The Ethics of Reporting Tragedy

"I can’t watch any more television,” my neighbor told me when we met while out walking our dogs Sunday morning. I understood at once that he was referring to the endless reports about the death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and dozens of other senior Polish officials who died in a plane crash? near Smolensk on Saturday. My neighbor is a 60-year-old retired police captain who has seen more than his share of violence in his life.

This immediately brought to mind the reaction of my 12-year-old daughter to the double suicide bombings in the Moscow metro on March 29. Having come home fr om school that day to find me listening to both television and radio reports of the tragedy, she asked, “Isn’t there any other news, Dad?” It turned out that her class had watched coverage of the event and she came home so stressed by it all that she flat out refused to tell me what the teacher had said, how her classmates had reacted or even what she was feeling right then.

After the Moscow blasts, journalists and columnists from Moskovsky Komsomolets, Noviye Izvestia, Izvestia and Kommersant commented on how slow state-controlled television was to report on the attack. They criticized television executives for failing to interrupt regularly scheduled programming in favor of special reports on the tragedy. Izvestia media columnist Irina Petrovskaya suggested that the general directors of television stations “probably acted on inertia, waiting to get word from the Kremlin before changing the schedule and informing viewers of what was happening in the capital.” That might be, but it has little importance now.

Here is how I got my news that day. I first learned about the terrorist attacks from a breaking-news flash on Vesti-24 television. Then I switched on Ekho Moskvy radio, wh ere coverage of the event was in full swing. I then quickly went online and searched among news sites and other radio stations. In other words, an abundance of news became available shortly after the tragedy occurred — everything from updates on the number of victims and comments from experts and officials to call-ins from listeners, blog discussions and even helpful advice on how to get around town with the metro system paralyzed.

To be honest, if a handful of journalists had not recently pointed out that television channels were slow to react to the metro bombings, I would never have noticed it. And now, confronted with the terrible images of wreckage from the crash of Kaczynski’s presidential jet, I am actually glad that images of the metro bombing site were broadcast with some delay. And I am grateful to my daughter’s insistence on March 29 that I turn off the television and radio. It was as if she were following the recommendation of a professional psychologist published by Izvestia after the bombing. That article suggested that one of the most effective ways to reduce stress is to focus your thoughts on something other than the terrorist attack, to think about something important for you such as family or work.

It is time we depoliticize the discussion over how and why the media respond to terrorist attacks and start focusing on the psychological effect that those reports have on viewers and listeners.

Alexei Pankin is editor of IFRA-GIPP Magazine for publishing business professionals.