Editorial Choices Have Consequences

To the editor: Last week, this publication covered a story in a way that caused tangible, measurable harm to a real person. Because the editorial choices that produced that harm are still visible on the front page of its website, days later, as of this writing, I am submitting this letter as part of the public record of those failures.

On June 23, Kemar Downer, an eight-year resident of this island, was attacked from behind while making a delivery on South Beach Street. He has no prior criminal record. His attorney argued self-defense in court — a claim the judge took seriously enough to set bail at a fraction of what the district attorney requested. A motion to dismiss has since been filed, arguing that Mr. Downer’s constitutional right to a prompt arraignment was violated. A second attorney, speaking directly to the Current, said the surveillance video “completely casts doubt all over the police report” and raised serious questions about whether sufficient probable cause even existed to charge Mr. Downer at all.

Instead of telling the story it should have told, the Current buried it in favor of a more sensational framing of events, while also choosing to publish a mugshot and a story built around the word “stabbing” across its website and social media platforms. The language shaped the entire frame of coverage before the full picture was known, before the video had been fully examined, and before anyone had established who initiated the altercation. The roles of “victim” and “alleged assailant” were assigned based on assumption, and that framing is not the passive act this publication would have you believe — every word choice, every image, every omission points somewhere, and this coverage pointed readers directly toward a conclusion before a single fact had been verified.

For a publication that positions itself as reporting from the scene within minutes, the timeline here is damning. South Beach Street has at least two surveillance cameras visible on that street. This is a community where footage of a public incident involving known people circulates privately within hours — sometimes faster. And yet it took the Current the better part of 24 hours to obtain and publish a single version of that surveillance video. That is not a logistical footnote. It is a direct reflection of how much investigative effort was applied to a story that was already out there — framed, amplified, and doing damage — before anyone went looking for what actually happened.

The consequences were visible in the comment section that followed. “Usual suspects in stabbing incidents.” “Time for another ICE visit.” “Hope Nantucket is enjoying their migrants.” These comments were not anomalies — they were the most engaged comments on the post, with hundreds of likes. Deleting explicit slurs while leaving coded racist language with hundreds of likes is not moderation. It is a policy decision, and publications are responsible for what their policy decisions produce. Again, these comments did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from a headline, a mugshot, and a framing that told readers what to think before the facts were pursued. And even after seeing these comments and how heated the comment thread had become on social media, this publication chose to publish Mr. Downer’s residential address. Publishing this man’s home address was not an editorial oversight. It was negligence, and it compounds every other failure in this chain.

The Current describes itself online as delivering the news “unbiased and unfiltered.” As of this Sunday, the front page of nantucketcurrent.com still features Mr. Downer’s mugshot — six days after the incident, after a motion to dismiss was filed on constitutional grounds, after a second attorney publicly questioned whether probable cause was even sufficient, and after the surveillance video contradicted the framing of the original coverage. That is not unbiased — it is a choice. And it is a choice still being actively made.

This publication made specific, accountable choices that failed this man at every turn — the mugshot, the framing, the address, the comment section. And this community absorbed those choices and acted on them, as comment sections always do when the framing tells them what to feel before the facts arrive. The Current is responsible for the editorial choices it made, the way it framed this story, and the environment it chose to continue hosting on its own platform. That responsibility does not diminish because time has passed or because subsequent coverage has been more measured. The damage was done in the first few hours, and it was done by the choices made by this outlet.

The Nantucket Current must update the original article’s framing to reflect what the evidence actually shows. It must remove the mugshot from its front page and contextualize it within the coverage. It must give the motion to dismiss — a constitutional argument with serious merit — the same prominence and urgency it gave to the word “stabbing.” And it must treat what happens in its comment sections in the hours after a story like this goes live as the editorial priority it is, not an afterthought.

Further, it is clear that if this publication would like to actually be relied upon by this community as an outlet that “delivers the news, stories, and people of Nantucket, unbiased and unfiltered,” there is work that must be done.

Whitnie Clarke-Barrett

Editor’s note: 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