SOMETIMES, particularly when they are dealing with a big story on deadline, some editors and reporters lose their best judgment. Instead of calmly and carefully assessing information and developing a fair telling of the story, they turn the sensationalism knob all the way up to eleven. Then some poor slob or pseudo celebrity gets publicly embarrassed so a reporter can have a byline above the fold that gets everyone who reads or hears about the story buzzing.
When the complaints come, the paper doubles down, defending the story and casting the paper and its staff as victims of unreasonable attacks and champions of the free press that is the very bedrock of our republic.
None of that happened at The Cavalier Daily last week.
The paper published a story about three football players facing criminal charges after they allegedly beat up some people at a party near James Madison University. When complaints rolled in, the Managing Board took them seriously enough to respond and say, "As this story continues to evolve, we hope that readers will hold The Cavalier Daily accountable for covering the story in a fair and accurate manner."
The Cavalier Daily has done just fine so far.
The article did not report the players' version of what happened, but that shouldn't be a surprise. If the players had an impulse to speak, someone with a cooler head would surely have stopped them. I would have liked to see evidence that The Cavalier Daily tried to reach the players and could not, but I do not recall seeing a lot of quotes from the players anywhere else, either. Some people might say that is just because the state of journalism has sunk so low. It is actually because people who have been arrested generally do not make many statements to the press unless they have publicists to do that for them. Even then they do not say all that much.
It would have been unethical for The Cavalier Daily to present the only eyewitness account the paper could find as if it came from some disinterested observer, but that is not what happened. It is clear that the person doing the talking was involved in the situation. Readers are free to decide how many grains of salt they need to take with that information.
This is what journalists do. They collect as much information as they can. They make sure it is as accurate as they can make it. Then they publish it. As soon as the press starts running or the upload is done, journalists go looking for the next piece of the story. If journalists published only after they had every possible piece of information related to a story, they wouldn't publish newspapers, they'd publish books, and many of those would be published after most of the people involved had died of old age.
People who complained about The Cavalier Daily using the players' mug shots apparently don't get out much. When someone gets arrested and the police take a mug shot, that's public record. A whole lot of what's public record ends up where the public can see it. (Ever seen The Smoking Gun?) As the Managing Board wrote in Friday's editorial, "Had The Cavalier Daily run Athletic Department photos of the individuals involved in this story, it would have implicitly connected the football team as a whole with an incident that allegedly featured misconduct from only three of its members acting independently of their program's influence."
The story also mentioned that one of the players had been convicted of something else in Harrisonburg. That seems appropriate, routine even. I am sorry The Cavalier Daily didn't mention, as The Washington Post did, that by not reporting his arrest the player may have violated the University's honor code.
I'm not sure I would have mentioned another player who left the team for completely unrelated issues, but I can understand the reasoning. It's just keeping track of how many players the football team might lose.
When I first read the story, I was sad that football players who represent the University might be involved in such a thing. I also thought that Mike London seems to have done exactly the right thing. He suspended the players even though at least two of the three played important roles on last year's team. London didn't kick them off the team, but until the thing is decided those players won't be taking part in team activities. They will, their coach said, "continue to attend all study halls and to meet their academic requirements." Good.
As some people who commented about the story online seem to have forgotten, these players are charged with crimes, but they haven't been convicted of anything. We'll just have to wait and see how their cases turn out.
I expect we'll read about that in The Cavalier Daily.
Tim Thornton is the ombudsman for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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