As we noted in Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader? something, something I attributed to being so #woke and #BlackLivesMatter and politically correct that the editors did not want to show the picture of a black man accused of murder, Juanyah Jamar Clay, because he is black. If there was another reason, I couldn’t think of it, because the Herald-Leader was willing to expend the bandwidth to include a useless article illustration of crime scene tape.
Well, Mr Clay has been apprehended, and, once again, the paper decided against posting his photo on their website:
Lexington teen arrested, charged with murder 1 day after police name him as a suspect
By Jeremy Chisenhall | March 31, 2021 | 8:55 AM EDT | Updated 9:07 AM EDT
A Lexington homicide suspect was arrested Tuesday after police publicly identified him just one day earlier.Juanyah J Clay, from the LEX18 website. Click to enlarge.
Juanyah Jamar Clay, 19, was arrested and booked at the Lexington-Fayette County Detention Center Tuesday evening after police said he was wanted for the alleged murder of 26-year-old Bryan D. Greene. Greene was found shot to death in January inside his residence at Eastridge Apartments, police said.
Clay was concealing three handguns on him at the time of his arrest, according to an arrest citation. He also had nearly 3.7 ounces of marijuana, more than 10 Percocet pills, cash and a digital scale with him. The officer who filled out Clay’s arrest citation said all the items were indicative of drug trafficking.
According to jail records, Clay faces eight charges: murder, carrying a concealed weapon, giving an officer false identifying information, receiving a stolen gun, tampering with a prison monitoring device, trafficking in less than 8 ounces of marijuana, trafficking in opiates, and violating conditions of release.
Clay had previously been charged with burglary and violating conditions of release in 2019, according to court records. That case remained open in court, but Clay had been released on a $15,000 surety bond.
Translation: Mr Clay is a bad dude!
He was already out on bond, so he was already facing criminal charges. He knew that carrying illegal drugs, and a firearm — in this case, three handguns — and tampering with an ankle monitor were all additional crimes, but he did it anyway.
As in yesterday’s article, the current one has an illustration, albeit a different one, of a Lexington police officer stringing yellow crime scene tape. The Herald-Leader obviously had no concern with using the bandwidth for a photo, but, once again, chose not to use Mr Clay’s picture. The illustration added exactly nothing to the story, where using Mr Clay’s photo would have qualified as newsworthy. Given that I had notified both the herald-Leader in general and the article author, Jeremy Chisenhall, specifically, by Twitter, of the lapse of responsible journalism here, it doesn’t seem likely that this was a simple omission, but a deliberate decision.
I have previously noted that we should simply stop printing the dead-trees editions of newspapers, but if newspapers really want to survive into the digital age, they need to do something really radical like practice journalism. The Lexington Herald-Leader is failing to do so.