Brian Dickerson

Detroit Free Press Columnist

It's certainly been a rough week for David Dao.

Sunday, he was dragged off his United Airlines flight to make way for an affiliated airline employee who needed the seat. A fellow passenger's video of the incident broadcast the hapless Kentucky physician's humiliation around the world.

Two days later — having done absolutely nothing to exploit or amplify the media sensation United's spectacularly bad judgment had unleashed — Dao was dragged to the center of the digital main stage yet again, this time by reporters who exhumed a 13-year-old felony conviction to insinuate that maybe, just maybe, the brutalized airline passenger had done something to bring Sunday's debacle on himself.

"Man removed from United flight had a troubled past," read the headline that appeared on the home page of this newspaper's website and a few thousand others around the world.

The accompanying story — first published by Louisville's Courier Journal, which like the Free Press is part of the USA TODAY Network — identified Dao, who'd spent the last decade residing with his wife in a small Kentucky community near Fort Knox, as a Vietnamese-trained pulmonary disease specialist who'd spent five years on probation after being convicted of writing fraudulent prescriptions in 2004. Medical licensing board records cited by the Courier-Journal (and the news service accounts that quickly followed) suggested that Dao had written the prescriptions in an attempt to ingratiate himself with an employee in whom he was sexually interested.

This was old territory for the Courier Journal, which had covered Dao's legal and disciplinary travails 13 years earlier. But it was news to the tens of millions who knew Dao only as an abused airline passenger.

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Dots, unconnected

Those who read far enough discovered that Dao had no subsequent arrests and that he had succeeded in regaining his license to practice medicine in 2015.

As for any suggestion that Dao's "troubled past" had played any part in United's decision to evict him from the airline seat he had purchased and haul him bodily from the aircraft ... well, there wasn't any.

Still, the inference was unmistakable: This "innocent victim" was no angel.

United Airlines executives, who've spent the better part of two days hinting that Dao's belligerence had somehow provoked his rough treatment, must have marveled at the subtlety of the smear.

So maybe the incident that had left Dao with a criminal record was an anomaly, an episode of aberrant behavior that had apparently not been repeated since George W. Bush was president. But just look at all the Google key words conjured by the exhumation of the doctor's conviction: Immigrant. Drugs. Felony. Sexual advances.

And now, "troubled past."

Go ahead, Google it: David Dao troubled past.

By Wednesday morning, I got about 490,000 hits.

Skepticism without judgment

After spending the better part of four decades in newspaper newsrooms, I can easily trace the arc of journalistic reflexes — many of them admirable — that prompted good reporters and editors to double down on Dr. Dao's humiliation.

Whenever something blows up on social media nowadays — a police shooting, a compromising photograph, a White House press secretary making dubious distinctions between homicidal dictators — responsible journalists start asking questions:

Does the "smoking gun" video or sound bite that has taken the Internet by storm tell the whole story? Are we missing some critical context that would put the incident in a dramatically different light? What happened just before the videographer turned on her cell phone, or just after the reporter turned off her microphone?

So it was with the video of David Dao being dragged before his fellow airline passengers like a slaughtered animal. It sure looked as though United had overreacted — but what had prompted such a seemingly egregious show of force? Had the passenger threatened to vandalize the aircraft, maybe punched a flight attendant? Was he drunk? High? Mentally ill? Had he been cited for disruptive behavior on other flights?

These were not only fair questions, but vital ones.

The problem arises when the search for relevant contextual data turns up details that are not so relevant — like Dao's criminal record.

Once upon a time, when only a handful of companies or wealthy individuals could afford printing presses or radio and TV affiliates, a handful of editors could effectively decided what was fit to print or broadcast, which details were relevant and which were merely titillating.Today, every teen with a smartphone is a publisher — and even among professional journalists, the reflex is to let every data point that's been vetted for accuracy fight for its own relevance.

So while we know of no evidence that David Dao's 13-year-old criminal record had anything whatsoever to do with his abuse by one of the world's largest airlines, who can say with certainty?

What we know for sure is that there was an arrest, a conviction, a probationary sentence, a suspension. Even today, there's a paper trail. We have the documents.

Are they relevant? Do they shed any light on what happened to Dao on Sunday? Is it even fair to bring them up now?

But that's not up to us, anymore. We report; you decide.

Where the buck stops

What self-serving nonsense.

So what if Dao's "troubled past" was doomed to resurface somewhere eventually? So what if some aggrieved patient, anti-immigrant website or savvy public relations representative eager to redeem his embattled airline's reputation would have found a way to leak the unfortunate physician's criminal past into the blogosphere, where it could replicate in the fertile slipstream of Sunday's sensational video?

Individual journalists still have agency and judgment, and we should not hesitate to exercise either in the interest of fairness and simple decency.

Because every one of us has a "troubled past," and it shouldn't become headline news just because some overzealous airline security thugs decided to give your seat to someone else.

Contact Brian Dickerson: bdickerson@freepress.com.