New York Times 'Outed' Sandusky Rape Victim

The New York Times is drawing flak in media circles over its transgressing a canon of journalistic ethics by identifying one of the alleged rape victims of Jerry Sandusky, not by name, but by supplying so much detail that anyone who cared to could identify the individual using the internet.

Dylan Stableford of Yahoo News writes:

The Patriot-News, the newspaper that broke the story of the child sex-abuse case against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, has been careful not to reveal the names of the alleged victims in its reporting.

But David Newhouse, editor of the Patriot-News, is livid that the New York Times revealed too much information about one of the alleged victims in a story last week.

Newhouse says that a Times' piece ("For a Reported Penn State Victim, a Search for Trust") written by Nare Schweber and Jo Becker published Wednesday is "so detailed," a simple Google search of its contents "results in the young man's name within seconds."

Newhouse's specific charge:

The story quotes his next-door neighbor and names his neighborhood. It describes the detailed circumstances of a car accident which was reported in local papers at the time. It says he liked to wear tie-dyed socks. None of these details have anything to do with why or how the boy was allegedly befriended and then assaulted over several years by Sandusky. They only serve to make the boy easily identifiable.

You could call the anonymity maintained in the story a polite fiction, but there is nothing polite about it.