Naming Names

Media organizations are frequently criticized for a heartless approach to the news. Stories that are damaging to a person’s reputation make the front page just as quickly—and many would say even more quickly—as stories that enhance it. At times, readers argue the media should be more hesitant to run articles that injure a person’s reputation—or, if the news must get out, that the subject be left unnamed.

Yet on a daily basis, The Crimson prints stories where the subjects shouldn’t go unnamed, where their identities are relevant to readers and shouldn’t be obscured. A process that requires editors to pick and choose which subjects are sympathetic—which deserve protection and which do not—would invite journalistic bias.

Journalists play God when they decide for their readers when to hide information from them. Frequently, those choices are unavoidable. There are only so many pages in the paper, and to serve their readers newspapers highlight some information and de-emphasize the rest. But it’s dangerous for journalists to decide when to pull their punches on the basis of reputations. As a result, The Crimson tries to print the information its reporters know.

On April 17, we reported that three student publications, including The Crimson, were investigating a student for plagiarism. Before the article ran, administrators, friends and colleagues close to the student repeatedly entreated us not to run it. They argued we had fulfilled our responsibility to our readers to correct her dishonesty—The Crimson had already retracted the four articles we believed were not entirely her own work, and she had resigned her editorship of The Crimson as well as her membership in several other publications.

It was clear to all of us that the student had suffered a great deal for her mistake, and was incredibly distraught over the possibility that it would be publicized. Friends and colleagues pointed out that an article would likely be seen by her teaching fellows, professors and casual acquaintances, and while it was unclear what their reaction to it might be, running the article would very likely cause her significant harm.

This was a serious concern for us. But we also felt that this story was very interesting, very important and already very public. A student had plagiarized on multiple occasions in multiple campus publications. This was a rare event, a dishonesty repeatedly undertaken in a public forum, and we ultimately did not want a concern for her reputation to stay our hand on significant news.