JONESIE: The real forces controlling the news

OPINION I think I understand sometimes why some people don’t trust the news anymore. It plays by old rules that seem silly and stuffy and serving you — citizens and readers/viewers — seems to be missing from the equation. We make so many decisions on behalf of a wide mass readership, we often ignore what’s in front of us. But what readers don’t know is that it’s not often the journalists making these calls. Not really. This week, a video started making its rounds on social media. It showed a 15-year-old girl getting stomped by a couple other girls, amid a large crowd of similar-aged teens. The girl is trying to negotiate with her initial aggressor when she is grabbed from behind and punched several times. That gets the crowd’s blood up. The initial aggressor takes over, gets the girl on the ground, sits on top of her and punches her to the point of unconsciousness. While unconscious and defenceless, some of the crowd cover her head and face with dirt. Castanet reported the story first and declined to show the video, without explanation. They named the father, then later removed his name. Kelowna Now went out of its way to ensure neither the victim nor her father were identified and declined to publish the video. CBC Radio declined to name the father on its website. It “reviewed” the video for readers, but refused to publish it. We also declined to publish the video. More on that later. Video is the domain of Global News so they ran it, but only after blurring the faces of all the participants. We’ve all saved you from seeing what these teens are doing in public with their time. That they recorded themselves and published to social media. Yeah, this is 2024. All you have to do is open another app on your phone and you’ll probably find it. Or ask enough people, someone will send it to you. Many of you have seen it, shared it already. The internet has its own ethic I swear I do not understand. Expectations and norms changed constantly. We're still playing by the rules of the '90s. My first shock of this was the suicide of Amanda Todd in 2012. No responsible news outlet would have covered her death for fear of the so-called suicide contagion, but readers knew it was an important story and spread it like wildfire on the web. It was important. And it was only after the web decided it was that journalists followed. So we still make silly decisions trying not to offend any sector of our mass markets. It’s kinda like when news outlets try to save your tender minds by blanking out words like f**k. When you read that, did you read eff-asterisk-asterisk-kay? Or did you just say the word? Exactly. It’s pointless. Yet we do it all the time, often to our own disadvantage. If those teens were instead involved in a fatal car crash, all of us would publish photos of the wreckage, justified to shock readers into maybe addressing the problem of alcohol/speed/talking to their kids. But this was a crime, you might say. Well, that gets kind of sticky. At the time all these news reports were published, it was nothing more than happenings in a public space. It wasn’t a crime until some of the kids were arrested under the Youth Criminal Justice Act this week and likely not until they are actually charged. And until those charges are laid, there’s no legal reason to protect the identity of the father or even the girl. Again, simply open another browser window and you can find him pretty quickly. He’s not exactly shy. So why? Not naming the victim of a crime seems like a good call anytime, though certainly not every time. But the video? Here’s a little story that might help illustrate. Somehow, the BC Prosecution Service got wind of a story we were doing a little while ago. The “Senior Communications Counsel” bopped into our email inbox to kill the story. Oh, she’ll quibble with that and she’d be accurate. She was informing us about a publication ban and she was giving me the courtesy of a heads up that they consider any information published about the president of a local society facing sex charges involving a minor would be violating that ban. We don't spend too much time on sex crimes unless they involve public figures in a position of authority and where there's a likelihood that other victims might come forward if they knew charges were laid. Happens more often than you think. It was a very reasonable thing for the prosecutor to do. She’s following the law meant to protect victims of crime. I interpret the law quite differently, but if I am wrong and get hauled before a judge and they find out the Crown warned me in advance? That’s not a risk I can take. But there’s not much left to report after that. I'd love to tell you about it. She assured me that prosecutors want to encourage reporters to cover stories, particularly about sexual assault cases and the like. I couldn’t help but laugh. One of the ironies in these Last Days of Journalism is that we work alongside people who understand the importance of a free press, actively claim to want to protect it, then hold our hands while they kill it off. Because the result is the same. Story’s dead. There is serious legal jeopardy for this stuff. The laws are often unclear and open to interpretation and get ever tighter. Like, I am pretty sure all I have laid out here is true, but it just takes one interpretation from a judge, and I am wrong and paying a price. You're the one who suffers for it. And if you don’t know how this stuff works, I could see why you’d blame us. That is, if you haven't already written us and our old tempered old rules and norms off as irrelevant. — Marshall Jones is the Managing Editor of iNFOnews.ca We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor. mailto:news@infonews.ca