assuming a similarly magisterial air in informing us what is and is not relevant, perhaps they should follow the wisdom of the courts, who strongly disfavor excluding true evidence without a really good reason.
Hey, if a paper routinely prints irrelevant information that is of no use to its readers, won’t they go to the paper down the street instead? But we don’t have an efficient market in this regard, because all the papers have, sub silentio, agreed to pretend that certain unpleasant or controversial details are irrelevant (rather than true, but unpleasant).
I already dealt with this. I don’t think even the Post is so socially conscious as to worry about the ramifications of printing “the suspet is a black male.” It’s more likely they are concerned with people getting on their ass for doing so. The bottom line comes first, and as an editor told me recently (on a different issue), no paper wants its readers to be angry at it.