There’s a lot of police lingo that floats in and out of newsrooms. One of these is the word “mugshot,” which as I’m sure you all know is slang for the photo of a person taken at the time of their arrest. They are rarely flattering photos. Over time, for newspaper purposes, the word mugshot has also come to mean any small, tightly cropped photo of a person that we run, regardless of whether the story has to do with crime. It’s just a picture of what they look like.
We run a lot of mugshots, crime-related and not. We ran four this morning on our front page. Two had to do with the increasingly nasty battle in the GOP primary for the 31st Senate seat once held by Ham Horton. The others were the booking photos of the two deputies arrested in Davidson County and charged with second-degree murder in the death of an inmate.
Why do we run mugshots of people charged with crimes? The flip answer is because we can. But that’s wrong. The reasons have to do with the role of a media that is independent of the government and our responsibility to bear witness. It’s not about shaming people. But mugshots—particularly of those charged with crimes—are snapshots, and they give us some inkling into who people are. It’s the newspaper as window and as mirror.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
Now let’s admit that it can be somewhat entertaining to see some mugshots, especially those of celebrities who are hauled in after going on a serious bender, which helps explain the success of The Smoking Gun.
On a more serious note I hope that if the people you picture are later exonerated that you run their pictures as prominently then as well...and if they’re convicted run them even more prominently.
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