Mike's blog: Left out

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August 29, 2005

Left out

I hope you read Annmarie Timmins's excellent Sunday Monitor story about the visiting room at the state prison for men in Concord. When the late Ray Barham wrote a column for the paper, I often visited him there. He’d tell me about the prisoners at the other tables, especially those who had committed grisly crimes. The rules forbade me to speak with other prisoners, but I was curious about them and their visitors. Annmarie’s story satisfied this curiosity.

At least one prisoner who might have been in the story was omitted, and thereby hangs a tale.

To report the story, Timmins went to the visiting room with Jeff Lyons, spokesperson for the Department of Corrections. She approached prisoners and their visitors and asked if they were willing to be interviewed. If the answer was yes, Lyons came to the table with a consent form that said the department would share information about the prisoner with the Monitor.

While Timmins was writing the story, a family that had signed the form objected to her intention to include the prisoner’s crime in the story. He was a sex offender, and his family said publishing the information might endanger him in prison. But prisoners’ offenses are a matter of public record, and we knew readers would want to know the crime committed by each prisoner in the story.

Timmins and her editors discussed the family’s concerns. We checked with people in the know about whether inmates generally know each other’s crimes and whether sex offenders are mistreated. The answers conflicted.

My view was that we should go with the information. The family had signed a form and spoken with Timmins. The crime and sentence were public information. Case closed.

But when the issue is ethical rather than legal, an editor is often an adviser, not a decision-maker. The decision is the reporter’s – especially when the reporter is a veteran like Timmins.

She decided the family had a point. The consent form they had signed said nothing about our including the crime. And if they felt publication might hurt the inmate, who were we to disregard that fear? Besides, in every other case, Timmins had discussed the crimes with her subjects during the interviews. In this one instance, it was only during a follow-up call to the family that she had raised the issue.

So she dropped the inmate from the story.

Reporters make decisions daily about what to put in their stories and what to leave out. This one provides a window into how complex such decisions can be.

Posted by Mike Pride at August 29, 2005 04:01 PM

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