The hypocrisy of the media

In August last year an 11-year-old school boy took his own life. The boy, who lived in a small Massachusetts community, was in fifth grade at the prestigious Andover School. The local newspaper, the Eagle-Tribune, published a story about the boy’s death but didn’t indicate how he died.

That editorial decision led to a torrent of emails, phone calls and letters to the paper’s editor, William Ketter, who penned a column for the paper’s opinion pages four days after the report on the boy’s death was published.

Mr Ketter’s op-ed piece was a brave piece of writing. He told his readers that his decision not to publish the cause of the boy’s death had been wrong. And, he observed, “Newspapers have long been squeamish about suicide, for the same reason we don’t identify the victims of sex crimes. There’s a traditional social stigma attached to both even though there should not be.”

Now contrast Mr Ketter’s bravery with the timidity shown by our national broadcaster, the ABC, earlier this year when it cut from a film a scene showing a 79-year-old woman putting a plastic bag over her head.

Janine Hosking’s documentary, Mademoiselle and the Doctor, told the story of Lisette Nigot who met Philip Nitshcke and talked about how she might end her own life.

The offending scene was shown in the context of a discussion about the options of suicide that Lisette had considered. The “plastic bag” scene was brief and symbolic. It was not in any sense a pictorial essay in the methodology of death by a plastic bag.

But it was all too much for the presenter of the late night ABC TV program, Compass. The program’s presenter, Geraldine Doogue, cut that scene from airing when she presented the documentary. According to Ms Doogue, she “was straight away concerned about some of the scenes with the so-called ‘plastic bag option’. I can’t remember ever before being so concerned about a sequence in a Compass program … this sequence clearly, in my view, breached our editorial codes and responsibility as a public broadcaster."

Ms Doogue’s views were supported by the managing director of the ABC, Russell Balding, who would not allow Media Watch to show the scene even though, on June 13 this year, it devoted a story to the matter.

Now you might say that there is a clear difference between the Andover school boy case and that involving Mademoiselle and the Doctor. Well in one sense there is - on the one hand we have the pictorial portrayal of a possible method of death, and on the other the failure to publish in print the reason for death.

But a deeper analysis of the two cases reveals a distinct difference in media attitudes’ towards death by suicide. In the case of the Andover school boy, a newspaper was prepared to acknowledge that, as one of its readers put it, “If it is a story, don’t tell me half of it”. In the case of the ABC’s censoring of Mademoiselle and the Doctor, it was an example of the “squeamishness” about which Mr Ketter spoke. The ABC is happy to allow verbal discussion about suicide and even the methods, so long as there is no pictorial display, even a fleeting one.

Mr Ketter was pushing the boundaries in a small community about what the media should say about death, the ABC was retreating from its duty to allow the whole story to be told.

These two cases draw out a much bigger conflict. It’s the hypocrisy of the media, about the portrayal of any form of death other than that by natural causes. In the US, the UK, Australia and numerous other countries, there are detailed guidelines for the media to follow when reporting on suicide. These guidelines are very detailed, right down to the language that can be used to describe a death by suicide. The underlying premise for the guidelines is generally the “copycat theory.” In other words, that there is research which links the reporting of suicide to the number of suicides in a community. Now this research is problematic and ambiguous, but let’s leave that to one side.

The bigger point is this - why is it that there is such “squeamishness”, to use Mr Ketter’s term, about the reporting of suicide? And in particular, the visual portrayal of suicide or death with dignified methods, but much less squeamishness about other methods which cause death - terrorist actions, executions of prisoners or even war.

In fact, journalists and cameramen and women who file footage of shoot outs in war zones are given accolades by their peers, and the public is told that such actions are the very essence of what it means to be the bearer of the news. Yet when the US 60 Minutes program viewed a method of dying with dignity on its program in 1998 it was roundly condemned even by its own peers.

And there have been numerous articles and television programs showing the methods used by suicide bombers.

In the US, a Californian superior court ruled in 2000 that the media should be permitted to witness executions from “the moment the condemned enters the execution chamber through to, and including, the time the condemned is declared dead”.

And there is not a day goes by without a film being shown in a public cinema somewhere in Australia that does not show some form of killing or manner of death. The extraordinarily powerful film Downfall, chronicling the last days of Adolf Hitler, and aired around Australia in cinemas earlier this year, includes a scene where Magda Goebbels kills each of her children by giving them a poison pill as they lay sleeping in their bunks. The camera lingers over this scene.

In none of these cases does the media worry about a “copycat” syndrome.

Perhaps the hypocrisy and double standard over the media's portrayal of euthanasia is linked to reluctance by the media to champion that cause. Take the contrast with the death penalty. The American media’s desire to be allowed to film a prisoner’s last moments, and his or her execution by the state, stems from a sense on the media’s part that it is allowing the community to witness the carrying out of an act of “justice”.

But suicide to the media is, even today, always taboo. It can never be justified - even if the person who ends their life chooses it rationally as an option. Even if the individual concerned elects to die by suicide rather than lingering on into a twilight world of pain and suffering. The media will have none of the great enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s observation that when “life has become a burden both courage and prudence should engage us to rid ourselves at once of existence”.

It is time that there were more journalists, editors and media proprietors who were prepared to follow Mr Ketter’s lead and admit they are wrong in their double standards about the portrayal of death.

This is not to say that our community needs to be inundated with a daily diet of ghoulishness or sadistic voyeurism. But it is to say that when Geraldine Doogue and the ABC refuse to show the fleeting image of an elderly woman voluntarily putting a plastic bag over her head, while sanctioning the pictorial portrayal of suicide bombings, war zone footage and films which contain images of people blowing their brains out or jumping off rooftops to their death, there is something wrong with our media.