Sensationalism in the news media
When I think about times when the media has acted irresponsibly, there are two occurrences that come to mind immediately — the news coverage of the shooting in Munich this July as well as the reports on the Germanwings crash last year.
When reporting on such tragic incidents such as the ones mentioned above and deciding which information to use, journalists have to weigh up whether the public interest or the victims’ personal rights are more important. In the case of Munich, reports on Bild.de were particularly, if not surprisingly, impious. Early on when the shooting was still ongoing, Bild published a picture of an apparently dead victim lying in a puddle of blood. You can still find the photograph on their website, but mind you, back then it wasn’t pixelated and it was clearly visible on their front page.
By now, the article — or should it be called a picture gallery with captions? — has been supplemented with pictures of the victims. But is it in the public interest to see photos of the victims and graphic depictions of violence? I don’t think knowing what the victims looked like serves an informational purpose, nor does it increase readers’ empathy for the victims.
A different case of media sensationalism could be seen with last year’s news coverage of the Germanwings crash. For days on end, the media was showing grieving children mourning their classmates who had been on the plane. Apparently, the wish of the victims’ relatives to mourn in private wasn’t as important as the media’s greed and desire to cash in on the tragedy.
Another issue that struck me as even more frustrating about the news coverage was how the information on the pilot’s background was presented. Some news outlets, being quick to judge, stated the pilot’s depression as the sole cause for his actions and raised the question whether pilots who suffer from depression should even be allowed to fly. These news reports made it seem as if depression would make people dangerous and unfit to participate in life. But in fact, there is no connection between depression and violence, and people suffering from depression are much more likely to pose a threat to themselves than to others.
This unreflective way of dealing with mental illness does nothing but to further increase the already existing stigma of mental illness. This is especially fatal when we look at current figures on mental illness. According to the World Health Organization, one in four people is affected by mental illness, every fifth person suffers from depression at least once in their lives, and almost two-thirds of people with a known mental illness don’t seek treatment — and these statistics don’t include unreported cases. If the shame and fear of being judged already prevents so many people from seeking treatment, the added fear of losing your job would only cause more people to hide their illness, only letting their condition weigh them down further. If health assessments for pilots were stricter, this single individual’s plan still might have gone undetected. But perhaps it wouldn’t have come this far if people started to realise that, just as there’s no shame in having a cold or any other physical illness, people aren’t responsible for suffering from mental health issues and therefore shouldn’t have to feel guilty for seeking help or be frowned upon by others.
The Guardian cites a woman’s tweet about a pilot reassuring his passengers a couple of days after the crash. “Pilot on my @Delta flight announces he and co-pilot are ex-military and ‘we both have wives and kids and are very happy’”. Why, since when can suffering from depression be reduced to being sad? And why would someone be more willing to kill 150 people, or any people at all, if they were sad? You can be sad, you can be depressed, you can have suicidal thoughts and still not have the desire to hurt anyone else because of your own mental state. It takes more than that. If anything, this goes to show that there’s still a huge amount of work to be done to educate people about mental illness and end its stigmatisation.
