The Mast-Head: Mother of the Bride
When I got into the office around 8 on Tuesday morning this week, there already was a message on my voice mail. It was from a woman who wanted us to remove the names of her daughter and her daughter’s fiancé from a 2013 letter to the editor that remained on our website.
Their wedding is about to take place and, without getting into the circumstances of the letter that offended the mother of the bride other than to say it involved an Amagansett summer share house, her worry was that some of the hundreds of guests coming to the wedding would turn to the web for information, a gift registry perhaps, and be tempted to read something less than flattering about the couple.
Her request was hardly the first. In recent months, there has been a sharp increase in the number and frequency of pleas from people whose names have appeared in The Star, mostly in connection with driving while intoxicated arrests, to expunge the online record. Our answer is always “no.”
Among these has been a woman who says she was fired from her job and cannot land another because potential employers are put off when they do a web search for her. Another was a man in the real estate business who was arrested on suspected D.W.I. after an accident but who eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. A third has been sending us polite letters, stopping by the office, and even contacted Google to see what could be done.
Perhaps it matters that each of these requests has come from someone who is white and of at least solid middle-class economic status; perhaps not. But it seems notable that not one has come from a person of color or from any of the many dozens of Latinos whom police stop here on a nearly daily basis. To me at least, it is as if a certain sense of privilege is at play in these requests.
Whether white, well-off people feel entitled to have their pasts scrubbed is not really an issue for us. What is important is that we, like other reputable publications, try faithfully to give account of what happens in the area we cover. Letters to the editor, which we view as the readers’ space, are a part of that mission, as is our writing about drug and alcohol-related arrests and other matters of public safety. They go on the website just like everything else as part of our contract with our readers and subscribers.
More so than print editions of the paper, the web is instantly searchable; the past lingers there for everyone, including those with matters that they or their mothers would like to forget. From time to time it may be necessary to correct something on our website, but we will not go back and change history. Nor should any other newspaper worth its salt. Something happened; we reported it, the record stands.
In the case of the couple about to be married, they had phoned separately to complain after the letter to the editor appeared, and each independently, if unknowingly, admitted to having violated the law. I told them that if they wanted to give their side of the story for publication, we were ready. I wasn’t surprised that they declined.