A Vermont television station has deleted the online version of a news story that garnered national attention and provoked a barrage of transphobic messages toward a transgender Randolph student and her family.
Links to the original story from Sept. 28 on the website for WCAX now turn up an error message and related social media posts have disappeared. The story’s deletion was first reported by Seven Days.
WCAX’s story quoted a Randolph Union High School volleyball player who objected to a transgender teammate’s use of a school locker room. The story was then cited in media reports by Fox News, the New York Post and Britain’s Daily Mail tabloid.
Roger Garrity, WCAX’s news director, said in an email that he made the decision to pull the story “so that others could not continue to use our reporting to attack people in the transgender community.”
While the story is no longer available online, Garrity said that WCAX had not retracted it, which generally happens when a news outlet no longer stands by the veracity of its reporting. The 2-minute, 41-second report, he said, was “intended to examine an apparent gap in state education policy that pits students against each other.”
“We do hope to further explore that issue in the future,” Garrity said.
Garrity also said that WCAX is “working on a message” to its viewers that acknowledges how the story has been used to attack the transgender teen. “We strongly condemn anyone who uses our journalism to cause harm to others,” he said.
VTDigger reported last week that the family of the transgender student disputed elements of the story and faced significant transphobic messages and online posts following the national media reports. The website for the Orange Southwest Supervisory District was hacked and subsequently disabled by the district.
Layne Millington, superintendent of the Orange Southwest Supervisory District, which includes Randolph Union High School, called WCAX’s story “probably the most irresponsible story I’ve ever seen” in more than three decades working in education.
“It was very one-sided and, unfortunately, when things are one-sided and only presenting one view, it’s predictably going to lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation in terms of how people react to it, which is kind of what happened,” Millington said Wednesday.
Millington estimated that about 150 people had gathered at the high school Tuesday night for the first of two community forums about the issue.
“It was civil,” Millington said. “And I appreciated that an awful lot. I think there were some good ideas that were shared and, hopefully, if nothing else, that got people to think about the broader implications of everything that’s happened here.”
The decision to remove a story, rather than to update or correct it, can be a difficult one, according to Dan Kennedy, a media critic and professor of journalism at Northeastern University.
“When you have a story that’s causing a lot of harm and has very little news value, you don’t really want to leave it in place so that it continues to do harm,” Kennedy said in an interview. “Even if most of the harm that that story can do has already been done. So how do you handle it?”
Still, he said, “I don’t think a complete deletion is the right way to go.”
Kennedy also referred to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which has a directive to “minimize harm.” Kennedy points out to his students that, contrary to popular belief, “it doesn’t mean ‘do no harm.’”
“But what it suggests is, you don’t harm people, unless there’s a public service component to it (or) unless it serves the public interest,” Kennedy said. After learning the facts of the WCAX story, he said, he didn’t believe there was a “good reason” for the harm caused to the transgender student.
