In the wake of last week’s fatal crash on Maui of a sightseeing helicopter, a woman calling from San Francisco wanted to know if her friend from California was one of the six dead passengers. She waited patiently while the
In the wake of last week’s fatal crash on Maui of a sightseeing helicopter, a woman calling from San Francisco wanted to know if her friend from California was one of the six dead passengers.
She waited patiently while the latest information was checked. For her, the news from the other end of the phone line was good.
There was audible relief in her voice when she learned the victims were all from New Jersey, Texas or Hawai’i (the pilot). She’d been worried because her friend, she said, had told her she was going on one of the helicopter junkets.
Like the San Francisco lady, most folks aren’t the survivors or friends of people who die tragically. News of such events-whether a helicopter going down in Hawai’i or, as happened this week, a supersonic airliner crash snuffing 113 lives in France-can be shocking and depressing. But only the loved ones of the victims are truly affected.
Their emotions should and can be considered by the news media when reporting the sad details of premature deaths. There was a time when newspapers and the electronic media could build walls between themselves and news consumers. Just report the carnage and don’t worry about the sensitivities of the people left behind, some editors and reporters believed.
But times have changed. With the abundance of news and sources, people can be affected more intensely by what they read, hear and see. The purveyors of that information must think carefully about the impact of their reporting.
A recent example was The GI’s coverage of the death in a Honolulu hotel room of a Kaua’i man. Police initially said Stephen Bogardus had been stabbed to death July 18. But within 24 hours, investigators were saying he may have died naturally, although they weren’t ruling out homicide. For a followup article, a doctor told The GI how the death could have been the result of an artery bursting through the skin of Bogardus’ neck (later confirmed by an autopsy) as a result of his treatments for cancer.
To describe what the artery failure would be like, the physician used an analogy that, if it had been printed, might have been upsetting to Bogardus’ survivors. So it was edited out of the story.
One person’s provocative news bite is another person’s painful memory. Whenever possible, we’ll avoid piling on the misery.
TGI editor Pat Jenkins can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 227) or pjenkins@pulitzer.net
