Children in the news always require special consideration

As the Star reported this week, the Toronto District School Board says it never discussed the implications of allowing an 11-year-old girl to speak to a barrage of reporters after she had made false allegations that her hijab had been cut.

It was “not part of the conversation,” TDSB spokesperson Ryan Bird told the Star on Tuesday.

In the interests of transparency, I think it only fair that the Star disclose that there was never any conversation in our newsroom about whether to publish the girl’s name and photographs of her taken at the school board.

The Star has no explicit policies on interviewing or identifying children. Its relatively vague guidelines on children are expressed in our standards manual in a section on privacy: “Children and teenagers — particularly those under the age of 16 who may not fully understand the implications of speaking to the media — command a special sensitivity,” it states.

Read more:

Family offers ‘sincere apologies’ for 11-year-old girl’s false hijab-cutting story

TDSB did not discuss implications of letting 11-year-old face media over hijab story

Attack on girl wearing a hijab didn’t happen, police say. Why did TDSB let the 11-year-old face the cameras?

As well, it advises that photographers “should be sensitive when photographing children under 16 without permission of a parent or guardian.”

In practice, I know that the newsroom often debates and discusses issues related to children in the news and is particularly sensitive to this when children are victims of crime.

So why didn’t that conversation happen here in this case? Why was no consideration whatsoever given to the possibility of shielding this child’s identity from public view?

The answer is simple and, to me, understandable: This girl’s speaking before media at the school board offices, with school board officials and her mother present, provided sanction for the Star and other media outlets to identify her.

As editor Michael Cooke told me: “The girl was put forward by responsible and caring adults, including her mother. That was enough for me.”

Parental permission to identify children in the news is indeed a significant factor in any judgment call on this issue and is generally the standard stated in those ethics codes that provide specific guidelines on covering children, including Britain’s Editor’s Code of Practice.

In a statement to the media Wednesday, the family said it chose to make the story public, “horrified that there was such a perpetrator who may try to harm someone else.” The mother made clear that at that time, she too believed her daughter’s story. The family has declined the Star’s requests for interviews and expressed its “sincere apologies to every Canadian.”

After Toronto police reported Monday morning that investigators had determined the attack did not happen, the Star decided not to name the girl. I believe that is the right decision and further, that we should consider removing her name from last week’s news reports so this story is not connected to her online identity for the rest of her life. Whatever happened — and it would seem this child told quite a lie — we must remember that she is just a child.

Had that public event at the girl’s school — in effect, a press conference with her mother and her speaking to media — not occurred, it’s likely the initial story would have been limited to reporting what Toronto police had said in the news release that first alerted media to what then was presented as a shocking story for our community. That release, which did not provide the child’s name, reported that an 11-year-old girl was walking to school when she was approached from behind by a man who pulled the hood off her jacket and then cut her hijab with a pair of scissors.

“This is being investigated as a hate crime,” stated that news release, which also included a detailed description of the man.

While the girl’s story was found to be false, this was not “fake news” as some critics have charged. The breaking news reports were based on information from reliable sources: an official police news release about a hate crime investigation involving a child, and an invitation by the school board for the media to talk to the girl with her mother presiding. On the face of it — based on what those valid sources said at that time, and the rush to condemnation by politicians at all levels of government — this was real news.

And now that we know it is not true, all of the institutions involved — including the media — are left to ask ourselves what lessons can be learned here. For my part, I hope this sparks deeper conversation in the media about specific rules on covering and naming children in the digital age.

On that, I was alerted this week to a 2004 Journalism Studies article by Romayne Smith Fullerton, an associate professor at Western University’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies, entitled “Covering Kids: Are journalists guilty of exploiting children?” (Full disclosure: the faculty awarded me a teaching fellowship and I’m now teaching a graduate course on critical issues in media literacy.)

Smith Fullerton examines how media might better assure that children’s stories are told in a responsible, ethical manner and raises the uncomfortable idea that parents might not always know what is best for their children — or fully understand the implications — when it comes to putting them forward to the media.

As she states, in making a strong case that children deserve special care and attention by the media, “few journalists or media outlets rigorously or systematically consider what coverage may mean for children and very few have detailed protocols about interacting with minors.”

Smith Fullerton contends that the media should consider more rigorous consent protocols similar to those required by academic researchers who interview children. She acknowledges the difficulty of this for newsrooms, particularly in breaking news situations.

I agree that the detailed protocols demanded in academia are likely unworkable in the newsroom. But I am aligned with her greater point that “media outlets need to develop valid, respectful and specific procedures for covering children,” and we have some responsibility to make sure parents understand the implications of media coverage of their children.

Children are vulnerable sources and the implications of any news coverage involving them should always be part of the conversation.

publiced@thestar.ca