10 Privacy

We’ll return to the sport of football for our opening hypothetical.

Study the following presentation slides by using the forward button or clicking on sections of the control bar. 

In this opening hypothetical, a key ethical concern surfaces: To what extent do family and friends deserve privacy in their time of grief?

In the previous lesson, we studied how ethical media professionals try to minimize harm by protecting the privacy of vulnerable sources.

In this lesson, we’ll cover privacy in more detail. As we’ve already seen in several case studies, two SPJ principles frequently conflict: minimizing harm and reporting truth.

PRIVACY FOR PROTESTERS?

Protests in the summer of 2020 sparked a journalistic debate about privacy of those who protest in public. Most journalists would argue that it harms the future of our democracy if we don’t have accurate portrayals of historic events. Part of that accuracy is capturing images of people who are publicly protesting. This argument maintains that if you want to maintain privacy, you shouldn’t protest in public.

Because of advancements in facial recognition technology and an increase in disinformation on social media, though, media professionals should at least consider unintended consequences from publishing images of protesters. Those images can wind up being used in ways that the photographer never intended.

Read the following and consider the extent to which protesters give up expectations of privacy:

• Photographers are being called on to stop showing protesters’ faces. Should they? – Poynter

The article includes the following advice from SPJ’s ethics chair:

Reporters who cover ongoing protests should take the time to understand the demographics of the group involved — like whether they are mostly underage individuals or if they’re in one of the communities being impacted by the issue.

An interesting campus-specific example surfaced in 2019 when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited Northwestern University. Students organized campus protests, and student journalists published photos of the protests. This led to an apparent no-win situation for editors of the student newspaper. According to an article from the Associated Press:

First, student activists criticized them for publishing photos of protesters on the suburban Chicago campus. Within days, editors at The Daily Northwestern decided to apologize, but their editorial prompted a second round of criticism from journalists around the country who said they shouldn’t feel any guilt about using basic reporting strategies.

You can read the full AP story here:

• Northwestern paper’s apology sparks journalism debate – Associated Press

IDENTIFYING PROTESTERS

In an unusual case example from 2021, USA Today asked readers to help “tell the story of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol” by identifying protesters/rioters in published photos. See a screenshot of the story below:

Critics suggested that by inviting readers to identify protesters, USA Today failed to minimize harm, especially for protesters who did nothing illegal, and instead assumed a role that is better left to law enforcement officials.

COMPASSION, CRIME STORIES AND MUGSHOTS

Newspapers and websites have a history of using police mugshots as part of crime coverage.

Today, however, many journalists are rethinking routine coverage of crime stories and the use of mugshots, mostly to protect privacy and minimize harm. For example, if a college freshman is arrested for a minor offense and the student newspaper publishes a story about the incident along with a mugshot, that story link may appear at the top of web search results for a decade or more. In worst-case scenarios, this can hamper job opportunities and harm a person’s reputation for a lifetime.

This ethical debate gained increased attention as a result of privacy laws that the European Union began enforcing in 2018. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) includes provisions that allow individuals to have past personal data erased, which is sometimes called a right to be forgotten.

The following headline and article from Slate frames the issues involved in crime coverage and the use of mugshots:

• Who deserves to have their past mistakes “forgotten”? – Slate

One British professor used as a source in the Slate article argues that “the way technology reminds us of our past harms our ability to forgive and make decisions in the present.”

European laws have caused U.S. news organizations to reconsider their practices, as you can read here:

• Tell-all crime reporting is a peculiarly American practice. Now U.S. news outlets are rethinking it. – Harvard’s Nieman Lab

The Nieman Lab article explains that some crime stories haunt story subjects “even if they were never convicted or courts had expunged the criminal record.”

The debate about crime stories and mugshots extends beyond stories published now and in the future. It also requires news sites to develop policies about removing crime-related content several years after it was originally published.

The Online News Association has a helpful web page that offers guidance for a variety of scenarios involving removal requests:

• Removing material from your archives – ONA

Also, one journalist-turned-researcher created an entire website called Unpublishing the News.

VICTIMS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

In the United States, news journalists agree that they will rarely identify victims of sexual assault by name. This is usually not a legal mandate; it is an ethical practice intended to minimize harm and maintain privacy for victims. To report accurately, journalists also must be careful in their use of legal terms, which can vary by state, related to sexual assault, sexual abuse, rape, sexual harassment, sexual misconduct and domestic violence.

Here’s guidance contained in the 55th edition (2020) of the Associated Press Stylebook:

We generally do not identify, in text or images, those who say they have been sexually assaulted or subjected to extreme abuse. We may identify victims of sexual assault or extreme abuse when victims publicly identify themselves.

Even if an adult victim has consented to be identified, this can be a difficult decision, especially if the victim is not a public figure. For example, a victim who wants to be identified may want to decrease the stigma attached to rape; on the other hand, identification may not be in the victim’s long-term best interest.

Another consideration is that people who are accused in cases involving sexual assault or abuse are frequently identified by name, as part of police records, in news reports. However, the person making the accusation is usually not identified. This can lead to concerns that only one side of the story is being told.

Here’s an overview of some key privacy issues in cases of sexual assault and domestic violence:

• Is it ever okay to name victims? – Columbia Journalism Review

DATA COLLECTION

Can comedy sometimes serve journalistic educational purposes? Maybe so. Instead of reading a lengthy text explanation for this section of the chapter, you can watch John Oliver explain how data brokers operate and what they’re doing with our private information: (Warning: The video contains some profanity)

Data Brokers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

In the video above, Oliver cites one media example about how the U.S. military buys location data from ordinary apps, meaning data from the apps that everyday consumers use can eventually wind up being used for military tracking.

• How the U.S. military buys location data from ordinary apps – Vice

The 2020 article from Vice includes this:

A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people’s personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military.

Increasingly, the field of advertising relies on data to target particular consumer demographics. Thus, data collection and advertising have become entwined. In short, professionals in advertising and public relations have an ethical obligation to prioritize users’ privacy when they collect data and use personal information to target individual consumers. Easier said than done.

SUICIDE

In the chapter opening, you considered a hypothetical scenario about a suicide. In that case, concerns about privacy extend to family and friends who may not want the cause of death to be widely reported.

The AP Stylebook provides the following guidance:

Generally, AP does not cover suicides or suicide attempts, unless the person involved is a well-known figure or the circumstances are particularly unusual or publicly disruptive.

For most instances, AP discourages reporters from detailing the method of suicide. Also, the use of “committed suicide” implies a criminal act, so AP suggests, when necessary, to simply say that a person died by suicide.

Another helpful resource, the Suicide Reporting Toolkit, lists five reasons why journalists should report suicide responsibly:

1. Irresponsible suicide reporting can impact the number of suicides.

2. To avoid contributing to further deaths by glamorizing suicide through vivid language or by inciting vulnerable people to kill themselves through excessive description of the method.

3. To avoid focusing on negative perceptions, stereotypes, sensationalism and deviance.

4. Responsible reporting can mitigate the number of deaths by suicide.

5. Responsible reporting can help dispel myths about suicide death and can educate the public on available treatments to help those in need.

Note that the third item pertains specifically to privacy, which is our topic for this chapter. The online toolkit also offers specific advice for journalists who cover suicides:

• The Suicide Reporting Toolkit

Ethical consideration of suicide coverage can be an intersection between psychology and journalism. The Psychology Today staff offers a warning about suicide contagion, when vulnerable audience members may more strongly consider suicide as a result of media coverage. Research suggests that “portraying suicide in responsible, straightforward ways—and emphasizing that help is always available—can help minimize the risk and better educate the public about suicide.”

• Media Coverage and Suicide Contagion – Psychology Today

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