Romenesko Letters
Dana Kennedy reports that Julian Assange‘s alleged crime isn’t violent rape, but that his trouble with the law “apparently stems from a condom malfunction.” David Cay Johnston writes: “If Kennedy is right, and at a minimum her report deserves to be checked out today, then our best news organizations are behaving more like (to borrow a hoary newspaper phrase) those ‘semi-official’ newspapers and broadcast outlets that reliably convey official government truths.”
From DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: The first rule of journalism — check it out — seems to have been forgotten by every journalist in the world writing about the Swedish “rape” charges against Julian Assange.
The exception is Dana Kennedy of AOL.
Kennedy reports that the charge against Assange is not “rape” or anything close to the violent, or at least coercive, crime implied by that word.
The actual crime Assange is suspected of “apparently stems from a condom malfunction,” Kennedy wrote. Put another way, in Sweden it may be a crime if a condom comes off during consensual relations.
How would such a crime be proven, absent exceptionally revealing videotape or a confession? Would anyone reasonably think of this as “rape” in the everyday sense that word is used by American news organizations?
Our best news organizations — The NYTimes, WashPost, WSJ, LATimes, USA Today, AP, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS and Reuters — all used “rape” as the crime at issue with little to no nuance, clips at Google News show. None, as best I can tell, reported that the crime in question is condom slippage.
While it is true that the word “rape” was attributed to Swedish authorities by each of these news organizations, that is not enough.
Accurate and nuanced translations — linguistic, legal and cultural — are necessary. So is asking precisely what the law in Sweden is and what precisely the accusers assert. Asking for a statutory citation and then getting expert analysis of the law would be a smart move.
As journalists we are supposed to carefully check and crosscheck facts. We are also supposed to independent. We are not supposed to take anyone’s word for it, especially not in a case where governments have a powerful interest in silencing someone.
If Kennedy is right, and at a minimum her report deserves to be checked out today, then our best news organizations are behaving more like (to borrow a hoary newspaper phrase) those “semi-official” newspapers and broadcast outlets that reliably convey official government truths.
Kennedy also reports that the Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, “has been active in the proposed reforms of Swedish rape laws that would, if passed, involve an investigation of whether an imbalance in power between two people could void one person’s insistence that the sex was consensual.”
The line above is another subtlety not conveyed in news reports I examined.
Kennedy did not speak to me about this — I merely read her article by chance and was struck by how it stood out from the lazy, uncritical reporting I had read and heard. I then expected to see follow-ups that either advanced her report or knocked it down. Instead, nothing has been pursued either way.
My hope here is that the top editors at the organizations named above will immediately call or email their reporters and tell them to check out Kennedy’s story and find out the actual facts. Better yet, the reporters whose bylines were atop stories about this will act on their own.
Ombudsmen and reader/listener/viewer representatives should also be raising questions within their organizations and reporting on what they find out.
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