Addressing Concerns About Our Breaking News Reporting

To our readers: I thank Whitnie Clarke-Barrett for sharing her concerns about our coverage of this incident, and want to respond specifically to several parts of her letter. First, our team responded to the downtown area after hearing a public safety dispatch regarding a person who had been stabbed. We located the scene, took photographs, spoke to witnesses, and we reported what we discovered, as we always do during a breaking news event. As more information was obtained through statements by police and attending the subsequent court hearings, we updated our reporting with additional information and context.

Our reporter, David Creed, utilizing sources he has cultivated through years of reporting on crime on Nantucket, was able to obtain a surveillance video of the incident within 24 hours, which we immediately published. This video provided additional context and information about what happened. To this date, no other publication that has covered the altercation and subsequent stabbing (and there were many publications that reported on it) has obtained that video or any other of the incident, and their coverage lacks the nuance and totality which we provided to our readers. David Creed also interviewed an uninvolved defense attorney to share his perspective and expertise on the case, the self-defense claim, and the motion to dismiss involving constitutional claims.

We used the word “stabbing” in our headline because, objectively, that is what happened. When we saw a person on the ground, bleeding, and being attended to by EMTs, we naturally referred to him as the “victim” in our initial reporting, as well as an “alleged assailant” who used the knife. Those words were not based on assumptions, but on going to the scene, observing, and speaking to witnesses. As we learned more about the incident, including statements made at Mr. Downer’s arraignment and through the surveillance video we obtained, we reported them objectively.

The facts that Mrs. Clarke-Barrett’s letter mentions - that Mr. Downer had no prior criminal record, the self-defense claim, the bail amount, the motion to dismiss - were all reported prominently by the Current moments after they became known during the arraignment.

Regarding how quickly we were able to obtain the video, and whether it was circulating privately in the community before we were able to publish it, I would argue that obtaining such a surveillance recording within 24 hours of an active law enforcement investigation is extremely fast - perhaps faster than we have ever obtained such footage in previous incidents. Had this video been circulating as Mrs. Clarke-Barrett suggests, it would have surfaced on social media or in another publication. To this day, it has not, and the Current’s posts that include that video are the only ones in which a recording of the altercation has been publicly disclosed.

We acknowledge that Mrs. Clarke-Barrett makes an important point about the comments made by other people in response to social media posts by the Current about the incident. Many of these comments were vile and racist. I personally spent hours reading through thousands of comments and deleting hundreds of them from our various social media pages. As we deleted them, unfortunately, more would crop up, and many more hours were devoted to addressing them. While we feel strongly that free speech and open debate are fundamental, we do not condone racist, hateful, or threatening comments on our social media page, and we apologize to those who saw them before we were able to delete them. We have already taken action to address this situation moving forward by enhancing the comment filter tools available on Instagram and Facebook, and are considering other policy changes with regard to the comment sections on our social media pages as well.

Regarding the publication of Mr. Downer’s mug shot, the Current has published dozens of mug shots of criminal suspects in high-profile cases on Nantucket over the years. For example, see here, here, here, and here. Mr. Downer’s name and mug shot were not published by the Current until Wednesday morning, the day after the incident, when we learned that police had charged him with two counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon causing serious bodily injury, as we have done in other high-profile criminal cases. The headline on our initial story, “Police Respond To Stabbing In Downtown Nantucket,” and our follow-up story “Stabbing Suspect Released On $2,500 Bail, Claims Self Defense During Arraignment,” are straightforward and reflect the evolving nature of a breaking news story.

We have since published several stories focused on the motion to dismiss by Mr. Downer’s attorney, as well as the new charges announced against the man who attacked him on South Beach Street.

We will continue to follow the story and report accurately on how it unfolds.

Jason Graziadei,
Nantucket Current editor-in-chief