The ins and outs of crime reporting

At the Fort Frances Times, we feel as if we have shaken a hornet’s nest this past week.
And we are being stung by the fall out. Our reporters and editor are taking the brunt of the criticism. They find themselves caught in a bind.
We find ourselves wrong, if we publish the names or information about the crime, and we find ourselves in the wrong if we fail to publish information about individuals or the crime.
And the bind extends to the courts.
Every newspaper grapples with naming names in terms of breaking the law. When a person is charged, they are accused of some crime. At that moment, in the eyes of the court they are still presumed innocent. At that time the charges have not been proved in court and they are not guilty until the outcome of the case is decided upon by the courts.
Unfortunately, often the public believes that if someone is charged, they are automatically guilty.
For, people to believe that justice happens, they have to see the outcomes of cases. However, it seems the general public likes to be voyeurs into the lives of people, who go afoul of the law.
Sometimes when we receive a crime report as was the case last Friday in the west end of Fort Frances, very little information is known or is being divulged as the police are continuing their investigation.
Earlier last week, a home was raided and four arrests were made. No names were supplied to the paper. A person who really wanted to know who lived at the address, could have used the internet to discover the names of the household members.
When we name a suspect, the courts of the land have now mandated that we must follow the case through to its outcome. That means, every time the accused appears in court, we are required to report on what happens at that moment.
Eventually several outcomes may happen. The charges may be dropped. The accused may be found guilty. The accused may be found innocent. The charges may be changed. Or, the accused may be found guilty of a lesser charge. And the newspaper has to be there to report on any of those outcomes.
Even when someone is found guilty and sentenced, we are required to follow through any appeals process that may take place.
It is a large burden on the newspaper, and really requires having a full time person attend the court house every day of the week, Small newspapers such as the Fort Frances Times and Rainy River Record do not have the staffing numbers or budget to have a person in the court every court day of the year. Very few large dailies in Canada follow the day to day proceedings in Canada.
We do, from time to time, publish names of individuals in cases we deem to be of public interest. And in doing that, we are criticized for embarrassing the person and their family.. Similarly, in not publishing names we are accused of covering up for the accused and denying the public access to information about the accused.
At one time, the newspaper used to publish the decisions of the court each week. We often discovered that in providing the conviction, the published names were identical to other individuals in the community. The innocent person was outraged.
We expanded that to include their ages, and even that produced problems. And then we included their household addresses only to find out they had moved over the course of their case and that too was incorrect.
We also discovered that persons could plead guilty and submit their fines through the mail and their names never appeared on the court proceedings. The only persons whose names were found in the weekly report, were those who contested the charge.
The courts and ourselves eventually became exasperated at the number of corrections that had to be made each week. The courts solution was for the newspaper to have a person in the court all the time. Our decision was to reduce our court coverage.
If you as an individual want to know more about crimes and the individuals who are charged across the Rainy River district, we encourage you to spend your days in the court house.
In the meantime, there’s a simple way to guarantee your name won’t appear in the paper: don’t break the law.
–Jim Cumming,
Publisher