tagged: Decency, Featured, Media

Covering Suicide: How Should Media Handle It?

Posted by Patrick in Anxiety & Depression, Breaking News, Decency, News & Media

Two high profile stories have sparked an age-old debate about how to handle the topic of suicide.

The first occurred on Wednesday — of all days, the first day of Black History Month — when news broke that Don Cornelius, creator of the legendary Soul Train, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The discovery was made after police were summoned to his home at 4:00am to investigate reports of a gunshot.

Thursday morning, Cornelius’s son, Tony, who had worked with his dad, appeared on CBS This Morning to talk about his father’s contributions to television, music and race relations, as well as his health and state of mind shortly before his death.

As a general rule, if it’s not a celebrity, or at least a well-known person, the media does not report on suicides. There is a fear, albeit somewhat irrational, that mentioning a suicide will cause someone who’s just on the fence from being “over the edge” to follow suit. For some viewers in our celebrity-obsessed culture, details of how a celebrity died is as important, if not more so, than the death itself.

The exception to this unwritten rule is if it is a case of murder/suicide or if it is a case of a suicide that happens in so public a place as to be newsworthy beyond the action itself. This brings us to the second story, which happened on Thursday here in Charleston, when an apparently distraught man drove his SUV onto the Ravenel bridge, then turned sideways in the middle of traffic and, according to police, indicated he wanted to harm himself. Scribbled across the windows of his SUV were messages like “Happy Now,” “Stay Away” and “Game Over.”

This was a private individual, but his actions wound up being a very public event, causing police to eventually shut down all lanes of the Ravenel Bridge, a major artery between Charleston and neighboring Mount Pleasant, backing up traffic for hours and creating a cascading nightmare across the area’s interstates and highways; in some cases, what would normally be a 20-minute commute turned into a bumper-to-bumper 60+ minute fiasco. Police reported a few accidents in the resulting traffic snarls, while other motorists were spotted pulled to the side of the road with their hoods up, the result of engines overheating or running out of gas.

Local stations, naturally, were on the air covering the unfolding drama on the bridge, and took live feeds from various South Carolina Department of Transportation cameras. On at least two different occasions, a camera on the bridge captured the man driving across lanes of the bridge and slamming into the barrier that fortunately held firm, preventing his car from careening over the bridge into the Cooper River below.

Emotions ran high on both stories. Some criticized the media for reporting that Cornelius’s death was the result of suicide. The death itself should have been enough to report. Here in the Lowcountry, people’s reactions were all over the place: they were angry that “some guy” would hold up traffic at the busiest time of the day, until his identity was eventually reported, at which point they were mad at the media for not respecting the “poor, troubled man’s” privacy. Ironically, on Friday, when it was reported that the most the man was likely to face for the drama on the bridge was a ticket for careless driving, the sense of injustice for those who’d been trapped in gridlock for hours turned their reaction back to anger at the man himself.

When I saw Cornelius the story on my Twitter feed, I clicked a link and was taken to TMZ.com, which mentioned suicide as part of the headline. When I retweeted the story, I changed the tweet to remove the suicide reference. Likewise, when I posted the story on this blog’s Facebook fan page, I removed the reference to suicide in that headline, too.

It’s one thing to have the suicide mentioned in the story, which I don’t necessarily have a problem with; I just didn’t feel it needed to be mentioned in the headline itself.

Several have asked me how I’d have handled the bridge story had it been up to me. (It wasn’t.)

First, I’d have reported right away the reason the bridge was shut down. People who are suddenly being turned away from their only convenient route home have a right to know what was happening. (My station did report from the start that there was a man apparently threatening to harm himself and that police were trying to talk him down.)

Second, I’d have stayed with coverage until the drama was over, alerting people to the situation and helping them avoid the worst of the traffic tie-ups. (My station did this as well, staying with the story from about 3:45pm through the end of our 6:00pm news.)

Third, I’d have avoided reporting the name of the suspect for as long as possible. The man, it turned out, had been a former member of a local volunteer rescue group, and was known by a few of the staff at my station. They actually held off reporting his identity until the police took him into custody.

The really interesting part of that, however, particularly considering how angry viewers seemed to be about his name being released at all, is that it was viewers who were naming him on our station’s Facebook page before we did. I’m not sure how an average person would possibly figure out, from a photo of a vehicle that shows its license plate, to whom the vehicle was registered. Maybe all of us have that power waiting, but if we do, I’m completely unaware of such an ability.

The point is that for the viewers who were mad that we’d publish the man’s identity at any point, it was other viewers — not us — who first made his name public.

I think that once police make it public, there’s little chance that it won’t be reported. The real question in this situation, though, is how long should the media wait to report something (after they have confirmed it, of course) that the public has already begun making public?

I don’t see that it did any public good in and of itself to release the man’s name. But once it’s out there, it’s out there. Especially when members of the very same public we’re trying to serve are the ones who are putting it out there.

And if the man himself had any expectation of privacy, that would have been dashed immediately when he chose one of the most public manners conceivable in this area for either ending life or making a show of the attempt to do so.

YOUR TURN:
How would you have handled these two stories?