Civil rights advocates have long fought to free people from their criminal records, with campaigns to expunge old cases and keep people’s past arrests private when they apply for jobs and housing. More than 70 million Americans have prior convictions or arrests – roughly one in three adults. The policies haven’t addressed one of the most damaging ways past run-ins with police can derail people’s lives: old media coverage. Some newsrooms are working to fill that gap. A few local newspapers have launched programs to review their archives and consider requests to remove names or delete old stories to protect the privacy of subjects involved in minor crimes, The Guardian reports. “In the old days, you put a story in the newspaper and it quickly, if not immediately, receded into memory,” said Chris Quinn, editor of Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer newspaper. “But because of our [search engine] power, anything we write now about somebody is always front and center.”
Quinn pioneered a “right-to-be-forgotten” experiment in 2018, motivated by the many inquiries he received from subjects describing the harms of past crime coverage and pleading for deletion. “People would say: ‘Your story is wrecking my life. I made a mistake, but … I’ve changed my life.’” It was long considered taboo in media to retract or alter old stories, particularly when there are no concerns about accuracy. Quinn said, “I couldn’t take it any more … I just got tired of telling people no and standing on tradition instead of being thoughtful.” The concept has spread to the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Bangor Daily News in Maine, the Oregonian and New Jersey’s NJ.com. The efforts gained momentum after racial justice protests in 2020 prompted newsroom reflections about the media’s legacy of biased and harmful coverage, including its widespread use of mugshots. Quinn dramatically scaled up his work after receiving Google funding allowing his newsroom to develop a tool for proactively identifying stories potentially worthy of deletion. The work was painstaking, but allowed for thousands of removals, making the program more equitable, instead of benefiting only aware of its initiative.