An Ohio news outlet is leading a change of tradition in American reporting which their editor-in-chief calls the “right to be forgotten.”
Long considered taboo to retract or erase old stories from newspaper archives, those that feature mug shots and report on residents charged with crimes can, in our search engine-powered world, continue to detract from their professional lives years after they’ve paid their debt to society.
Now, in much the same way that civil rights attorneys fight to get citizens’ criminal and court records sealed, Chris Quinn, editor of Cleveland.com and Plain Dealer newspaper is advocating that newspapers remove old stories regarding crimes or misdemeanors that have been atoned for.
The Guardian reports that the concept has since spread to the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Bangor Daily News in Maine, the Oregonian, and New Jersey’s NJ.com.
Quinn explained the reasoning behind his efforts in an article on Cleveland.com, which began back in 2018 and had just finished taking 5 names and mug shots out of the archives.
“One was someone who had been in the health field and stole some drugs from her employer. A judge eventually declared that she not only had completed her sentence but had completely rehabilitated herself.”
“She lost her license to work in her healthcare field, but as she sought to begin a new career, any Google search of her name brought up our stories about her crime, along with her mug shot. Another was a man who stole some scrap metal years ago, completed his sentence, and had his record sealed. Yet our story dogged him.”
Quinn was interviewed in the Guardian and said he regularly received phone calls and emails from these people, asking for their stories to be taken down. He was tired of “standing on tradition” instead of just being compassionate.
“I couldn’t take it anymore… I just got tired of telling people no,” he said.
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An ironic ally in the fight to be forgotten came from Google, who in 2022 paid Quinn and his team $200,000 to proactively search their own archives of 1.4 million content pieces and delete stories that may be embarrassing to citizens who have served time and or paid their debt to society, or even just those who committed embarrassing acts.
The Oregonian is also taking action to ease the burden of past misdemeanors on their perpetrators. According to editor Therese Bottomly, each request is taken very seriously and looked at individually. Some are removed, others are deindexed from Google so they don’t appear in a search query but can still be found on the Oregon archives for one reason or another.
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Some, however, are maintained because the subject’s behavior rose to certain levels.
“These folks are going to be our neighbors, our co-workers and hopefully contributing members of society someday,” Bottomly told the Guardian. “So should we figure out ways to at least not be an unnecessary barrier to re-entry for something truly minor and in the past, and for which somebody has paid their debt?”
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Will this help the victims forget the crimes as well?