I enjoy traipsing through police-blotter coverage of yesteryear, and I especially linger over panty thefts, public nudity, and other embarrassing revelations.

When I post such stories here or on Facebook, I’ll redact both victims and suspects. I figure that the initial public shame was enough.

When I began my journalism career over 40 years ago, newspapers routinely printed the names of victims and suspects, even in sexual assault crimes.

Things are different now.

Gone are the days when newspapers, those paragons of papery veracity, were unabashed in their inky declarations of guilt and victimhood. Once merely suspected, suspects found themselves as infamous as a peacock at a penguin gathering, and the victim, well, became no less a public spectacle.

The presumption of innocence was soaked in the cold ink of print, wrung dry by the iron press of public opinion. There was a crude democracy to it, a collective societal reckoning — the bitter taste of a public pillory distilled into newsprint.

Contrast that with the pusillanimous journalism of today, where the specter of libel looms large, where delicate sensibilities are swaddled in the gauzy shroud of anonymity.

Today’s scribes, armed with their stylish quills and wary of wielding their words as swords, tip-toe gingerly on the thin ice of legal ramifications.

The suspects remain vague, ghostly apparitions in a twilight world, named only when their crimes possess a certain grotesque grandeur that ignites public curiosity.

We’ve traded in our broadsheets of brazen disclosure for a more cautious, considerate news dissemination. The query is: Does this new order protect the innocent, or does it merely cushion the fall of the guilty? Is it a mark of progression or simply the shrinking violet of a culture too timid to bare its foibles?
The answer, dear reader, is as elusive as the names we no longer print.

As for the media, the printing presses roll on, now seemingly more in the business of whispering secrets than shouting truths.