I seriously doubt a drug dealer is the most powerful person in my region. I live in a small suburb of Austin, Texas, not the setting of a crime drama where the mobs and cartels run everything. I also don't know the name of the mayor, why the hell would I? The mayor is nobody. And if I want to know who the mayor is, I'll check the internet. I don't need a paper for that.
Well what are you doing in a comment thread about news reporting if you don't care about any of this stuff? I'm pretty certain that the drug dealers and the network of power they represent has influence on the lives of high school kids even in your sleepy suburb. If you don't care about this, then fine. But many people do. Just like they care about local politics, local business, and everything else that a newspaper is supposed to report on.
I don't need to know the names of specific drug dealers or politicians to care about my community or even engage in activism. If I do need to know, again, I don't need the paper to tell me.
You're wildly spinning the topic off the rails. The subject of this thread is not news reporting per se, but newspapers removing old crime stories, and whether that would, to quote upthread, "prevent the public from knowing of the past misdeeds of the powerful."
I'm arguing it wouldn't because newspapers are not the sole source of knowledge for anyone and haven't been for a very long time, and because such stories are a matter of obvious public interest, and would certainly remain archived.
What the article is discussing is a consideration by some (not even all) papers to consider remove old stories of minor criminal incidents on a case by case consideration. If anything, this protects the less powerful more so than the powerful.
You're right. The hacker discussion is about all kinds of crime, including murder, but the article is about minor incidents.
"There was some initial internal resistance, but eventually Quinn and his staff came up with general parameters: they would not erase names in cases of violence, sex offenses, crimes against children or corruption."
It's a bit odd, because newspapers rarely report on minor crimes, and when they do they don't put the names of the guilty in print.
It depends on where you are, but where I am local papers report on minor crimes, with names, all the time.
And even if they no longer do, archives may still exist. Which as the article states is a problem when employers will search those archives and refuse to hire for even minor offenses, regardless of context.
