Christine Blasey Ford Wanted To Stay Private. News Coverage Forced Her Out. Reporters Need To Wrestle With This.
There's a third rail in American journalism. Every cop and court reporter knows it.
It's the identities of sexual assault victims. You just don't go near them. You don't report them, you don't report details on them, you don't question this rule and if you're not sure you don't do it anyways. Journalism has few iron-clad rules when it comes to the reporting of true facts--almost everything is negotiable to news judgment at some point--but this rule is one of the least flexible, and the least ambiguous. In just this one case, reporters aren't allowed to do their job no matter how much they might want to.
This relates to three things which Christine Blasey Ford, a Palo Alto professor and until last week a private citizen, has claimed. The first is that Brett Kavanaugh, a nominee for the Supreme Court, attempted to sexually assault her at a party when both were in high school in the early 1980s. The second is that, while she had notified her Congresswoman about the incident, she didn't wish to come forward publicly. The third is that she felt compelled to do so, in a Sept. 16 interview with the Washington Post, because of the news coverage swirling around her story over that week.
As a 15-year journalist who cut his teeth covering cops and courts for a local Ohio paper, those three claims made me sick to my stomach once I saw them clearly. It's not that I have particularly strong feelings about the rule, or that it's obvious to me it was broken. But years of conditioning had impressed onto me that in a confusing case like this, the wishes of the victim are paramount. I couldn't quite tell if reporters had given them proper deference here.
And I also knew that Ford's life was about to become absolute hell. (And it has.)
