There is a quiet but powerful shift happening in journalism; one that could fundamentally change how people recover from the harms inflicted by the criminal justice system.
It’s called the right to be forgotten.
This week, The Guardian’s Sam Levin examined the origins of an experiment launched by Chris Quinn, editor of Cleveland.com: removing or anonymizing decades-old crime coverage when it no longer serves the public interest and continues to cause harm. What began as a local editorial decision has sparked a national conversation about accountability, permanence, and whether journalism should function as a life sentence.
For decades, advocates have fought for Ban the Box, Clean Slate laws, and second-chance hiring initiatives, all premised on the idea that punishment should end, and that people deserve the opportunity to rebuild. Yet news coverage has remained frozen in time, anchoring people indefinitely to their worst moment.
A single article, published years or decades ago, can still surface in background checks, Google searches, and housing applications, long after charges were dismissed, sentences completed, or lives transformed. The result is a shadow punishment that no court imposed, but that follows people everywhere.
When Journalism Becomes a Collateral Consequence
Crime reporting often relies on a single, self-interested source: law enforcement.
Press releases are treated as neutral facts when they are anything but. Prosecutorial narratives are printed verbatim. Defendants’ voices, if they appear at all, are reduced to mugshots and charges.
So what’s missing? Valuable context. Humanity. And most importantly, accountability when those early narratives turn out to be incomplete, misleading, or flat-out wrong.
Unlike court records, news articles don’t expire. They don’t come with annotations explaining that charges were dropped, convictions overturned, or sentences completed. Instead, they linger; unqualified, permanent, and searchable, functioning as a digital scarlet letter.
This is especially damaging for people already marginalized by race, poverty, mental illness, or lack of legal representation. The same communities over-policed by the system are over-exposed by it.
A Digital Era Problem With Analog Consequences
The framers of the Constitution never envisioned a world where a local arrest could be broadcast globally and preserved forever. But that’s the reality we live in now; one where the court of public opinion often delivers harsher, longer-lasting punishment than the justice system itself.
Journalism was never intended to be an extension of sentencing. Yet when newsrooms outright refuse to revisit or contextualize old crime coverage, that’s exactly what it becomes. They are part of the problem.
The experiment underway acknowledges a hard truth: public interest is not static. What served transparency at the time of arrest may no longer serve justice years later, especially when someone has demonstrably changed.
This Isn’t About Erasing History
The right to be forgotten is not about rewriting the past or hiding misconduct. It’s about proportionality. It’s about recognizing that perpetual exposure is its own form of punishment; one that operates without due process, appeal, or expiration. Modern true crime culture, driven by clicks and spectacle, often turns real human suffering into entertainment.
Prosecutors and police understand this and exploit it. Judges tolerate it. And media outlets benefit from it.
And so I will remain deeply critical of how crime is covered and how media is weaponized against defendants. But I will admit, this shift does matter. It signals a willingness, however tentative, to reckon with harm.
It’s not at all the fairness that is deserved, but it’s at least movement. And in a system that has been stubbornly resistant to second chances, even small steps deserve attention.
Read more here.
