Published: Just now
This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer’s.
Two noticed verdicts on the same day – and three people who were sentenced in the district court to life imprisonment.
In these cases, Aftonbladet chose to name the three people: Alexander Rad, father of Tintin, and Johanna Leshem Jansson and Maja Hellman, who were convicted of murdering Tove.
The reason for that is that we judged that there is a public interest in knowing who committed the crimes. Of course, we have weighed this public interest against possible publicity damage and we believe that the public interest prevailed.
All publishing decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. These two are very different in many ways, but there are also a couple of common denominators.
However, it is important to remember that press ethics is independent of law. This means that we the media make our decisions and the courts theirs.
There are many misunderstandings about this, the most common is perhaps the belief that media are not allowed to publish names and pictures of criminals before a verdict. So it is not so. But even if the media and the courts are independent of each other, they have traditionally lived in a kind of symbiosis.
In media ethics if you’re talking about evidence, if you’re going to single out someone as blameworthy, you have to have grounds for it.
The fact that a person has been convicted in a court of law thanks to evidence that was supported and diluted in a legal process obviously carries weight. Therefore, we have often seen the media name criminals only after a verdict has been handed down. As in these two cases.
Read more about how we work with press ethics here.