In the past two weeks, we’ve reported the attempted suicide of a former El Paso school trustee after his arrest on bribery and other corruption charges and on the death by suicide of a former El Paso Times publisher.
And we have caught a bit of scolding for it.
A regular but angry reader called us “pigs without lipstick” and a colleague from the El Paso Times simply disapproved saying, “Think of the family.”
The angry comment generated a policy debate here at Newspaper Tree, thankfully a brief one.
At the El Paso Times, the policy of not reporting suicides has been around for over a decade. I never agreed with it when I was there. Actually, I hated it, for a lot of reasons.
In the news industry, newsroom policies about suicide are all over the map.
Newspapers and TV routinely report murders and all sorts of terrible crimes committed by fathers, mothers and children that their fathers, mothers and children certainly suffer when they hear or read about.
When it comes to the guy who kills his wife and kids and then turns the gun on himself, everyone reports that as a murder-suicide.
And what of Columbine High and similar events when kids shoot kids and then shoot themselves?
Naming them and reporting that they died by their own hands violates two old rules: one on not reporting a suicide and the other on not reporting the names of juveniles who commit crimes, another strange taboo.
Of course, you can make the point that murder-suicides are different because there are other victims involved.
We have had teen suicides in El Paso, but the Times doesn’t write about them, though it may report the death.
More than once in my years there, I pitched stories on the subject that were rejected because it would have meant violating the policy directly or indirectly by identifying family members of young people who killed themselves.
But without the initial reporting, there was no way to go back to families and friends for interviews, which would have made any in depth look at the subject on a community basis hard to pull off.
So, the whole subject has been swept under the carpet, by journalists of all people.
It was getting late Friday when I started making calls looking for some other points of view about this.
No one was around at UTEP’s Communication’s Department, but I did find one professor still in his office at UT Austin’s Journalism School, Gene Burd, who has been there since 1972, two years before I graduated there.
He’s been teaching reporting and ethics for more than three decades and acknowledged the industry’s conflict between reporting a suicide and being sensitive to family members.
Not reporting the fact that someone has taken his own life prevents any further examination of the social and personal aspects of suicide, he said.
“There are opportunities where we can all learn more about suicide,” he said. “It’s not verboten any more. Culturally, it’s more out in the open.”
In some countries, and the state of Oregon, medical personnel are allowed to help people take their own in cases of “terminal disease.”
A whole culture has arisen around it, he said.
Then there’s the rising incidence of suicide generally.
“I think there’s a need for more explanations about why this is happening in a society where we’re in contrast with so much of the world’s population where people are having struggles just to live,” Burd said.
He noted that suicide rates are far higher in countries that are wealthy versus poor nations where it is rare.
He also noted that it wasn’t long ago that people shied away from saying – or reporting – that someone died of cancer.
Digging around on the Internet, I found a report from the Centers on Disease Control on a national workshop involving prominent medical experts and journalists in 1994.
It cited the sharp increase suicides, which more than doubled, among 15 to 24 year olds from 1950 through 1990.
It is entitled “Suicide Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide: Recommendations from a National Workshop” and was published in April 1994.
The report discussed concerns that intense media reporting on clusters of suicides by young people could lead to a “suicide contagion” that would result in more self-inflicted deaths.
“These findings have induced efforts on the part of many suicide-prevention specialists, public health practitioners, and researchers to curtail the reporting of suicide – especially youth suicide – in newspapers and on television,” the report stated.
“Such efforts were often counterproductive, and news articles about suicides were written without the valuable input of well-informed suicide-prevention specialists and others in the community.”
The conclusion of the report was that the subject should not be off-limits because dealing with it openly is better than covering it up.
A similar conclusion was reached in a Psychiatric News article in September 2001. [link]
It began, “Not long ago, an executive editor at United Press International (UPI) lost an old friend—a teacher—to suicide. The newspaper in the town where the teacher lived reported on his death and described his life in detail, yet did not mention the cause of his death.
“Had the newspaper done the right thing by not publishing the cause of death? In spite of his many years in journalism, the UPI editor wasn’t sure.”
Suicide authorities from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in New York City and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that the news media needs better guidance on reporting suicides and, in conjunction with authorities from the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, unveiled a set of recommendations at a news conference in August 2001.
The first recommendation was that death reports in the media should include the cause of death, even when it is suicide:
“Herbert Hendin, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College and medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, explained at the press conference that if a story about someone’s death is important enough to publish, then there shouldn’t be any harm in mentioning that suicide was the cause of death, any more than there would be harm in mentioning cancer or heart disease as the cause.
“In fact, he opined, such a story would be incomplete if the cause of death were not included.”
The article went on to list recommendations on how the news media should report suicides, sensitively and with common sense, but accurately.
Last week’s death of former Times publisher and president Mack Quintana was a shock to those of us who knew, cared for and respected him.
We will never know what led him to that decision. But, I believe, God does, and he judges each of us individually, beyond any blanket rules that we here have, in our lack of understanding, extrapolated from Holy Scripture.
It’s something to think about.
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To reach David Crowder, write to dcrowder@epmediagroup.com or call (915) 351-0605
