Oops, sorry. The Gazette’s headline is “UI police detective tells Iowa City man to ‘leave my family alone’ after harassment.”
Headlines frame stories — in the age of social media, are all many people read — and, unlike the Daily Iowan’s piece, this frame only tells the story of the prosecution and the police.
The ledes of the two pieces tell two very different stories. Compare the two. Here’s Trish Mehaffy’s from The Gazette:
A University of Iowa police detective said an Iowa City man created a social media profile of him using personal information, including his spouse’s name, and used “hateful discriminating language” that he would never use.
The first three paragraphs are all from the detective’s “victim impact statement.”
Meanwhile, here’s Emma Jane’s lede in The Daily Iowan:
Daniel Kauble was sentenced Thursday to two years of probation and six months of suspension — meaning he will serve jail time if he violates probation — for operating a parody account on X, formerly known as Twitter, impersonating University of Iowa Police Department detective Ian Mallory.
Simply regurgitating police reports, court filings and victim impact statements is stenography, not journalism. I don’t care how you feel about this series of events, acknowledging Kauble’s Twitter account was a parody is key to understanding what’s happening here, and “satire” or “parody” do not appear in The Gazette story.
(The Press-Citizen, if it ever covers this, will do it at least a week late with a clickbate headline such as “Who Harassed a UIPD Detective?” but it’s not worth criticizing.)