Journalists are an independent bunch, reluctant to cede dominion over their work to outside organizations, and the closest we come to a rule book is through the Associated Press.
For more than 70 years, the AP Stylebook has offered guidelines on usage, spelling, capitalization, cultural sensitivity, reporting principles and more. Every newsroom I’ve worked in has relied on it as a resource. The AP updates the stylebook almost every year.
The 57th edition of the AP Stylebook was released a month ago, and what caught my attention was a new chapter on criminal justice. Crime reporting, which had been relatively unchanged for decades, has evolved rapidly in recent years, and the new chapter addresses those changes. It has advice on mugshots, graphic material and plenty more.
I think many of you will be delighted by the new entry, based on your responses to my recent column about why we did not publish surveillance video from a grocery store shortly before a 3-year-old boy was killed. We did not publish it out of sensitivity for his family.
Here’s what the AP Stylebook entry says about the issue:
“Consider: What public good is served by including graphic details or images of violence, abuse or death? Does each detail advance the story or people’s understanding of what happened; or does it serve just to shock and push people away without accomplishing anything?... Are those details necessary to understand the story? Or are they outweighed by the potential harm to survivors, families, communities?”
Exactly. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. The entry also recommends considering the impact on journalists who view the graphic images or videos, something we’ve done more and more in recent years. Viewing them is traumatizing.
I love what the AP team has done here. Newsrooms were not thinking this way when I started out, and for many years thereafter. We are now, and that’s a step forward.
As for mug shots, in my column about the video we didn’t publish, I mentioned again that we don’t publish mug shots on our platforms. We were among the first newsrooms to cut back on mug shots when we changed our policy in 2018. Whenever I mention the policy, I receive emails accusing me of trying to hide the race of criminals.
As I explained in 2018, many of the crimes we cover are born of poverty, which disproportionately involves Black people, so the mug shots we published were disproportionately of Black people. That gave a false impression that Black people commit more crimes than others. Mug shots are also about the worst photos people will ever take – way worse than driver license pictures. Publishing them is mean.
The AP Stylebook has a different take. It uses mug shots.
Now, the AP does not publish mug shots solely because of how the accused person appears or cover stories driven by the embarrassment factor. And the AP is cognizant of how the public might react to mug shots.
“Many viewers and readers associate mug shots with guilt – even if the person has not been convicted or gone to trial yet,” the entry says. So, the AP usually blocks mug shots from being the lead image or only photo in a story.
But, unlike us, the AP allows their use. This is a case where our policy differs from the AP Stylebook, which gets back to my original point about journalists not ceding their dominion. The stylebook is a collection of guidelines. It is up to newsrooms to make the decisions.
Lastly, because I get asked about this regularly, here’s a reminder of why the AP began capitalizing Black in 2020. This is from an AP announcement of the change.
“AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa. The lowercase black is a color, not a person.
The AP said the change aligned “with long-standing capitalization of other racial and ethnic identifiers such as Latino, Asian American and Native American.”
That’s a change with which we agreed, and we adopted the AP policy as soon as it was announced. People regularly ask why capitalize Black but not white. The answer is that white is not an ethnic identifier. It does not fit the parameters AP uses for capitalization. Our readers see a lot of gray in this issue, but if you read the AP explanation, you’ll see the reasoning is quite clear. Or you might say it is black and white.
I'm at cquinn@cleveland.com
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