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Comment by xibalba | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting (and confounding) topic.

On a corollary note, Austin recently experienced a mass shooting in a popular Downton area. 14 people were shot. One died. Another is paralyzed. The local paper of record explicitly declined to publish the description of the suspects as released by the police so as to not "perpetuate stereotypes". The question I have is, what is the obligation to report the facts of a story, regardless of consequence? My belief is that reporting should report all the facts and let the chips fall where they may. But I also understand that reasonable people can disagree. (In this case, it seemed unreasonable to me as one shooter was still at large.)

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Withholding the description reasonable if it is so vague as to be useless. "Black male, 18-35" is not useful or actionable information.

If it's a more detailed description, and the shooter was still at large, then I agree with you.

I'm in full agreement, iff it's standardized across the board. But it's very much not. As much as I hate the namesake, Coulter's Law is silly yet sadly mostly correct.

If he’d been white, does anyone doubt that his description would have been published?

It sounds like the reason was to not perpetuate stereotypes, and in general caucasian people don’t seem to have that stereotype as far as I can tell. Whether they would have posted it or not is unclear, but if their only reason for not posting was as to not perpetuate stereotypes and the offender wasn’t living under that stereotype…

Chicken or egg?

I'm inclined to think that the way the stereotypes were started and then perpetuated to begin with was they reported the persons color in news stories for decades for everyone who basically wasn't white. Couldn't artificially focusing on any particular group or groups eventually lead to a stereotype if you aren't reporting on the others equally?

The stereotype of the "scary black man" predates cable news reporting. The "savage colored man" predates slavery, and goes back to racist colonists, racist explorers, if not even before that and before that.

It doesn't matter which came first. The point is that the stereotypes are not relevant to today's society no matter how they started.

Do other regular black people appreciate when newspapers do this? Anyone with half a brain knows what it means when the newspaper declines to describe a suspect. It seems like it will both not have the intended effect of "not perpetuating stereotypes" and signal to everyone else that black people need special treatment. It seems entirely worse in every respect.

Mind you: the situation of the above article is related to minor crimes.

Not mass shootings (a major crime if I ever heard one!). The reason for not naming people in mass shootings is different. Mass shooters want fame, so you deny them fame by not naming them.

Minor criminals have the opposite problem: they can often be rehabilitated back into society after serving their debt to society, but the public shaming of news reports can hamstring them for their entire lives. Entire industries revolve around using SEO tricks to hide people's pasts.

It doesn't have to be that way. If someone is arrested for petty theft, maybe it's ok for the news article to just say "A suspect was arrested". I'm not sure naming them actually helps society at large.

My impression as a black person waiting for the shoe to drop in these delayed ID stories is that the perp turns out to be another black person somewhat less then half the time, and that it's often the case that the police are the ones withholding the identity, not the media.

So I think you're making a leap by assuming that such instances are incontrovertibly based on a supposed intention by the media to treat black suspects with kid gloves. Other than the NYT on a good day, I frankly don't see any evidence that the mainstream media have such charitable intentions toward blacks.

To answer your question directly, if the suspect is going to end up being publicly ID'd, no I don't appreciate coyness, just come out with it. But I agree with the AP that not all stories are worth divulging the name. I had a girlfriend in my teens whose dad was arrested on suspicion of being in a drug ring, and not only did the tabloid get many details wrong, but of course there was no retraction when he was eventually released without charges. That blurb might be on some old microfilm somewhere but in today's world he would be Googleable forever.

I think explicitly propagating a racial stereotype is worse than just giving an objective description of someone

Well, if we go by Twitter, it is a stereotype, though as stereotypes they can be wrong, such as when someone recently on Twitter tweeted before the Id of the perp was made public said, another white male (about a mass shooting). Unfortunately? for her and her retweeters, that ended up being wrong.

Also it's the stereotype for serial killers. So, what, now they can't mention if they guy was white because it's a negative stereotype?

In my opinion—Twitter is not a very accurate gauge on society at large. I'd assume that Twitter has a vocal 10% of users counting as 90% of the content on there. Many of which are quite opinionated...

> caucasian people don’t seem to have that stereotype as far as I can tell

Really? For mass shootings? They're overwhelming done by white people.

Well, technically speaking, depending on the exact terms of reference for "mass shooting", white people (... men ... mass shootings by women are rare) are slightly under-represented as mass shooters vs. their proportion of the population.

Well, that’s the stereotype alright... but statistically it’s inaccurate.

Are you sure? I looked into this claim last year and it didn't seem to hold up. As far as I can tell, looking at both FBI and wider media stats, each year white individuals (and white males) seem to be the minority of mass shooters. My theory is that people making this claim are confusing the terms "mass shooter" with "school shooter" and the first category is more than 10 times larger than the second category.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in...

As another poster pointed out, as a percentage of the population, white people are slightly underrepresented, but in absolute numbers, they're the clear majority.

Well, there’s this (which is clearly trying to push an agenda but is apparently accurate): http://mass-shootings.info/

But it depends on your definition. Certainly the big, intentional “I’m going to kill everyone and then kill myself,” style shootings largely seem to be done by white men.

I told my wife the other week someone should really start an organization that brings gang members to shooting ranges. If they could actually hit their targets a lot less innocent people would die. We recently had three children in a week or so get shot in Minneapolis, all just bystanders.

I genuinely thought the stereotype for non-gang mass shootings was the other one.

I disagree, since that description does exclude a large fraction of the population.

That doesn't make it useful or actionable.

No, it doesn't. At least not in this case. Austin is 8% black. So 4% black male. Then you narrow it down by age range, appearance, etc and you now have a very narrow pool. The public deserves to know about a violent, armed murderer in their midst, political correctness be damned.

So I think you agree with my comment, although your first sentence suggests otherwise.

Ha! You're correct. My apologies.

But then why even mention it was a male at all?

"skinny black male with dread locks wearing a black shirt" was the description that the police gave of the suspect.

Funnily enough, both suspects in the Austin case are teenagers.

> explicitly declined to publish the description of the suspects as released by the police so as to not "perpetuate stereotypes"

That rationale is a bit ironic but there's a bit more to it:

The Austin American-Statesman is not including the description as it is too vague at this time to be useful in identifying the shooter and such publication could be harmful in perpetuating stereotypes and potentially put innocent individuals at risk.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/06/12/what-we-know...

The description was, for Austin, sufficiently specific to drastically narrow down the candidate pool of lookalikes. Keep in mind, this armed and dangerous mass shooter was still at large amongst the public. At what point do the scales tip in favor of safety and caution over "perpetuating stereotypes"?

> this armed and dangerous mass shooter was still at large amongst the public

And quickly picked up from his summer school class in Kileen.

The phrase mass shooter seems to be a suitcase phrase, a lot of different meanings are packed into the same scary words. Additional information is needed to understand the risk profile. Was the mass shooter on a continuous rampage, or performed a horrific act from which they fled, or periodically performs the same act? It seems in this case there was a mass shooting from which the suspect(s) fled. What is the risk profile to address in such a case and what tradeoffs are socially acceptable and feasible to address the risk?

A-AS made a call to not describe the suspect and also a call to perform some virtue signaling as justification. I think the former is reasonable given the risk profile but the latter is a poor reason outside the specific circumstances.

> The question I have is, what is the obligation to report the facts of a story, regardless of consequence?

None. I don't even know why the news reports shootings at all. If they affect traffic, or the police are searching for witnesses or have drawings or photos of suspects that need to be identified, fine. Crime statistics, and the city's justification of the job they're doing? Fine.

But the leering at victims and the poring over the perpetrator's life is just pornography. Also, unless the failure to convict or the conviction despite mitigating evidence is part of a trend, or an indication of specific corruption - I don't know why it's supposed to be relevant to my life except to make me vote for the politician who assuages my fears of violence.

In this particular case, one of the shooters was still at large. Do you not think the public has a right to information about a dangerous, armed fugitive who may be in their midst? I do.

Take the Boston Marathon bombers. Should the press have remained mum on the identities of the suspects? Now, I'm not saying that these situations are perfectly analogous, but surely you agree that, at some point, the press has an obligation to report imminent danger to the public,no? The question is, where is the line (or is there one at all)? I would argue that the press is duty bound to report just the facts, and all of the facts.

Considering stories about mobs trying to lynch innocent people they thought responsible? That seems like a pretty clear "No, the public definiely does not" to me. After they are convicted, maybe.

The risk of vigilante mobs was not cited by the Austin-American Statesman. Rather, they claimed a risk of "perpetuating stereotypes".

Secondarily, claiming that there is a risk of vigilante mob justice is absurd. If you think I'm wrong, please point me to a credible source which reports on an instance of vigilante mob justice in the United States from the last 30 years.

The exact case we were discussing for example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2r3d54/what_h...

There are an infinite number of facts. There always is a decision made about which particular facts to include and how to frame them. One can’t simply “report the facts”.

That being said, with difficulty, journalists can make an effort to minimize the amount of “story-telling” that occurs in a news article. I appreciate that the AP seems to be better about this than many other sources.

I don't think journalists have any requirement to publish who the suspects in a case are.

Think about it a moment: A suspect hasn't been convicted of anything. If there are two suspects for the same crime, then one of them is guaranteed to be innocent.

And in the case of mass-shootings, we've seen that the public goes crazy. Wasn't it the boston-marathon bomber that had people performing their own vigilante work and tracking down the wrong person?

Sometimes it's better if the news doesn't get involved in pointing fingers at this stage of the investigation. Let the police do their jobs, and report something only after the police are actually sure they have the person they are accusing of the crime.

Simply being investigated isn't newsworthy.

Do it like New Zealand, write about the victims only. Don't give in to the urge to feed the longings for name of the suspects.

"Lots of people have been shot, and the shooter is still at large on your street. We have a good description of them but don't want to tell you".

I don't think there's obligation to report all the facts. Otherwise you'd be obliged to publish eye color of the perpetrator or his blood type or every other irrelevant detail.

It obvious that reporting will omit some fact, and reporting body is the one what's worth publishing by assesing relevancy and social impact.

The media rush for clicks and advertising is not the right driver for such kind of news.

Some people shoot places up for the notoriety. Not giving it to them seems reasonable to me.

That said, not perpetuating sterotypes is a stupid reason.

Maybe because we have such a skewed media system in the US that facts mean nothing if you can monetize said stereotypes. Honestly, we need to restrict media companies speech somewhat. It's certainly not fair that they can control information on top of allow for whatever libel they want to pass through so long as they add a retraction later.

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