This paper’s coverage of the Saturday-evening disappearance of a 9-year-old girl while biking a loop road at Moreau Lake State Park began with a brief story posted just after dawn on Sunday noting that law enforcement was combing the area.
We have a regular protocol for cases in which children (or even adults, such as impaired senior citizens) go missing: We’ll post whatever information public safety officials deem helpful in bringing about their safe return—name and photo, as well as any additional information about appearance, demeanor, or who they might be accompanied by. The vast majority of these incidents end in a matter of hours or days, usually with a safe return.
The vanishing at Moreau Lake case, alas, escalated a few hours later with the grave news that an Amber Alert had been issued after authorities came to the conclusion that the child had likely been abducted and could be in immediate peril. It was, to use a cliche, every parent’s worst nightmare.
As we have done in similar circumstances, the Times Union dropped its paywall for that story and subsequent coverage of the search. We plastered every article with the girl’s photo and her name, for the obvious reason that the more people who were familiar with her appearance the greater the chance that she might be spotted.
And that’s the way we proceeded through Monday night when the missing girl was rescued and Craig Ross Jr. was arrested and charged with her kidnapping.
The Times Union has continued to dig into the circumstances of the abduction and the investigation, including questions about the conduct of the case as well as the alleged perpetrator’s actions.
But as much as this newspaper can avoid it, we will not be using the victim’s name or photo.
The Times Union—like many other responsible media outlets—does not generally name the victims of crimes; the logic behind that is that those individuals have been put through enough by their ordeal and generally do not seek or appreciate the media attention that might come with it. That goes double for minors who are the victims of crime, who should be afforded the chance to grow up without the worst hours of their lives chasing them on the internet.
In certain cases, naming a victim is unavoidable, or the victim will proactively ask to be identified as part of telling their story. And some crimes, murder chief among them, tear holes in our community to the extent that failing to name the victim—as in the brutal 2022 killing of Phillip Rabadi, currently the subject of a singular trial in Albany County court—would amount to a sort of secondary erasure of their existence.
One of the key tenets of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics is “Minimize harm.” That does not mean we can eliminate harm, and there will surely be occasions when we will be obliged to push up against this effort to let the victim stay anonymous. But we’ll do our best—and though I have no editorial control over other outlets in this region and beyond, I’d encourage them to think about doing the same.
It’s worth noting that the girl’s aunt posted on Facebook the day after her rescue asking the many good people who posted the victim’s photo in the wake of her disappearance to please take those images down and replace them with a heart with her first name over it.
Private citizens, of course, aren’t obliged to follow the SPJ’s guidelines for journalists. But in a world where everyone with a smartphone can be a publisher, we might all be better off if more citizens at least took a look at them.
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