Yesterday morning the body of a teenage girl was found in her Paddington house in Brisbane; around the same time her mother jumped to her death from the Story Bridge, leaving her 12 year-old son sitting in the car only metres away. It is not known how the young girl died but early reports indicate she was stabbed.
This is a terrible crime and tragedy and the family involved must be distraught. Mounting interest from the media cannot be helping their situation but surely, given the fact that an underage girl has been killed and a young boy has watched is mother purposely fall to her death, the media would show some respect and honour the families right to privacy.
Some news organisations, like the ABC, have shown a high level of respect, reporting on the incident while excluding the names of those involved. Others, like ninemsn, seem to have forgotten their journalistic ethics and morals and have splashed the victims names all over their news site. While there is legally nothing wrong with reporting the names, it is highly unlikely that the family involved is comfortable with this.
Journalists are often privy to sensitive information, whether it be the name of a victim, the details of a crime, or off the record comments and it is their duty to respect this information and display empathy and kindness to those it relates to.
Publishing the names of the young girl and her mother was not only a gross invasion of privacy; it was a deplorable act of insensitivity and thoughtlessness. Who in their right mind would think that publishing those names would not put more pressure and stress on that family? Publishing those names makes it so much easier for other news organisations to contact them and hound them with questions; it identifies them to everyone who opens up the ninemsn home page, even relatives or friends who may not have been notified yet; it turns something so incredibly hurtful and private into a public forum for the whole nation to comment on.
In my last post, I praised ninemsn for publishing a photo of a man who had just been stabbed because it was an incredible display of photo journalism in action; now I can’t help thinking this was simply another case of ninemsn revealing all the gory details of a crime in a bid to suck in more readers.
Here is a link to the ABC story, sans victims names.
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