In our society, it often happens that the media that reported the truth has to take civil and criminal responsibility for defamation or violation of personality rights. As a result, the principle of anonymous reporting tends to be enforced by law. However, in other societies, this issue is left to the realm of journalistic ethics. France, which established the principle of presumption of innocence, is the same.
It is not that the provisions of the law are absent. The Free Press Act of 1881 prohibits the disclosure of the identity of minor victims. When reporting on serious or controversial issues that could result in minors being brought to court, or when they want to protect their sources, the media will report without revealing their real names.
On the other hand, there are no strict legal provisions regarding portrait rights of persons involved in judicial cases. It just prohibits posting images of people in handcuffs or in police custody. After being convicted, their identities can be disclosed. However, if there is a risk that a minor victim will be recognized due to the disclosure of the identity of the perpetrator, anonymous reporting is the rule. In addition, according to the principle of presumption of innocence, most media outlets blur the image of the suspect or accused before indictment.
However, anonymity creates a desire in some members of the public to know the identity of the suspect. Occasionally, netizens who have successfully identified the suspect flock to the suspect’s SNS account to criticize them, and sometimes protest against the media, which does not disclose their identity, saying that they value only the human rights of the perpetrator, not the victim.
Of course, the principle of anonymous reporting is not always followed. A Netflix documentary about the 1984 unsolved abduction and murder case. <누가 어린 그레고리를 죽였나?>As shown in , the real name of four-year-old Gregory Villemain is known all over France. At the time, the media was in a hurry to make a ‘business’ with stimulating reports full of speculation, ignoring the principle of presumption of innocence and the protection regulations for minor victims.
In order to solve the difficult problem of ‘anonymity of criminal-related persons’, some media outlets, especially major local daily newspapers, are working to update the principles of crime reporting. It is to think about various ways to prepare for the possibility that a completely wrong person is misunderstood as the culprit due to anonymous reporting, or that negative perceptions of a particular race, country, or community may occur. An example is ‘Ouest France’, the largest daily newspaper in France, and ‘Labouille du Nord’, a daily newspaper in northern France.
Even if individual news outlets prepare an ethical charter for reporting, there are times when it is difficult to judge what principles to follow when reporting on a case that has gained national fame. In this case, there are organizations that draw consensus. The ‘Association of Judicial Professional Press’ (APJ, founded in 1887), which was joined by about 200 legal journalists in Paris, is such an example.
One of the oldest journalist organizations in France, the Association of Professional Journalists, is a group that strongly opposes the media’s attention-grabbing real-name reports and insists on strong victim protection. In the 2005 case of the Angers Pedophile Network, in which 45 children were sexually abused, APJ proposed using the names of adults corresponding to their birth dates instead of the names of the victims to protect the identity of minors.
On the other hand, criminal identities are disclosed to put an end to groundless rumors floating around on social networks. Three Kurds were killed in a shooting in Paris in December 2022, which sparked outrage among Kurdish migrants. At the time, the suspect was a 69-year-old white male, but rumors circulated that he was responsible for Turkiye, and the name of the culprit was also misrepresented. So APJ revealed his real name.
It seems that it is not easy in any society to be free from the dilemma of anonymous reporting. However, when anonymity is in the realm of journalistic ethics rather than legally mandated, the related discussion seems to be richer.