In your lifetime, have you done something really stupid, shameful or embarrassing, something you’d be mortified to have your friends or employer know about today?
I suspect the answer for most people is yes. We’re all human. Making mistakes is part of the journey.
How would you feel if, anytime someone searched your name on Google, they found all of the details about the big mistake from your past, no matter how long ago it happened and how much you have changed since? Would it cost you a job? Would it change how your friends view you today?
Those are the questions behind our “Right to be Forgotten” policy, in which we change dated stories so that internet searches about people don’t bring up our stories about the mistakes they made or minor crimes they committed. The idea is that you should not have to pay for all time for a minor mistake.
For more than two years, we’ve taken requests from people to remove the information, and now we want to start making those changes on a grander scale, without people having to ask us.
Why would we want to do that?
It’s about fairness and equity. We fear bias, conscious or not, affected the choices of stories we’ve published over the years. We get our information from police. If police had any racial bias -- conscious or not -- as they offered us information, then chances are the content in our archives reflects that bias.
We also have a fairness issue in what we reported in different periods of our history. We know, for example, that in the years 2009 to 2013, we had a reporter whose job was to do police blotter reporting in Cleveland. If you were arrested for a minor crime in those four years, you’re in our archives. But if you were arrested for the same thing in 2008 or 2014, you’re not.
How is that fair?
So we’d like to go back over the archives and, in certain types of crimes, wipe out the identifying information. Disorderly conduct. Public intoxication. (We don’t change stories involving violence, sex crimes, corruption or crimes against children.)
We also hope the courts might work with us, to help us with cases where people have successfully had their criminal records sealed. These are people for whom you cannot get the police reports or court records, because judges have decided they have atoned for their crimes and deserve to be free of them. How can they be free of them if accounts are in our archives?
Part of the reason we want to expand the scope of our Right to be Forgotten is we worry that people of lesser means may not be aware that we will consider removing their names from stories about their old mistakes. We don’t want our “Right to be Forgotten” to apply only to people of means, as that would build a bias into what stories are unchanged.
All of this is a big undertaking, so it might take us a while to get there, but we think it’s the right thing to do.
We’ve received a lot of national attention for the Right to be Forgotten. I’ve spoken to a lot of newsrooms that are considering it. Just Friday, I spoke to a class of interested journalism students at the University of California, Berkeley.
We’re glad we’re a national leader in what appears to be turning into a movement. I’ll keep updating you as it continues to evolve. And if you want us to consider changing a story about you, fill out this form and we will.
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October 03, 2020 at 07:00PM
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We want to expand our Right to be Forgotten, and this time it’s about fairness and equity: Letter from the Ed - cleveland.com
"right" - Google News
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