On Tuesday when the story of the schoolyard shooting in Jonesboro, Ark., broke, there was no debate in the Tribune newsroom about changing the paper’s longstanding policy barring identification of the two young boys accused in the ambush.
The Tribune does not name those under age 17 charged with crimes unless they are tried as adults.
Three days later the Tribune switched gears and identified 11-year-old Andrew Golden and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson as the suspects being held in the shootings that killed five people.
Why did Tribune editors abandon their self-imposed rule for the first time in memory?
The short, and hardly satisfying, answer: Everyone else was doing it.
From a practical standpoint, it was becoming absurd not to publish the boys’ names. By Thursday virtually every news organization not only was using the names but also publishing photos or running childhood videos of the boys.
The Tribune and several other large newspapers with similar policies were swept along with the media momentum, a dynamic that has been accelerated by an information highway where there are virtually no traffic laws and no one willing to enforce the few that exist.
Granted, the Tribune could have stuck to its rule and omitted the names, probably without much consequence. The names of the boys were of little significance to Chicago-area readers, and the suspects could be profiled without naming them.
Since 1994, however, when 11-year-old Robert “Yummy” Sandifer was accused of killing a 14-year-old girl here and was subsequently shot and killed by two brothers, ages 14 and 16, questions have grown in the newsroom about the practicality of protecting the privacy of juveniles accused of heinous crimes.
Sandifer was named in the Tribune only after he was killed, and his killers, Cragg and Derrick Hardaway, were named because they were tried as adults.
A few weeks after Sandifer’s death, two boys ages 10 and 11 dropped 5-year-old Eric Morse to his death from the 14th floor window of a Chicago Housing Authority building.
Earlier this year Chicago police arrested a 12-year-old boy who they said walked up behind two teenagers and shot them to death.
The Tribune has never identified the 12-year-old or the two boys convicted in the Morse case because they were too young to be tried as adults under current Illinois law, which says offenders must be at least 13 before they can be transferred to adult court.
Juveniles’ names have been protected by the courts–and most news organizations–over the years because (it was reasoned) they are immature, have a better chance of being rehabilitated than adults, and naming them in public could leave lifetime scars.
No law prohibits publishing juveniles’ names, and usually they are easy to obtain through law enforcement bodies, families or friends. Yet, there was evidence that anonymity worked, especially because their crimes in general were much less serious than murder.
Dick Schwarzlose, a professor who teaches journalism ethics at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, said that it is time to make exceptions to the juvenile privacy rule.
“Keep your rule, but find some language to violate it when it serves the reader. . . . The Arkansas case should be an exception. Here there is a broader usefulness in using the photos and names of the kids,” Schwarzlose said.
“When a crime is so broad-based . . . it impacts many people and they see those involved as being just like themselves and their children, and it (naming suspects) really brings it home.
“We see this morality play that they (Jonesboro residents) are going through, and we are drawn in with them. The names become important.”
Indeed, after the Jonesboro shootings in which his son Mitchell is accused, Scott Johnson said, “The most tragic thing is, this could have been anyone’s son. He’s like everyone else.”
Somehow, attaching a name to the word “suspect”–and then by extension being free to use the suspect’s photo–might help halt an escalation of hatefulness. The public sees the person, the parents and their own tragedy, as well as the alleged offense.
Bob Steele, an expert in ethics at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla., raised another question in his checklist of when to publish juvenile names. Does the absence of the name leave open the possibility that someone else mistakenly would be blamed? In Chicago the answer was not pertinent, but in Jonesboro it might have been.
The Washington Post also made an exception to its policy and named the accused boys in Arkansas. Geneva Overholser, the Post’s ombudsman, agreed with the decision to name the suspects.
“There is a real cost to the individuals involved, but there is an important gain to the public in understanding, because our society is changing so rapidly, and it helps in coming to terms with the violence,” she said.
Marda Dunsky, an assistant professor at Medill, summed it up this way:
“The American culture tends to put the rights of the individual above everything else, yet there comes a point where protecting individual rights comes up against social interest. If, by printing the names, it acts as a deterrent or gets parents to look closer at what the kids are doing, then it serves the social good.”
The courts seem to be agreeing. The age for trying juveniles as adults continues to be lowered across the nation, and bills are pending to liberalize federal and Illinois laws.
Judge William Hibbler, the presiding judge of the juvenile justice division in Cook County, said Friday that he sees few indications that the practice of shielding juvenile names “has as much protection as we think.”
He agreed that publishing the names of the Arkansas boys, under the circumstances, was permissible.
The Tribune philosophy in recent years has been to approach guidelines case-by-case in a collaborative setting where several editors debate the issue and attempt to come to a well-reasoned conclusion.
The juvenile privacy issue has been subjected to that same process, but until now no sufficient reason had surfaced to make an exception.
Even so, there remains discomfort with naming the two boys Friday, partly because once you cross the line, it might be easier next time.
