Loaded Words

It would never be professional to call someone weird, creepy or lewd to their face while conducting an interview. So it’s certainly never okay to put things in a news story. This seems obvious doesn’t it? But six newspapers, The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Daily Express, Daily Mail and Daily Record, are learning this the hard way after being sued for libel following the Joanna Yeates case.

Yeates, a 25-year-old landscape architect in Hampshire, England went missing last December. Her body was found several days later showing signs of strangulation. Her neighbor was arrested and charged with her murder the following month.

However, her land lord, Christopher Jefferies, was also questioned during the case and the press had a field day. Playing private-eye, these six papers went so far as to use anonymous sources calling Jefferies creepy or strange. Another ran a head line reading “Strange Mr. Jeffries.”

Blogger Roy Greenslade called it character assassination on the part of the media.

I remember going over the case study in class where a Chinese-food restaurant burned down and a Seattle paper thought they found the arsonist. However they held onto the story pending further investigation and another paper beat them to the punch. My professor asked his students if they would have ran the story or held onto it a bit longer before accusing who they thought was the man in charge. I was in the boat that said run it.

But what if they had been wrong? Look at the kind of damage jumping to conclusions can do. I think journalists are great investigators but you must do it in a way that is not incriminating. Words like creepy, posh, strange, eccentric and unkempt do not have neutral connotations. Sure many of these words were used in quote by anonymous students or neighbors but why would you trust an anonymous source?

There should be more than just a fine line between news reporting and tabloids. This case is a clear example of where reporters and newspapers got it wrong. They accused the wrong man through loaded words and anonymous sources and it hurt this man’s reputation.

Freedom of the press is a beautiful thing and something we should not take for granted, but it is also comforting to know that citizens can take actions against the press when they have overstepped their boundaries. No one is above the law.