"Suspect"

In a report on the local news last night on WTMJ, the reporter did something again that I've occasionally noticed, but which freshly struck me when I saw it again: she used the word "suspect" to refer not to a particular person of whom the authorities bore suspicion, but a person acting in a clearly criminal manner, e.g., "So-and-so was at home and heard a noise in their living room. Going to investigate, they saw a burglar in their home. The suspect was stuffing the family possessions into a backpack." Tonight's was a pretty clear-cut case of this.

The ill which this portends, and which I hope comes back to bite these stations in some form of libel action, is that it means they are re-defining the word "suspect" for their viewers to mean "perpetrator" so that when they describe an innocent person as a "suspect," they are in fact stating literally and explicitly that that person is guilty.

I know this seems like an exaggerated claim. Surely, it must be merely implicit that they are being called guilty, right? Wrong. Consider how this plays out in the form of a debate:

P: You ruined my life. You told everybody I committed this crime.

D: No we didn't. We never said that.

P: Well, that was clearly what you meant. That's what everyone understood.

D: We're not responsible for how our reports may be misinterpreted. We clearly stated you were only a suspect. Look it up. It means you didn't necessarily do anything. It means just that some people think you might have done it.

P: But that's not what it means to your viewers. It's not how you use the word yourself. On other newscasts you've said someone definitely did something, and then you call the person who did it the "suspect." When you use the word in that way, you give it the meaning of someone definitely guilty. A reasonable person, familiar with the way you use language, would understand you to be saying that I was definitely guilty. And that includes you: you knew what you were saying when you said it.