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Abstract
This study of crime reporting shows that keeping crime records secret hurts democratic consolidation. While many reporters and journalism experts interviewed claimed to value the presumption of innocence, at the same time, many skirted legal restrictions and ethical codes. Police and prosecutors supplied leaks, and reporters sought further information from witnesses. This porous secrecy leads to publication of rumors and unreliable eye-witness accounts. Four exacerbating factors affect this reporting method: widespread “clientelism,” a partisan news media, an alternative definition of “public interest,” and weak professionalism.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Romayne Smith Fullerton and Maggie Jones Patterson would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the private endowment of Morton Weissman for their support in the collection of this research data.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. March 2005 to June 2011.
2. As of January 28, 2016, Diário de Notícias newspaper reported that the investigation is ongoing. Sócrates’ defense has argued that there is not sufficient evidence to convict him of corruption. The judges have considered whether there are grounds to investigate Sócrates’ use of third parties, like his childhood friend Carlos Santos Silva, to hold properties for him (http://www.dn.pt/portugal/interior/tribunal-da-relacao-reconhece-indicios-decorrupcao-contra-socrates-5002748.html).
3. One newspaper, Correio da Manhã, did gain access to the records for a time through a legal maneuver that is explained later.
4. All information quoted directly from sources is taken from personal interviews conducted by the authors (for names and positions, see Appendix A).
5. These three countries are not alone in this regard. Protecting the presumption of innocence by withholding arrest records from the public is a common tenet of the Napoleonic Court system, which is influential in Europe and Latin America.
6. Because these countries rarely, if ever, employ trial by jury, the right to a fair trial is not a part of the conversation.
7. The project began in 2009 with our realization that many northern European journalists routinely protect the identity of accused and in some cases, even convicted persons, while North American reporters seek to publish all they can discover, especially in the case of signal crimes. We began interviewing news professionals and academics in 2010, and have collected data in Sweden, the Netherlands, England, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, for a total of 141 interviews with journalists, editors, members of press councils or similar organizations, and media academics. Several of our recent publications (Smith Fullerton and Patterson Citation2013, Citation2016a, Citation2016b) outline some of our findings in the countries from the Liberal and Democratic Corporatist models.
8. All other countries in our sample make arrest records public at the time of arrest. Some countries in our larger study, such as the Netherlands and Sweden, generally protect privacy and the presumption of innocence by choosing not to identify in their media coverage persons accused of serious crimes. This practice is in compliance with journalistic ethics policies. Journalists in England, Ireland, and Canada are bound by laws to protect the presumption of innocence and not to taint the jury pool or its selection process. In the United States, journalists cover arrests with relative impunity.
9. While codes can be ignored, they point to professional ideals, and offer a reference point in our discussions with practitioners, most of whom were crime reporters, media experts, or academics. We chose not to interview bloggers, freelancers, or those who produce news solely for small niche websites, because these practitioners are not bound by ethics codes in the same manner as those employed by large media institutions. Our project focuses on institutions, particularly the institution of journalism, which carries history and tradition in its practices, and we believe that the attitudes of institutions are best reflected in the professionals who are employed by them.
10. When coverage is in a language none of the authors speak, we work from translations. In this instance, one author is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and has a working knowledge of Italian. In addition, we had translators in all three countries.
11. According to United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which ranks national murder rates in six categories. Italy is in the lowest rankings on par with Spain and the Netherlands. Portugal (1.2 percent murder rate), Canada (1.4 percent), and England (1 percent) are all in the second-lowest category, and the United States (3.4 percent) in the third lowest (https://www.unodc.org/gsh/). Also see European murder rates, kept by the European Union, at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Homicides_recorded_by_the_police,_2002–12_YB14.png.
12. The law in Spain as of December 9, 2013 (https://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-2013-12887). This access to information law is not working, and nothing changes. A note in Article 14 about the exceptions states that access to the information might be limited by certain concerns. Among them: public security; prevention, investigation and sanction of criminal, administrative, or disciplinary offences; or the equality of parties in legal proceedings and effective legal protection.
13. Epitomized by those we targeted for interviews: mainstream and well-known reporters.
14. See, for example, Mancini (Citation2000), Hallin and Mancini (Citation2004), and Hallin and Papathanassopoulos (Citation2002).
15. Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini fell in1943; Spain’s Francisco Franco fell in 1975; and Portugal’s dictatorship ended in 1974.
16. Many North American and northern European interview subjects explicitly said or strongly implied that such ethical considerations influenced their practice.
17. Article 329 of the Italian code says that investigation activities are not secret “beyond the end of preliminary investigations.” Also documents communicated to the media by the defense are permitted under the code.
18. See Maciá-Barber and Galván-Arias (Citation2012). This article outlines in detail how a Tenerife man was falsely accused by the media of the rape and murder of his girlfriend’s daughter, Aitana. It has become a much-cited case in Spain because of the behavior of the journalists covering the story.
19. See Patterson and Smith Fullerton (Citation2015) and Smith Fullerton and Patterson (Citation2013). These articles offer insight into the effects of media coverage of accused but not convicted persons in countries from Hallin and Mancini’s Liberal model, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
20. For a selection of articles, see the organization’s website http://notiziario.ossigeno.info/english/.
21. See https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=09000016804f9fd.
23. In addition to Voltmer (Citation2013) and Christians et al. (Citation2009), to whom we have already referred, see also Deuze’s article, “What is Journalism?” (Deuze Citation2005) and his book, Media Work (Deuze Citation2007), as well as an earlier book, The American Journalist, by Weaver and Wilhoit (Citation1986).
24. Kovach and Rosenstiel (Citation2007, Citation81–Citation82) contest the common interpretation of objectivity as “free of bias … The call for journalists to adopt objectivity [circa 1920s] was an appeal for them to develop a consistent method of testing information—a transparent approach to evidence—precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.” Objectivity is not a fundamental principle of journalism, they declare. Rather, the familiar neutral voice in newswriting is often a helpful device to convey that the information was obtained by objective means (83). Hellmueller, Vos, and Poepsel (Citation2013) also suggest that the online formats may be pushing younger US journalists toward a greater reliance on transparency than objectivity as their measure of credibility.