DETROIT, MI — Each day, editors across the country make choices about what news is “fit to print.” But what about the news that’s fit to un-print?
That was the question faced last week at the Columbus Dispatch, where the editor had second thoughts about a politically sensitive story hours after it appeared on the paper’s site. The decision to pull the article—and the manner in which it was pulled—underscores how, years into the digital era, there aren’t widely understood conventions on when and why to unpublish a story. The episode also highlights the importance of transparency in these decisions, and how confusion or a lack of clarity can make news outlets vulnerable to accusations of ulterior motives. On a couple of fronts, the Dispatch could have done better here.
The backstory begins in April 2013, with allegations from a former intern for Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine that she was sexually harassed by a senior male employee. Those allegations were investigated by the local county prosecutor, who concluded last year that there was no criminal case to bring. An internal investigation reached a similar result. The intern reportedly never identified the alleged harasser to authorities, and, according to the prosecutor’s account, insisted there was never any sexual contact.
But with DeWine, a Republican, up for reelection this fall, the case has been back in the news lately, as Democrats have criticized the way he handled the investigation and accused him of using “political muscle” to disrupt the process. And on Sept. 4, two Democratic lawmakers announced on a conference call that they intended to introduce legislation that would empower the state’s inspector general to open a new investigation—mirroring a 2008 law that authorized a probe that prompted an earlier AG to resign amid scandal.
Dispatch reporter Alan Johnson wrote a brief story about the Democrats’ comments, headlined, “Lawmakers want inspector general to look into attorney general’s office.” It was published on the paper’s website at 3:56pm that day.
By 10pm, the story was removed from the Dispatch’s website by editor Ben Marrison—the link now goes to a dead page, though the headline is clear in the URL—and it never appeared in the print paper.
But the article didn’t disappear entirely. The Ohio Democratic Party publicized the removal—and shared the pulled article—in a Sept. 9 press release that sought to connect the scrubbed story to other events to argue that the Dispatch favors the GOP.
The Democrats clearly have political motives here, and they’re working the media refs. But what’s more pertinent for this discussion is the murky threshold for when (and whether) it’s appropriate to unpublish a story.
In this case, Marrison said, when the story came up during the Dispatch’s evening news meeting, the managing editor for news asked “why we were pursuing the story at all when the prosecutor’s investigation found that the woman had recanted.” Marrison agreed, he said, and “asked the editor on that story to be sure we make clear to readers that the woman said this was not sexual in nature.”
When Marrison saw the published article on the paper’s website about four or five hours later, he said, the story “did not meet my expectations. It appears the editor thought the editing had addressed my concerns, but it did not. And the editor had already left for the day.”
Marrison said that he then worked at editing the story, but that “I was unable to rewrite it to my satisfaction.” He decided to take the story down from the website that evening.
“Because this was a story about a legislative proposal that had yet to be introduced, there would be other opportunities to tackle it if we deemed it newsworthy,” he said. “As for newsworthiness, I don’t believe other newspapers covering the Statehouse wrote about it that day, either. And we’ve published several stories on the general issue already.”
Marrison is correct in that other major Ohio news outlets appeared to have shrugged at this story: Similar pieces did not appear in the Cleveland Plain Dealer or Cincinnati Enquirer. And their decision not to cover the Democrats’ comments seems solid. An announcement of plans to seek an investigation that may or may not ever happen, with apparent partisan motive, doesn’t scream “newsworthy.”
But unpublishing a story because editors feel that there was an error in news judgment—rather than, say, plagiarism, fabulism, libel, risk of harm, or even factual error that undermines the premise—is a low threshold. I’m not persuaded it was the right call here. Even for those who disagree, because the story was online for nearly six hours before disappearing, with no explanation offered to readers, the Dispatch risked sowing confusion rather than clarification, and missed an opportunity to explain its editorial standards.
Craig Silverman, a fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, has tackled the unsteady territory of unpublishing articles before. “First of all, you try to never unpublish,” he wrote last year. “But if you do have to remove content, be sure to publish an explanation/apology at the same URL.”
In the Dispatch’s case, Silverman said, the paper owes readers a public explanation for why a story—especially one about a serious topic—was published and then removed without disclosure. “By scrubbing it off the site and saying nothing, the paper opens itself up to accusations and speculation about its motives and ethics,” he wrote in an email.
In the interest of consistency and transparency, Silverman said, media outlets should also have a “playbook” that specifically details when unpublishing is necessary, and who makes the call. (CJR has also written about the value of these policies, in the face of rising requests from sources and subjects to unpublish material.)
Marrison said that the Dispatch doesn’t have a formal policy on unpublishing, and it doesn’t sound like there are plans to change that. “Generally, stories aren’t posted that are problematic. If an issue is discovered, we can usually edit the story to satisfy or resolve any concerns.”
Here’s hoping that this incident sparks some more discussion within the Dispatch. Errors in news judgment do happen, and it’s good to be prepared—and transparent—as we deal with them.
“I’d imagine that if a government office released something newsworthy and then attempted to disappear it, the paper would demand answers,” said Silverman. “It’s no different in this case.”
Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in ELLE Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Next City, and other publications. Anna edited A Detroit Anthology, a Michigan Notable Book, and she was a 2017 Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt. She is online at www.annaclark.net and on Twitter @annaleighclark.