Editorial

A bit hasty, perhaps

Last Monday morning, The Leader faced a dilemma, with regard to reporting a case of what might have been homicide. The situation, early Monday morning (Oct. 6) was this: A man had died in town on Sunday, evidently (but not officially confirmed) by way of an attack by another person.
Everyone in town was talking about it. Certain aspects were very commonly ‘understood’, most prominently that it was a shooting.
But we had no official word on it. The police declined to comment, for reasons of protecting the integrity of the investigation, they said.
Fair enough. But not exactly a solution as far as the paper was concerned. To have waited a week to publish anything about the story seemed foolish. Irresponsible, even. Murder is big, big news in a small town like Slave Lake. A newspaper of record should not be acting as if it hadn’t happened.
So we ran with the small piece on the front page. It didn’t say much, but it did say there was a shooting. ‘Everybody’ (excluding the police) said it was a shooting, but even when the RCMP confirmed later on the Monday that they were treating the matter as a homicide, they didn’t say how the man had been killed. That was probably by 10:00 a.m., but by then, the front page of The Leader for the Oct. 8 issues was an hour gone to the printer, and too late to recall for changes. Our story called it a ‘shooting’ incident, which in retrospect was probably relying too much on talk around town rather than official word.
An amended version of the story appeared a day or two later at lakesideleader.com.
Later in the week, police in fact confirmed that the man was shot, and released the names of the suspects along with that of the victim, which presents another dilemma.
As a rule, The Leader does not publish the names of accused persons until they are convicted. The thinking is that if someone turns out to be innocent of the charges, they don’t deserve to have their name associated with the charges. In many cases, police don’t release the names of the persons charged, possibly for similar reasons. But sometimes they do, for whatever reason. When they do, other news outlets often do publish or broadcast the names. The names of the two suspects in the Blaine Cardinal murder have by now been broadcast all over the place.
So who are we kidding that we’re making a difference by not publishing them?
Well, a policy is a policy, and we’ll stick by it – at least for now. From our point of view, there’s no good reason to expose those two suspects to any more public scrutiny (and possibly retaliation) than they already face. Let the matter go through the court system. If and when they are convicted of a crime, then we’ll publish their names.