Make Way for the Real News, Please

Posted on July 27, 2003 in Journalists & Pundits Justice Privacy

I wasn’t going to talk about the Kobe Bryant scandal which is starting to build into another media circus (others, such as Pen the Gutless Pacifist, have already covered my sentiments on the topic) but Andrew of Byte Back mentioned a report about Tom Leykis revealed by Roanoke, Virginia columnist Lana Whited:

In 1993, when he worked in Boston, Leykis was charged with felony assault and battery after he (according to the police complaint) hit his wife with a glass, pushed her head into a fireplace, and threatened to kill her. He completed a program for batterers, and the charges were dropped.

Perhaps as a man accused of a crime against a woman, Leykis finds it difficult to be objective about Bryant’s case.

If that’s all there was to say, I would have left it at that because Andrew has already pointed it out. But in his quick chop at Leykis, he missed mentioning Whited’s compelling proposal about how to handle future cases like this:

If I were drafting a policy about this thorny topic, I’d say withhold the names of accusers and victims as a general policy, and make exceptions only when the accuser or victim consents, and even then only when some good would likely come of the disclosure.

In all the justified anger over Leykis’s boorishness, Whited alone has seen that perhaps a good point is to be salvaged: that we’re innocent until proven guilty.

Kobe Bryant has been accused. He is not considered a criminal until he has stood trial. Both he and the victim deserve their day in court before we brand either of them as a liar.

I stand with those who support the victim’s right to privacy. Past experience has shown that publishing the names (and sometimes the addresses) of rape victims is an invitation to further sexual violence against them. But publishing the accusation is an invitation to a different kind of horror — a media circus — which threatens to drown out all the news that really impacts the lives of Americans. Did the O.J. scandal make us a better nation? I ask. Will we be better served by concentrating on reports of relatively small crimes or by concentrating on acts of Congress and the Resident now occupying the White House against the will of the people?

News is not entertainment, it is information vital to the lives of the people delivered to them when it is key to their lives. The glamour trials only serve to divide us — mostly over nothing. What is needed is forebearance in rushing to judgement against any accused or any victim. What we need is an invitation to the People to participate once more in the governance of our country. Stories of violence, of who accused who, only serve to alienate and disempower the people with feelings of helplessness. Let the news — which is the finding of the jury — come when it comes. Let’s mind the other issues of the day and make the affairs of Kobe Bryant and others like him just a footnote in our daily information feed.