Brown University – Media Nation

In ‘The Wired City,’ I wrote about a murder and the ethics of naming a ‘person of interest’

I was appalled earlier this week when multiple news organizations, citing anonymous sources, named the “person of interest” who had been taken into custody in connection with the mass shootings at Brown University. That person was later released, and which led to a scramble by some of those media outlets to memory-hole their earlier coverage.

My 2013 book “The Wired City” opens with a story about why the New Haven Independent took a different approach in response to a high-profile murder. The Independent, a digital nonprofit founded in 2005, is still going strong. Here’s an excerpt from that book.

A murder, a media frenzy and the rise of a new form of local news

Nieman Lab | June 5, 2013

Paul Bass felt uneasy. It was a Friday — Sept. 11, 2009. He was getting ready to leave the office for Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath. And he was beginning to wonder if he had blown a big story.

Two days before, Bass had received an email from someone at Yale University telling him that a 24-year-old graduate student named Annie Le was missing. Could Bass post something on his community website, the New Haven Independent? Sure thing, Bass replied. So he wrote a one-sentence item with a link to a Yale Daily News account. As he recalled later, he didn’t think much about it after that.

Now Bass was facing a dilemma. Annie Le was still missing, and the media were starting to swarm. He was off until Saturday night; as an observant Jew, he does not work on Saturdays until after sundown. On top of this, his managing editor, Melissa Bailey, was leaving town for a few days. Bass remembered reading somewhere that Le had once written a story about students and crime for a magazine affiliated with Yale. He found it, linked to it, and wrote an article beginning: “A graduate pharmacology student asked Yale’s police chief a question: ‘What can one do to avoid becoming another unnamed victim?’ Seven months after she printed the answer in a campus publication, the student may have become a crime victim herself.” It was a start — nothing special, but enough to get the Independent into the chase. Then Bass went home.

As it turned out, the Annie Le saga — soon to become a murder story — developed into one of the most heavily publicized news events to hit New Haven in many years. Her body was discovered inside a laboratory wall at Yale Medical School on Sunday, Sept. 13, the day she was to be married. The grisly fate of the beautiful young Yale student proved irresistible to the national media. From The New York Times to the New York Post, from the “Today” show to Nancy Grace, reporters, producers and photographers besieged city and university officials.

Read the rest at Nieman Lab.

Local and national media mobilize to cover the Brown shootings. There was one serious misstep.

*A public vigil in Providence on Sunday night. Photo (cc) 2025 by Michael Salerno / Rhode Island Current.*

If there’s a place that’s the opposite of a news desert, it is surely Providence, Rhode Island. Multiple news organizations have mobilized to try to keep up with developments in Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University, where two students were killed and nine injured by a gunman who burst into a building where students were studying for final exams.

The student newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald, was pretty much shut down for the semester, but its journalists are working hard to stay on top of the story. Here is the Herald’s live blog. Also, the Herald covered a community gathering called by the Providence City Council that was originally intended as a Hanukkah celebration. The tagline for the reporter, Emily Feil, says that she’s a freshman and adds, “In her free time, she can be found watching bad TV and reading good books.” Your heart breaks.

In addition to the Herald, local news outlets covering the shootings include The Providence Journal; The Boston Globe, which has a robust Rhode Island bureau; Ocean State Media, the state’s public television and radio operation; WJAR-TV (Channel 10); WPRI-TV (Channel 12); WNRI Radio (1380 AM and 99.9 FM); the Rhode Island Current, a nonprofit digital publication that’s part of the nationwide States Newsroom; and GoLocalProv. If I’ve missed any, let me know and I’ll add them.

I was appalled at the number of news organizations that named the “person of interest” who was taken into custody and then released late Sunday after authorities determined that he had nothing to do with the shooting. If you search Google News for that person’s name, you’ll get multiple hits, including The Washington Post, NBC News and CNN.

Some outlets appear to have tried to cover their tracks by deleting their earlier stories. But a person of interest is not the same as a suspect, and he shouldn’t have been identified in the first place, especially given that his detention was attributed to unnamed sources. Here is an ethical perspective from a notorious case in New Haven, Connecticut, some years ago.

A terrible weekend

The Brown shootings took place the same weekend as a mass murder in Sydney, Australia, where what was reported to be a father-and-son team killed at least 15 people, with another 42 hospitalized. The killings were carried out at a beachside Hanukkah gathering, and they’re being investigated as as an antisemitic incident. There was at least one act of incredible courage, as a bystander identified as Ahmed al Ahmed tackled one of the gunmen from behind, suffering serious injuries as a result. Ahmed’s parents are refugees who had recently arrived from Syria.

Finally, we all woke up this morning to the news that filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, had been killed in their home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles.

It was a terrible weekend. Hold your loved ones close.

More: Rhode Island-based independent journalist Steve Ahlquist has been covering the Brown shootings.

A Muzzle Award to Brown University, which investigated a student for committing journalism

*Sayles Hall at Brown University. Photo (cc) 2021 by Chris Rycroft.*

Recalcitrant administrators, emails and phone calls that go unreturned, and complaints from the people they write about — student journalists have a hard time, just as journalists do everywhere.

What happened to Brown University student Alex Shieh, though, went well beyond that. According to Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times, Shieh was investigated to determine whether he had violated the school’s code of conduct. Shieh’s offense was committing journalism by sending an email to 3,805 administrators in March and asking them, DOGE-like, “what tasks you performed in the past week.”

As Dominic Coletti wrote for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which took up Shieh’s cause, Shieh was accused of misrepresenting himself by claiming that he was a reporter for The Brown Spectator, a conservative student publication — except that he was telling the truth. (The Spectator had gone on hiatus but was revived recently, so it’s possible that particular accusation was technically accurate. Not that it matters. You don’t need a news outlet to exercise your First Amendment rights.)

Two other students were also investigated. Though the Times reports that all three were cleared, the university administration has earned a New England Muzzle Award for its censorious approach to journalists who ask tough questions. After all, none of those administrators who were emailed had to respond, and reportedly many of them didn’t. FIRE’s Coletti writes:

Brown’s response here flies in the face of its due process and free expression guarantees, and threatens to chill student reporting on campus. Due process is essential not just to guarantee defendants a fair shake, but to uphold the legitimacy of campus disciplinary proceedings. It also acts as a bulwark protecting students’ individual liberties.

By the way, Shieh is an occasional contributor to The Boston Globe, and Globe columnist Carine Hajjar reported on his plight several weeks ago. She noted that one of Shieh’s fellow students at the Spectator criticized him because he “sorted scores of administrators, by name, into pejorative categories … all before having conducted a single interview.”

That’s pretty poor journalistic practice. It’s also protected by the First Amendment, especially at an independent publication like the Spectator, which has no ties to the university. Indeed, the administration is trying to force the paper to drop “Brown” from its name.

“Instead of chilling dissenting takes inside its community, Brown should be keener than ever to cultivate them,” Hajjar wrote. “Otherwise it’s asking for the Trump administration to swoop in with instructions.”