by T.A. O'Malley

Created on: June 17, 2008

Imagine a world in which journalists only reported about people who gave them permission to do so. Watergate? No way. The Iraq war? Virtually impossible. Your senator's arrest for soliciting a prostitute? Never sees the light of day.

The end result is that a democratic society is not possible.

It often is uncomfortable, often it is painful, but objective reporting and journalistic credibility are not emotional creatures. That said, most media outlets have policies in place to protect certain types of crime victims. For example, most news media will not publish names of rape victims without permission, because of the psychological damage it can inflict on the victims, who often feel tremendous amounts of guilt and shame anyway.

But that is about as protective as most news media are willing to be. The objective of every story is to tell it as completely as possible, and willingly leaving out names compromises that goal. The fact is, it does matter who, specifically, was murdered. It matters where he lived and what he did for a living and who he was as a person. Suppose that one week, a man is killed. The next week, his business partner is killed. The next week, it's his lawyer. If the governor is murdered, you can't very well report the murder without reporting the victim. Doesn't this seem like information the public ought to know? Sometimes, names merely add clarity to the story. Sometimes, they are matters of which the public clearly needs to be aware.

Besides, these things are matters of public record, anyway. Anybody wanting to find out the victim's identity could do so by going to the police department and requesting the records. News media traditionally been highly useful doing that leg work for the public. After all, reporters have no legal privileges that aren't afforded to the general public. Theoretically, anybody can walk up to a crime scene and start asking questions. Traditionally, the common man just hasn't had a medium with which to disseminate the answers.

Because of the Internet, now anybody conceivably could do these things, but most people never will, not when they can easily find out what they want to know by reading their local newspaper or watching the 10 p.m. news.

Certainly the news media in general have been profiting for all of media history by reporting about crime and death and various other horrors. And many have suggested that they have done so in a manner that, perhaps by its existence alone, exaggerates these problems, making the world appear to be a more dangerous place than it actually is. While this is certainly true, it is not necessarily fixable. It is hard to write a story about someone getting not killed.

The function of the Fourth Estate is to essentially keep society honest. By reporting the news and doing it aggressively and without favor, the media help protect the public from corruption in government, from other members of the public, and from themselves. And asking reporters for forfeit any of that power is to take the sword from their hands.

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