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Busted! in Austin - New Weekly Rag -

Friday, June 19, 2009

Kristi says:

Last week, Dan came back to the office with the latest copy of Busted! in Austin - a weekly publication full of pictures of mug shots of people recently arrested. I've seen this rag at various gas stations but haven't wanted to pay $1 to anyone who was profiting off of the misfortunes of others. (At first, I thought it was free, given its shoddy appearance, but then noticed its cheeky warning, "It's not free, unless you want to be in the next issue!")

A couple of my friends have asked me if it is legal for this paper to publish all these mugshots. Unfortunately, it is legal as mug shots are public records. Mr. Ward has included a disclaimer in his little project: "All suspects appearing in Busted! In Austin are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. All information and photos presented in Busted! In Austin are obtained from public documents and other public sources including police affidavits and court documents." You can bet, however, that he won't later publish the names and photos of folks in the paper that were later acquitted at trial or had their charges dismissed.

Jordan Smith of the Austin Chronicle reports that its founder, J. Martin Ward "considers the project something of a social equalizer – the face of crime, he says, isn't homogeneous. " I find that interesting, as my first thought while flipping through the pages was, "Why are they only featuring the poor and minorities?" I've seen several mug shots, both as a prosecutor and defense attorney, and not everyone looks awful like the majority of ones in here.

Busted! In Austin reminds me of COPS - I've always thought that show was a big F-You to the lower class. You never see white-collar criminals getting arrested on there and they always seem to feature police patrolling in impoverished areas.

What about the rich kids who get arrested in Westlake? Will we be seeing their mugshots? And, if Mr. Ward wants to be a "social equalizer," his time would be better volunteering with Austin's young people living in poverty, educating them about both the law and other matters.

Dan says: I had a few thoughts on Busted!, too, but I didn't really want to give a rag like this two entries on the blog, so we've got our first-ever joint post.

In the issue that I picked up, there's a letter from someone who makes a lot of the same points that Kristi made up there, and I thought that Ward's response to it stank of the sort of lazy, cowardly nonsense that deserved a good calling out:

 
Busted! In Austin always values the voice of dissent. Busted! In Austin is proud to exercise our 1st amendment rights in reporting what we feel is newsworthy.

A good way to spot when someone is trying to play the martyr when they're being called out on their reprehensible behavior is when they try to hide their tacky behavior behind the Bill of Rights. Yes, you've got the right to publish this crap. The criticism isn't that you're breaking the law, it's that you're being an a**hole. The dimestore Larry Flynt pose in response to people saying, "hey, what you're doing is shameful and mean-spirited" is disingenuous. No one's trying to silence you. They're just telling you that you're a crappy person. That's our First Amendment right.

 
It may seem like exploitation from your point of view, but from our point of view, we are reporting crime we think is newsworthy, evidenced by the paper's popularity.

The paper's alleged popularity (you'll notice that issue 6, which is the one I picked up, has exactly one paid ad) isn't the arbiter of newsworthiness, and I suspect that Ward knows this, too. If anything that people were willing to plunk a buck down on the counter for at a gas station was automatically the news, then Batboy would be our firm’s newest client. “I’m validated by people’s lower instincts!” isn’t exactly a convincing defense. He should have just typed, "Screw you, I wanna make money", and left it at that. This act is embarrassing.

Furthermore, the "we are reporting crime" line betrays the fact that he doesn't know what he's talking about. He's not reporting crime. He's reporting arrests. There's a difference. I reviewed the DWI arrest tape of a client the other day who had her charges dismissed before she was even out of jail. There was no probable cause and no reason to believe that she was driving while intoxicated - the judge grasped this fact very quickly and dismissed the case about as soon as it was brought to his attention. So no crime was committed, but her picture would still be eligible to run in Busted!, free of all context and devoid of any facts, except maybe if her hair looked good or not in the photo.

Which really busts a hole in the lame “newsworthy” argument Ward hides behind. Look at the paper, which groups people as "Busted Beauties", "Heavenly Hair", and "Old Farts". If Ward really wants to pretend that he's got the moral high ground of offering news to the community, I'd sure love to hear him explain exactly how worthy a goal it is to inform Austinites that some pretty girls or some dudes with long beards got arrested this week. Otherwise, geez, it just looks like you're full of crap. What I don’t understand is why he cares about pretending like he’s doing anything other than cashing in by making fun of vulnerable people going through the worst time of their lives. Who’s he trying to win an argument with?

If you're going to be a shameful, eploitative scumbag, Ward, at least be an honest one.

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