A Right to be Forgotten: Largest American news agency changes policy for crime reporting to do less harm
By Maggie Jones Patterson, Professor of Journalism, Duquesne University; and Romayne Smith Fullerton, Associate Professor, Information and Media Studies, Western University When the names of suspects appear in crime stories, their lives may be broken and never put back together. For years, people have begged The Associated Press, known as the “AP,” to scrub their indiscretions from its archives. Some of those requests “were heart-rending,” said John Daniszewski, standards vice president at AP who helped to spearhead the worldwide news service’s new policy. Acknowledging that journalism can inflict wounds unnecessarily, AP will no longer name those arrested for minor...
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