Police reports are not a template for journalists

On Tuesday, February 12, Daily Monitor published a story in both print [newspaper] and online about a failed bank robbery under the headline, “Robbers raid dfcu Bank, rape employee”.

A reader who asked that I withhold her identity wondered whether the treatment of the story by Daily Monitor was ethical and whether any consideration was made about the victims and their families before screaming with the headline and embellishing graphic details in the body of the story.

Well, reporting violent crimes is a very delicate affair and reporters/editors many times have to tread a tight rope between having to tell the story graphically and, therefore, offloading the shock of the episode to the readers and having to numb aspects of it to spare the public the gory details. There is, therefore, no black and white answer as to how a violent crime story should be handled. There are, however, many things editors should be sensitive about. It is these that would answer the questions the reader raised with me.

A few things can be noted about this particular story. One, the story carried the byline of URN (Uganda Radio Network), meaning it was not written by a Daily Monitor reporter. URN is a news agency from which Daily Monitor and many other media platforms buy news. URN has its own string of reporters across the country so one of them filed this story.
Two, the fact that Daily Monitor published the story in the manner it did, it should have been subjected to the NMG editorial guidelines. It was, therefore, the responsibility of the editor to attune the story in line with the in-house editorial guidelines. I will refer to applicable sections below:

Victims of sex crimes. “The media should not identify victims of sexual assault or publish material likely to contribute to such identification. Such exposure does not serve any legitimate journalistic or public interest and may bring social opprobrium to the victims and social embarrassment to their relations, family, friends, community or religious order to which they belong. Editors have a moral obligation to ensure that they leave no margin whatsoever that could lead to the identification of such victims.”

Acts of violence: “The media should avoid presenting acts of violence, armed robberies, banditry and terrorist activities in a manner that glorifies such anti-social conduct. Also, newspapers should not allow their columns to be used for writings, which have a tendency to encourage or glorify social evils, warlike activities, ethnic, racial or religious hostilities.”

While part of the story should have been informed by aspects of the NMG provision on reporting acts of violence, the editors should have leaned heavily on the provision relating to reporting on victims of sex crimes. If they had done so, then it would not have been necessary to go into details of what the robbers did to one or all of the bank employees, including the line that “the employee who was reportedly raped has since been admitted [to hospital] in Kampala and vaginal samples taken”.

Such details serve no purpose other than to increase the pain of the victims and their families, as well as feed social stigma against the victims. Yes all the above details were in the police report which the reporter relied on to write the story.

While police needs all those details to help in the investigations and prosecution, journalists should not just reproduce a police report; more sensitivity needs to be applied by the reporter and editor was to what is necessary for public consumption and what is not. This bearing in mind the impact the story will have on the victims, their families and the general public.

Perhaps a cue should have been taken from the dfcu Bank statement that was written with a lot of sensitivity, thus: “Several armed men ambushed our staff as they were closing up to leave the branch after work. Unfortunately, during the attack, some of our employees were physically assaulted. We are doing everything to ensure they get back to their feet as quickly as possible.”

To the reader who raised this with me, and many others who share her thoughts, the answer is that there is no black and white template for covering crime. Journalist must, however, exercise empathy in situations like this, not just add pain to injury of victims.

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