CASE STUDY AND ANALYSIS ON UNPUBLISHING

A Report of the Ethics Advisory Committee of The Canadian Association of Journalists January 2014 PANEL MEMBERS: TIM CURRIE AND PATRICK BRETHOUR This case study takes the CAJs recommended best practices for dealing with unpublishing requests and applies them to an actual unpublishing request submitted to a major Canadian news organization in the past three years. The goal is to dissect the documents tough rationale, using a heart-wrenching but typical plea to alter published content. In this case study, references to details in the original published story have been significantly altered to avoid any possible further harm to the source.

Overview:
In the story, a woman with a gambling problem criticizes the provinces gaming commission for failing to enforce its voluntary self-exclusion list. The woman joined this program, but alleges the commission has made no effort to bar her from gambling venues under its control. The story identifies the woman as suffering from depression and an anxiety disorder. It describes her as being in and out of hospital for extended periods and states that she went on long-term disability from her job as a retail manager 11 months previously. It relates how she continues to gamble away money from family members who gave her money for food, rent and utilities. At its conclusion, the story relates a recent anecdote in which the woman, inebriated and in a state of despair, leaves a gathering of friends and gambles away $1,825 she obtains in a cash advance from her credit card. The woman comes across in the story as severely troubled. In addition to having a serious gambling problem, she is unable to hold a job, drinks to excess and appears to have betrayed the trust of family members.

CAJ | ETHICS ADVISORY COMMITTEE: Unpublishing Case Study| January 2014

Months after the story publication, the woman asks the newspapers editors in an email to remove this story from its website. She states: This information and its availability online is causing me a great deal of stress, anxiety, and is impacting my life negatively. This online content has interfered with my personal life, employment opportunities, mental health and continues to do so. In a subsequent phone conversation with the editor, she says continued publication of the story will destroy her future prospects." She implores the editors to help her, saying, "This is a disaster for me."

The ethical issues:

1. Why not unpublish? The CAJs recommended best practices for dealing with unpublishing requests convey the general principle that news organizations are in the business of telling the truth, not hiding it, stating news organizations do not rewrite history or make news disappear. Specifically, the document states we should not remove published information because sources change their minds about what they told a journalist, or decide, following publication, that they do not want news about them accessed through a search engine. Using this criteria alone, the guidelines are easily applied and would warrant a quick rejection of the womans request. The woman appears to have volunteered extensive details about her personal life in the original interview. She acknowledges in her email that she offered her story freely but now asks the editor for help dealing with the results when I performed a Google search using my first and last name. The woman appears to have a textbook case of source remorse, which the guidelines state explicitly is not a right reason to unpublish. 2. Did the woman have the full capacity to agree to the interview? The story says the woman was in and out of hospital over the past few years and also participated in a community-based program for gambling addiction. It mentions her experience with depression. Was she in a rational state of mind when she consented to the interview? Reporters, of course, are not psychiatrists. But they have an obligation to conduct interviews only with people who understand what publication entails. A CAJ document on the issue outlines competing views as to whether journalists can or should craft general guidelines for obtaining consent from inexperienced or vulnerable interview subjects. The authors agree, however, that journalists have a duty to deal fairly with their subjects and discuss their practices at greater length in the newsroom. Journalists should not, they concur, aim to be social workers, risk experts or advocates for their sources.

CAJ | ETHICS ADVISORY COMMITTEE: Unpublishing Case Study| January 2014

In this case, the woman acknowledges she rationally consented to the original interview. At the time I felt a need to come forward in regards to the issue at hand, she writes in her email. In fact, this phrasing suggests her motive was altruistic, perhaps underscoring the sad nature of her request that the woman, driven by an initial desire to help others avoid her situation, finds herself now worse off because of her choice. 3. Does the prospect of exceptional harm warrant removal of the story? The guidelines state that there may also be some rare cases where we might unpublish content becomes it is judged to be the humane thing to do. "Rare cases" are not defined in the guidelines. They are framed generally in the document as being an egregious error or violation of journalistic ethics or when someones life may be endangered by ongoing publication. An ethics scholar has similarly phrased this kind of harm as a profound and imminent threat to their wellbeing. In her email and phone conversation, the woman has not alleged an error in the story or an external threat to her life. Consequently, this case would not appear to pass the test of impending harm. However, other threats are easily imagined for a financially burdened person already suffering from depression and anxiety especially one who has pleaded in an email to rectify a situation that is presently causing me many personal problems. The woman does not mention a history of self-harm or say she has considered the prospect. But suicide is not unusual under such conditions a point made in the story itself. On this basis, the story would appear to be a good candidate for unpublishing as the humane thing to do. Assuming most prospective employers comb the Internet, who would hire her? But being humane is difficult to define and even more difficult to rationalize especially to other sources seeking to have their stories unpublished. The best practice guidelines state: Any decision to remove content deemed to be harmful to an individual must be weighed against the publics right to know, the historical record, and the reality that the article may be cached in search engines and will likely not disappear entirely from the Internet. These criteria offer considerable justification for keeping the gambling story online. The public interest and, indeed the publics interest is evident: the social cost of government-run gambling operations is a frequent topic of public debate. This story humanizes the problem of gambling addiction and exposes shortcomings in the provinces efforts to alleviate them. It effectively lays out the scope of the issue, noting that the woman is one of 4,600 other Albertans who have also signed themselves up for the self-exclusion list.

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Removing the story would be only partially effective. The paper does not appear to have syndicated the story for publication by other news organizations. But at least one other website has reproduced the story in its entirety. Another has republished the first 150 words, including the womans name. Google caches a copy of the page, but Googles current practice is to remove the cache once the original webpage has vanished for a certain period of time. The story forms a significant part of the historical record. Being a feature, it doesnt bring to light new additions to the public record, such as a criminal charge or policy change. However, at more than 1,000 words, its a sizeable investigative feature. It was a substantial part of the papers editorial content on the day it was published and a component of the papers ongoing coverage of the social costs of gambling. It is also linked to from at least two other blogs.

Alternatives to Unpublishing:
An emerging best-practice alternative to unpublishing is to write an addendum listing further developments in a story or pen a follow-up article exploring how a person has dealt with their challenges. New York Times editors, for example, have added addendums to major crime stories many years later, when requested by a source and when the source has provided evidence such as legal documents acquitting them of a sex charge. A follow-up story is less common, but held by some journalists as a reasonable alternative to unpublishing even though it risks straining newsroom resources. This option is particularly applicable in cases in which the initial story was not a news report, but a feature that focused on a persons troubles as an example of a broader problem. A follow-up of the gambling story might focus on the womans recovery, her progression through a gambling addiction program and her plan to restore her finances. The womans email, however, suggests this approach could be unsuitable. Is she dealing constructively with her challenges? She isnt clear, but suggests that her recovery has been difficult. She states the original story continues to interfere with her personal life, employment opportunities (and) mental health. If this is the case, a story on her continuing troubles would serve little purpose and likely only exacerbate the problem she alleges.

Few Options Available After Publication

In short, the papers editors have few courses of action available to them. The ethical and practical case for keeping the story intact is strong. As well, the

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newspaper would simply be conforming to standard industry practice. A 2009 study by the Toronto Stars Kathy English suggests North American news editors are reluctant to alter a story once it has been published for reasons other than factual error or ethical indiscretion in the original reporting. The only option available to editors is to remove the story or the womans name for humanitarian reasons. But without a note from the womans doctor describing suicidal tendencies, there are few specific reasons on which to base that decision aside from simple compassion and a reasonable presumption the woman fits a profile for people at risk. In the service of transparency, such a move would require that editors place a note in the story mentioning the change. It might read: The source profiled in this story has convinced editors that ongoing publication of her name profoundly harms her recovery. As a result, we have removed her name. A notice such as this, however, will provide fodder for others seeking redress. It will also introduce questions from readers as to the exact criteria for major revisions following publication.

A Change in Attribution Practice?

The increasing numbers of sources who regret having shared their personal stories perhaps beg reporters to reassess their attribution practices in specific cases such as this. Journalists have long argued for named sources where possible. Full attribution increases the credibility of the story, strengthens verification and roots the story with more vivid detail. But anonymity in a few circumstances may be required. Is there is a narrow slice of stories in which sources volunteer their experience concerning a profoundly personal issue such as an addiction, or an ethical, sexual or criminal indiscretion that warrants anonymous attribution in the Internet age? Publishing a persons name on a major news site immediately boosts the search engine ranking for that persons name. As well, the trend over time has been for search engines to make news content more freely and easily available to anyone conducting a search. The result is an ever-increasing likelihood that sources will feel harmed in the long term by their initial motivation to share indiscretions for the benefit of others. Search engine companies themselves perhaps provide the only other means of challenging this scenario. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt suggested in 2013

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the Internet needs a delete button for young people who commit crimes and later find their prospects harmed by their actions. He didnt indicate any upcoming functionality for Googles products that might allow people some control over their online identities. However, he called the issue a matter of fairness, saying there is a time when erasure is a right thing.

Postscript
Editors at the news organization decided to unpublish this story, nearly three years after publication. They made, in an editor's words, "the rare call" to unpublish after receiving an email from the woman's psychiatrist. The doctor stated the story was highly distressing and detrimental to her mental health, making it difficult for the womans ongoing efforts to rehabilitate herself and get a job. This argument constituted "a strong case of harm, in the editors view. Enough to unpublish? The editors, in the end, did not evaluate the case on harm alone. They were also prompted to consider the womans capacity to agree to the original interview. In the email, the doctor related his professional opinion that the woman's "fragile state of mind on discharge from the hospitals psychiatric unit impaired her decision-making" when the journalist interviewed her shortly after. The unpublishing request initially appeared to be a straightforward candidate for rejection. In the end, editors approved it following the introduction of new evidence of harm and an inability to provide consent. The editors asked the webmaster to do whatever needs to be done with Google to exclude it from being cached by search engines. At present, a page exists at the original story URL showing the original headline and stating the page is not available because it may have moved or expired from our site.