This week, I read “Before You Publish a Rape Victim’s Name…” from the Ethics section and “Can Suicide Coverage Lead to Copycats?” from the Taste & Sensitivity section. I chose these two articles because both these issues are red flags in a journalism newsroom, and writers and editors often aren’t sure how to approach stories related to these subjects — if at all.
When it comes to rape, many people who have not been close to the experience, including journalists, have considered arguments for publishing victims’ names. By keeping the victims nameless and faceless, aren’t we making the story less real and doing them even more harm? Kelly McBride, a member of the Ethics Faculty at the Poynter Institute, spoke with a number of rape victims, crisis counselors and nurses, and she found the answer was overwhelmingly “no.”
Even those who were familiar with journalistic practice and who realized that preserving victims’ anonymity would likely lead to a lack of empathy from readers were still very much against providing names and details. This is an important fact for journalists to realize before they campaign for full disclosure in news stories.
Rather, McBride says, the goal of publications should be to portray rapes more accurately. First of all, most rape victims are children. Statistics are thrown out such as “650,000 women a year are victims of rape,” but in actuality it’s 300,000 women and 350,000 girls, which is horrible. Secondly, the majority of victims are raped by someone they know, and usually it happens through the use of manipulation or incapacitation through drugs or alcohol.
Newspapers almost always give more inches and prominence to the sensational rape stories: the ones involving violence or kidnapping. Typical rape stories are assigned to the briefs section. This dichotomy leaves the public generally uninformed about the true nature of rape.
The same can be said of suicide stories. According to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the majority of suicides are sensationalized and mislead readers about typical suicide cases.
Most people who commit suicide were depressed, whether that fact was known to family members or not. In Jamieson’s study of suicide stories in the New York Times, however, only about 7 percent of stories mentioned a history of mental illness. Instead, the stories were sensationalized, often being given flashy or romantic headlines and describing in detail how the person committed suicide.
Excessive detail leads to another, more important problem than public ignorance: the possibility of copycats. News stories in Vienna about an increasing number of people jumping in front of subway cars to commit suicide were extensive and graphic. People who had been contemplating suicide read the details in the papers and decided to try the same method. When social scientists observed this trend, they notified the newspapers. When reporting on the suicides then dropped, there were 80 percent fewer attempts.
A number of public health organizations released recommendations in 2001 for reporters covering suicide. The guidelines urge reporters to avoid mentioning the method of suicide in the headline, avoid prominent or repeated reporting on an individual suicide, avoid detailed descriptions of the method and avoid romanticizing the act of suicide or suggesting that such acts are the inexplicable acts of otherwise happy and normal individuals. However, that same year the Annenberg Public Policy Center interviewed 61 reporters and 15 editors who had reported on acts of suicide, and it found no awareness of the guidelines. During my two years at the Alligator we covered student suicides a number of times, and I had no idea the recommendations existed, and I’m fairly sure the other editors didn’t, either.
What’s important to remember about the touchy topics of rape and suicide is that journalists should try to do no harm. Generally, we do go for the more sensational stories and we do use the more romantic headlines because it’s proven that that’s what people like to read. I don’t think ordinary, albeit accurate, stories portraying rape and suicide will ever be given the prominence of more high-profile and atypical cases because first and foremost, newspapers try to draw in readers. Many times I would say that this method of getting people to read more stories is fine, because we all know we’d rather read an interesting story than a run-of-the-mill one about the same topic. However, these sensitive cases are instances where I have to disagree on the method. Both rape and suicide are very sensitive topics, not just for the victims but also for relatives and friends, and journalists can have no idea what it’s like unless they’ve experienced it. I still don’t think anonymous stories indicative of the norm will be given the same number of inches or the same prominence in a paper as the sensational stories. But if nothing else except to be tactful, I would recommend that journalists at least stop romanticizing the stories they do print and refrain from providing more detail than what’s needed.
