‘We report the world as it is,not as we want it to be’: Journalists’ negotiation of professional practices and responsibilities when reporting on suicide

Abstract

Media coverage of suicide can play a pivotal role in raising public awareness of an important public health issue. But research suggests that reporting on suicide can potentially trigger suicidal behavior in vulnerable individuals. To encourage the responsible reporting of suicide as a public health issue, media recommendations have been developed. Based on interviews with 50 US journalists, this study explores journalists’ awareness of and attitudes toward suicide reporting risks and US media recommendations. Through the lens of suicide news reporting, this is a study examining how journalists view their professional roles and sense of social responsibility when reporting on issues, like suicide, with potential public health consequences. We find that while the journalists interviewed want to cover suicide responsibly, and as a public health issue, they often deviate from recommendations. In many cases, professional conventions and routines conflict with or hinder guideline compliance. Moreover, many journalists deliberately disregard suicide reporting guidelines because they clash with their professional values and perceived responsibility of serving the public via truth-telling and full disclosure of information.

Keywords

Journalists news production professionalism public health suicide

Introduction

Already the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, suicide is a growing public health problem (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2015). From the perspective of those involved in suicide prevention, media coverage of suicide can play a vital role in raising public awareness and spurring prevention efforts (World Health Organization (WHO), 2008). And yet, media coverage of suicide can present significantly more challenges than coverage of other pressing public health issues, such as heart disease or cancer. When reporting on suicide, not all press is ‘good’ press.

First, like many other mental health issues, suicide is a socially stigmatized topic. People who consider, attempt, or complete suicide may be viewed as ‘weak’, ‘sinful’, or even ‘selfish’. The family and friends of those who have attempted or completed suicide may face judgments, by themselves and others, that their behavior somehow contributed to the suicide (attempt) or that they could have ‘done something’ to prevent it (Wertheimer, 2013). Thus, reporting on suicide requires that journalists show particular sensitivity, avoiding sensationalism and the perpetuation of myths about suicide, which can lead to furthering stigmatization or misconceptions (Pirkis et al., 2006). But presenting an even larger complication is the possibility of ‘copycatting’ and ‘contagion’ effects resulting from suicide coverage. By now, decades of research have established that aspects of media coverage of suicidal behavior can be a contributing factor in such behavior among vulnerable populations, particularly young people (Gould et al., 2003, 2014; Pirkis and Blood, 2001; WHO, 2008).

Social stigma and the possibility of contagion combine to present both suicide prevention advocates and journalists with a particularly thorny dilemma: How to cover a deserving public health problem in a way that reduces stigma rather than reinforces it and that encourages health-seeking behaviors rather than self-harm.

In an attempt to respond to this dilemma, public health groups and partners around the world developed recommendations for the news media that were intended to encourage responsible and prevention-oriented coverage of suicide (Bohanna and Wang, 2012; WHO, 2008). In the United States and other countries, these suicide reporting recommendations have been met with a range of responses by journalists, from ignorance to ambivalence and from acceptance to resistance (Collings and Kemp, 2010; Crane et al., 2005; Gandy and Terrion, 2015; Jamieson et al., 2003; Skehan et al., 2006; Tully and Elsaka, 2004). Meanwhile, suicide rates have continued to rise in the United States and elsewhere during the last 25 years.

Our project, based on 50 semi-structured interviews with US journalists, examines how news workers are managing coverage of suicide in circumstances in which their professional practices and values routinely come into conflict with the best advice of public health professionals and suicide prevention experts. This research follows by more than a decade a study by Jamieson et al. (2003) that was the first to investigate US journalists’ awareness of and attitudes about contagion potential and suicide reporting recommendations.

In contrast to what Jamieson et al. (2003) found, most of the journalists we interviewed were aware of contagion theories, concerned about contagion potential, and also aware of key recommendations for responsible suicide reporting. By and large, journalists expressed knowledge that reporting on suicide can present certain risks to vulnerable individuals, cause pain for surviving friends and family members, and increase stigma. And yet, even with this knowledge and concern, many journalists described bending or breaking with important aspects of suicide reporting recommendations when writing about suicide. In effect, they engaged in risky professional behavior. But why?

Our answer to this question is grounded in theories about journalistic professionalism – the matrix of routines, values, and role conceptions that shape journalistic work (Deuze, 2005; Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001). These deeply ingrained practices and values powerfully shape news content (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014: 164–203).

This study builds upon previous research that has found that professional practices and values can lead journalists to deviate from what health experts consider responsible and productive health communication (Atkin and Arkin, 1990; Chapman and Lupton, 1994; Dentzer, 2009; Southwell et al., 2013). It seeks to explain how journalists – many of whom profess great reluctance to write about suicide and who show extraordinary compassion toward suicide loss survivors – nonetheless engage in newsmaking practices that many of them know could trigger suicidal behavior by vulnerable individuals. And it describes how conventional news values and routines can lead journalists to adopt an episodic framing of suicidal behavior that has the potential to compound this problem.

The ‘(ir)responsible’ reporting of suicide

Since the 1970s, with the early work of Bollen and Phillips (1982) and Phillips (1974, 1979), social scientific support for contagion theory has increased; it has also become more analytically sophisticated, indicating which aspects of reporting present greater risks and which populations are potentially more vulnerable (Gould et al., 2003, 2014; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2010; Pirkis and Blood, 2001).

Concerns about the adverse effects of suicide news coverage have prompted suicidologists, public health officials, and mental health experts to develop recommendations for media producers, in the United States (CDC, 1994; Reportingonsuicide.org, n.d.) and across the globe (Bohanna and Wang, 2012; Pirkis et al., 2006; WHO, 2008). The recommendations focus primarily on avoiding content and practices associated with contagion, such as providing details and images about the manner of death or coverage that romanticizes or sensationalizes suicide. They also generally recommend the inclusion of suicide prevention resources. The most recent iterations of reporting guidelines, such as ‘Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide’ (Reportingonsuicide.org, n.d.), suggest reporters discuss suicide warning signs and that they devote more coverage to hopeful stories of people who have overcome a suicidal crisis. It has been shown that such prevention-oriented coverage is associated with a subsequent decrease in suicide within a population (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2010).

Despite increasing scientific knowledge of contagion and the development of guidelines, however, those in public health and suicide prevention work have reason to remain concerned about the state of suicide news reporting (Pirkis et al., 2006; WHO, 2008). While in some national contexts, such as Australia, suicide reporting guidelines have been embraced and reflected in reporting (Pirkis et al., 2009; Skehan et al., 2006), there has been a decidedly mixed reception and spotty record of compliance in most other national contexts (Bohanna and Wang, 2012). In Austria (Niederkrotenthaler and Sonneck, 2007) and Australia (Pirkis et al., 2009), content analyses indicate that avoidance of contagion factors in coverage has improved in the years since introduction of national media recommendations. In contrast to these success stories, however, analyses of US and UK news content have found that many stories continue to deviate from national recommendations (Gould et al., 2007; Jamieson et al., 2003; John et al., 2016; Tatum et al., 2010).

Only a handful of studies have asked journalists directly about their attitudes toward these recommendations and the reasons for which they have followed (or not followed) them (Collings and Kemp, 2010; Crane et al., 2005; Gandy and Terrion, 2015; Jamieson et al., 2003; Skehan et al., 2006; Tully and Elsaka, 2004). These studies indicate a wide range of reasons why media recommendations may go unheeded or only partially complied with.

Jamieson et al.’s (2003) interviews with 57 US journalists revealed that most were simply unaware of the CDC’s or other recommendations. Later interview-based studies demonstrate a rising awareness of reporting recommendations (at least outside the United States), but reveal other obstacles to following reporting guidelines. Most significantly, journalists interviewed continue to voice skepticism about contagion possibilities (Collings and Kemp, 2010; Gandy and Terrion, 2015; Jamieson et al., 2003; Tully and Elsaka, 2004).

Gandy and Terrion (2015) and Collings and Kemp (2010) discuss how journalists in Canada and New Zealand, respectively, perceive suicide reporting recommendations as clashing with their social responsibility to ‘tell the whole story’. Media recommendations for the responsible reporting of suicide involve the cautious, selective disclosure of information, for example, not disclosing details about method, certain kinds of images, or the content of suicide ‘notes’. Suppression of information is directly at odds with the core journalistic value of truth-telling and thorough information disclosure (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001; Schudson, 2015). Considering this tension, journalists may feel that abiding by suicide reporting recommendations inhibits their ability to provide an objective, accurate account (Gandy and Terrion, 2015), and even that such guidelines represent a form of externally imposed censorship (Collings and Kemp, 2010).

Methods

During an 18-month period lasting from the summer of 2014 to the winter of 2016, we interviewed 50 journalists from around the country. In these semi-structured, confidential interviews, which typically lasted from 25 to 45 minutes, we asked the journalists about a variety of issues related to suicide coverage.

The interviews with journalists coincided with a related content analysis of suicide coverage in newspapers. The data for that project came from 10 regional daily newspapers in seven states representing regions of the country with the highest to lowest suicide rates. Thirty-six of the 50 journalists who we interviewed came from these regional newspapers, or, in one case, from a similar publication nearby. The journalists from these regional publications either had written one or more articles about suicide during the 2 or 3 years before we interviewed them or were editors who played some role in handling suicide coverage. The remaining 14 journalists were chosen purposely because they had demonstrated a particular interest in suicide coverage.¹ Some, for example, had participated in journalism conferences on suicide coverage; others had earned awards or recognition for their coverage of suicide.

The majority of the journalists were working as reporters/writers (30) or editors (15) at print/online publications, with the others occupying varying professional roles, such as working in public radio or doing freelance journalism. The gender balance of the 50 journalists interviewed was 28 men and 22 women. Although the nature of this purposive, non-random sample does not allow generalizability to the entire population of US journalists, it does provide a wide and diverse swath of journalists working at newspapers of varying sizes and in diverse parts of the country, including areas with varying suicide rates. Most of the journalists interviewed had had several years of professional experience (an average of more than 20 years), and throughout the interviews, many participants reflected on their experience covering suicide in multiple news organizations and in various journalistic capacities over the years (e.g. as a reporter and an editor).²

The 50 interviews were audiotaped and transcribed.³ The authors read and qualitatively coded the transcripts through a multi-step, iterative process. The transcripts were read for information relating to journalists’ concern for suicide contagion possibilities, and their awareness and adherence to media recommendations for the responsible reporting of suicide. More broadly, transcripts were coded to capture themes in how journalists view their roles and responsibilities when it comes to writing about suicide and aspects of journalistic practices, conventions, and values that influence the reporting choices they make.

The first author of this article read all the transcripts four times, and the second author read the transcripts twice.⁴ In initial reviews, emergent themes were identified. On subsequent passes, these initial thematic codes were reviewed and refined, condensing and reinterpreting thematic groups into codes that best and most parsimoniously addressed the pressing questions of this article. Throughout this process, the first and second author of this article met to discuss emergent themes, come to agreement about interpretations, and refine categorizations. This analysis process was repeated until existing thematic coding captured all relevant ideas and sentiments and no new interpretative insights were gained.⁵

In what follows, the findings of our interviews are presented in three sections. In the first section, we describe journalists’ awareness of and attitudes toward contagion and media recommendations. We discuss which recommendations specifically journalists are aware of, where they received information about recommendations, and which recommendations they tend to follow (and which they don’t). This section provides a much needed update to Jamieson et al.’s interviews with US journalists from 2003.

In the second section, we discuss how news values driving story selection and the framing conventions typically associated with these story types (e.g. a ‘crime’ story) shape suicide coverage in certain ways. Whereas episodic/event-based framings of suicide are characterized by conventions usually at odds with responsible reporting recommendations, thematic/issue-based framings of suicide offer opportunities for journalists to stay within recommendations and to create prevention-oriented content.

In the third section, we delve into the more complicated issue of why journalists might deliberately decide to break with recommendations, invoking their journalistic commitment to transparency and full disclosure. Like their counterparts in Canada (Gandy and Terrion, 2015) and New Zealand (Collings and Kemp, 2010), we too find that US journalists grapple with following reporting recommendations, describing difficulty adhering to recommendations in light of their deeply held journalistic values and sense of public responsibility to ‘tell the whole story’.

‘Let’s be aware of situations that are difficult, and let’s talk about it’: Journalists’ awareness of and attitudes toward contagion and suicide reporting recommendations

Journalists’ awareness of and concern for suicide contagion

Our interviews indicate that concerns for contagion possibilities play a significant role in journalists’ considerations and newsrooms’ policies surrounding reporting on suicide. In 35 of the 50 interviews, journalists brought up contagion and discussed how it influences their or their newsroom’s approach to suicide coverage.

The majority of journalists who discussed contagion expressed some degree of explicit concern about the potential of contagion effects. Contagion was cited as the most prominent factor in why many newsrooms said they had a general, default policy of (usually) not reporting on individual suicide deaths/attempts. When describing writing about suicide, journalists indicated that concern for contagion influenced the content of their reporting. Journalists spoke about the importance of withholding details about suicide method and location:

I had done research and I knew that it was not good necessarily to emphasize how they planned the suicide and how they executed it. It was not good to give hints to people about how they could smartly execute a suicide. Or, like, this is a less painful way to kill yourself. I wasn’t trying to give any information to people that were looking to the article so they could get information on how to kill themselves.

Many of the journalists expressed some specific knowledge related to lessening contagion possibilities and were aware that certain populations, such as young people, were considered to be at greater risk. Journalists mentioned learning this information from interactions with public health and suicide prevention advocates, as well as from their own informal ‘Googling’ or ‘research’ into the issue. More broadly, though, journalists indicated that information about contagion was something they had gradually accumulated from years of newsroom experience, from their interactions and conversations with editors, fellow journalists, and a variety of public/mental health sources.

These findings stand in contrast to Jamieson et al.’s (2003) interviews with US journalists, in which a majority expressed doubt and skepticism about contagion theory. In our sample, only six journalists clearly expressed skepticism or outright rejection of contagion possibilities. This distinguishes our US sample from their counterparts in Canada and New Zealand as well, among whom recent studies find more widespread skepticism and resistance to contagion theories (Collings and Kemp, 2010; Gandy and Terrion, 2015).

Journalists’ awareness of, attitude toward, and incorporation of national and other media recommendations

In interviews, journalists were asked whether they were aware of, or ever consulted, national media recommendations for reporting on suicide.

Of the 50 journalists interviewed, about two-thirds either had never heard of national media recommendations, were unsure if they had ever come across them, or gave answers that indicated only faint familiarity with the notion of national or other guidelines. However, many of the journalists did indicate that they were familiar with sub-national, state, or local recommendations created by proximate public/mental health agencies and groups. Many other journalists said they followed in-house newsroom policies. In describing these various policies and newsroom practices, aspects of the national recommendations were clearly present. Very few of the journalists interviewed stated they had never seen any form of guidelines or recommendations, whether national, local, or in-house, formal or informal.

Indeed, regardless of whether journalists indicated knowledge of national media recommendations specifically, it was clear that certain crucial tenants of the national recommendations had become commonplace in newsroom policy, practice, and conventional wisdom in one way or another. The majority of journalists interviewed indicated a general newsroom awareness and adherence to key aspects of national recommendations, such as refraining from publishing details about suicide method or photos of the death. Other aspects of the national media recommendations, however, were decidedly less widespread. For example, most of the journalists were unaware of recommendations surrounding preferred terminology, such as avoiding describing suicide attempts as ‘successful’, ‘unsuccessful’, or ‘failed’.

A third of the journalists did indicate some awareness of national media recommendations, such as the CDC’s, or the newly updated ‘Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide’ (Reportingonsuicide.org, n.d.). These journalists expressed great appreciation for these resources and described careful attention to and compliance with recommendations: ‘We really, really tried to follow those guidelines pretty – I mean, like, we went through the story and held that sheet of paper next to it, and said, okay, check. We’re hitting all the right things here’.

Overall, our interviews suggest that US journalists approach reporting on suicide quite differently than they would other unnatural deaths (such as a traffic accident), with special consideration, and, in many cases, extra deliberation. Knowledge of contagion is widespread among the journalists we interviewed, as is the general notion that reporting on suicide method and location can contribute to this risk. To that end, about two-thirds of the journalists indicated that their news organizations had policies – formal or informal – reflecting these key considerations, as well as others, such as observing special sensitivity to the privacy and emotions of surviving family members.

And yet, our interviews also revealed that journalists often made decisions to bend or break with these precautions around reporting on suicide. In many cases, journalists felt that the circumstances of a suicide death and what made it newsworthy (e.g. its publicness, the involvement of police) prompted them to respond in routine, obligatory ways, applying typical newsmaking conventions and practices that conflict with suicide reporting recommendations. In many other cases, though, they described grappling with the rationales underlying the recommendations, ultimately deciding to go against some or several of the recommendations. These were not decisions that journalists made lightly; often, they described great deliberation and purpose behind the decision to disregard recommendations. This is detailed in the following two sections.

‘Not every story’s a big deal’: The pitfalls of episodic, event-based reporting versus the promise of thematic, issue-based reporting

This study’s analysis of interviews suggests that the impetus and framing for coverage, whether ‘episodic’ or ‘thematic’ (Iyengar, 1994), and the news routines and conventions associated with these two broad story framings, affect their content and conformity to the public health community’s model of responsible suicide news reporting.

Previously, our research team explored how this sample of US journalists decided that suicide was newsworthy (Beam et al., 2017). For the most part, individual suicide deaths are only covered when certain key news values are invoked. In many cases, suicide becomes newsworthy when it occurs in public or involves a ‘public’ person or unusual, dramatic elements – all traditional news values driving ‘hard news’ reporting.

By their very nature, stories covered for ‘obligatory’ reasons of publicness, crime, or other ‘hard news’ considerations contain content that breaks with recommendations, and employ framing that does not lend itself to prevention-oriented coverage. Stories about ‘suicide-by-cop’ or people who take their own lives by jumping off a bridge, journalists explained, are almost always covered in very short, formulaic news briefs, following the conventions of episodic, event-centered newswriting. In most cases, these stories are written quickly, under tight time constraints. Journalists approached these stories in routine, formulaic ways, generally giving a quick synopsis of the essential who, what, when, where details. Journalists said they covered many suicides that occur in public, or that create a noticeable public disruption, because of the suicide method involved (e.g. jumping from a bridge, in front of a train). Discussion of suicide method is also included as a usual element in suicide deaths covered because they involve crime, such as murder-suicides.

The focus on such ‘hard news’, episodic storytelling and formatting is not conducive to educational, public health framings (Kristiansen, 1988; Lupton, 1994). The conventions of episodic newswriting contribute to the tendency of journalism to focus on individual or event-based examples of health issues rather than the broader social determinants of and potential solutions to these problems (Gasher et al., 2007; Hodgetts et al., 2007). And, indeed, journalists experienced in writing news briefs about a suicide death by bridge-jumping or a train collision described these story types as inappropriate or unsuitable vehicles for a broader educational or preventive discussion about suicide. Some journalists saw the inclusion of prevention information or other educational content as extraneous, or even inappropriate, for such episodic news pieces, seemingly distinguishing between ‘news’ pieces and ‘issue’ stories. Several acknowledged that they don’t refer to the national recommendations when writing short, news brief items involving suicide, citing a lack of time and/or explaining that the guidelines were not relevant for these kinds of stories. ‘I probably would [refer to recommendations] if I was really like sitting down to write about [suicide]’, one journalist explained, ‘but I’d probably would not just day-to-day. Like if I got called in to cover a cop shift and for some reason had to write about a suicide there’. Another journalist expressed the same sentiment even more succinctly: ‘I don’t refer to them for every story. Not every story’s a big deal’.

Other mundane aspects of newswriting conventions and journalistic training contributed to practices that broke with reporting recommendations. From a suicide prevention perspective, the common term ‘committed suicide’ should be avoided because it associates suicide with criminality (e.g. ‘committed a crime’) and moral deviance (‘committed adultery’). But many reporters spoke about using the term ‘committed’ or more specific language, such as ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound’, because it reflected the ‘official’ terminology used by police, first responders, and medical examiners. Other reporters specifically rejected the use of terms preferred by the suicide prevention community, such as ‘died by suicide’ or ‘took his own life’, because they viewed these terms as insufficiently concrete, overly euphemistic, or simply because they thought they sounded unnatural. Journalists spoke of the need for newswriting to be ‘accurate’, ‘clear’, or simply ‘good’, implying that ‘died by suicide’ was not ‘good’ writing. Some journalists described not being comfortable with a separate, stand-alone ‘box’ for listing suicide prevention hotlines and resources – a key recommendation for mitigating the risk of contagion – and talked about ways that these can be more ‘naturally’ incorporated into the body text of the story.

In contrast to the myriad pitfalls of ‘hard news’, episodic newswriting, stories purposefully done as feature ‘issue’ pieces can present time, space, and, most importantly, storytelling conventions much more conducive to prevention content and public health framings. More than half of the journalists we interviewed talked about having done some kind of non-episodic, issue piece concerning suicide, ranging from one-off stories to multi-part series. Importantly, journalists spoke of pursuing these stories because they were aware of the limitations and problems of episodic, news bulletin reporting: ‘my personal thing is we are not doing any favors by … covering individual suicide as individual newsworthy events. I don’t think, you know, personally, I don’t think that that really helps suicide prevention’. Journalists talked about relishing the opportunity to write longer, more involved stories that could more extensively explore suicide as a public health problem:

As a reporter, I think it’s important to look at the issue in a more holistic way and not just on a case by case basis, so we’re not doing it with little briefs that run buried inside the newspaper. But we look at it in terms of what are some of the factors that might be leading to these suicides, what are some of the factors that might contribute to this phenomenon occurring, and what mental health experts can be consulted in order to try to put it into perspective.

Overall, by their very nature, news stories that discuss suicide as a significant social or public health issue are beneficial from a public health perspective. When writing non-episodic, thematic stories, many journalists described employing the journalistic convention of ‘humanizing’ or ‘personalizing’ an abstract social issue. Building a story around the personal profile of a compelling and/or ‘representative’ personality is a time-honored technique in journalistic writing – and such ‘personalizing’ and ‘humanizing’ narrative techniques are especially common in news media coverage of health and social issues (Lupton, 1994). For the most part, journalists described telling the story of an individual’s death as a vehicle through which to ‘humanize’ and ‘make relatable’ a large and complicated social/health problem (e.g. the problem of veteran’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), insufficient mental health treatment). Thus, this convention lent itself well to public health framings of suicide as a systemic social/heath issue.

‘We report the world as it is, not as we want it to be’: Confluence and conflict among journalistic roles and responsibilities when reporting on suicide

As described in the previous section, the vast majority of journalists interviewed described suicide as an important social/health issue deserving of regular media coverage. This was particularly true of journalists working in communities that had been noticeably impacted by suicide. Consistently, journalists invoked a sense of responsibility toward fulfilling a public service mission when reporting on suicide as a social/health issue. ‘We hoped to make a difference’, one journalist reflected about their newspaper’s multi-part series on suicide, ‘[t]hat was our biggest hope’. Several journalists saw suicide as an issue of growing importance, deserving more media attention:

I mean, let’s face it, the very high-profile recent suicides have brought to light some things that we as journalists have to think about for our community, and how to inform them about how to talk about these types of incidents and the impact on the community … And I think that’s something we have to constantly be thinking about and talking about – leading the community. Let’s face it, one of the most important things a news organization can do is lead the community dialogue.

‘Leading the community dialogue’, ‘raising awareness’, ‘starting a conversation’, ‘breaking the stigma’ – these are the phrases used by many of our interviewees when explaining the motivation and purpose behind their reporting on suicide. In fulfilling their civic responsibility of informing their communities about an important social/health problem, many journalists were clearly attentive to risks involved with reporting on suicide. They spoke about being careful to cover the issue in a sufficient way while avoiding practices that could be risky, particularly contagion. Apart from contagion concerns, journalists spoke about the need to respect the privacy and emotions of surviving family members, and how to talk about the prevalence of suicide without being overly alarming.

But journalists clearly wrestled with how much information, and what kinds of information, to disclose and withhold when writing about suicide. This was a central dilemma faced by the journalists we interviewed because it involves fundamental aspects of journalists’ sense of responsibility to serve the public. For journalists, socialized to value full disclosure of information as a virtue, and even obligation, of their professional work, it was difficult to fully embrace the idea of restraint and withholding information as better serving the public than full disclosure of what they viewed as ‘relevant’ information. Several journalists openly grappled with what amount and kind of information about suicide the public had a ‘need to know’ and was legitimately ‘in the public interest’. Journalists weighed the value of serving the ‘public interest’ or ‘public good’ against ethical concerns for surviving family and, more broadly, against concerns that their reporting could actually harm the public in some way. ‘It’s kind of a balancing act’; one journalist explained, ‘I think we have to rethink the way we cover suicide ultimately because all the secrecy … it certainly protects on one level, but it also perpetuates it as a mystery to people and a black hole’.

While many journalists described being able to negotiate this balancing act, just as many of the journalists we interviewed spoke about the need to break with recommended practices for the sake of further pushing the issue of suicide into the public domain. In explaining their desire to break with various guidelines, journalists often invoked a fundamental professional value: a default inclination toward truth-telling and disclosure of information.

For some journalists, this journalistic impulse simply outweighed or voided concerns about contagion or sensitivity to family members. This feeling was especially true in reference to event-based, episodic stories (e.g. a bridge-jumping) – in large part because journalists felt an obligation to verify public dialogue about events (e.g. a missing person report, social media chatter) and to put an end to any public speculations about what may or may not have happened. But non-episodic, issue pieces also made journalists reflective about fulfilling their professional obligation of completely informing the public. One journalist, for instance, described wrestling with including content risking potential contagion effects, ultimately deciding to include that content, saying ‘I guess as a news person, I’m reluctant to shield people from the truth’. A few journalists were blunter in their valuing of ‘truth-telling’ and disclosure as their primary priority and responsibility: ‘But as far as impact on the public, to be honest, I don’t care. Do my readers need to know this? That might weigh into [my decisions] but whether it hurts the people – my god, no – because everything in the news is damaging’.

For many more journalists, transparency and broader disclosure of information was actually a benefit to and vehicle for increasing public understanding and awareness of this important social/health issue. In many cases, it was this rationale that motivated journalists to deliberately break from recommendations:

We debated [the recommendations] and we, I think, threw almost every one of those out the window. Not willy nilly, but we thought if we are going to cover this issue, cover it responsibly and really let people know, tell people what’s going on, then we had to do that and we did.

Several journalists openly questioned whether reporting recommendations and related newsroom policies that suggest restraint and selective disclosure of information actually hindered the ability to have a more meaningful public conversation about suicide. These journalists were not insensitive to concerns about contagion, to the feelings of surviving members and other considerations, but they worried about the potential pitfalls of restrained coverage: ‘I also wonder if in not covering suicides, and not digging into that pain a little bit, are we not kind of closing our eyes to a problem? And closing the public’s eyes?’ Another journalist employed a similar vision/blindness metaphor, asking ‘Just, in general, do we create our own blind spot by not covering [suicide]?’ These sentiments echo those of journalistic counterparts in Canada (Gandy and Terrion, 2015), England (Crane et al., 2005), and New Zealand (Collings and Kemp, 2010).

Both journalists and the public health community alike believe that media coverage of suicide can raise awareness and generate public dialogue around preventing and destigmatizing suicide, but have fundamental differences regarding the amount and kinds of information that can achieve those goals. For many of the journalists we interviewed, the journalistic inclination and commitment to disclose and detail information, while perhaps risky, may ultimately be a benefit to addressing the problem of suicide. Upon reflection, journalists voiced recognition of this pivotal difference between the nature of their journalistic roles and responsibilities versus those of the public health community and others. ‘Our role is so different from a lot of people’, one journalist reflected, ‘we report about the world as it is, not as we want it to be. I think that’s what people don’t quite understand’.

Discussion

As the practice of modern journalism has evolved, so has the way journalists approach coverage of suicide, a complex social problem and worsening public health issue (Campion-Smith, 2015; Richardson, 2015). As is still the case from over a decade ago (Jamieson et al., 2003), suicide is just as often (if not more so) a newsworthy event in newsrooms across the country (Beam et al., 2017). Our interviews illustrate that much has changed in the years since Jamieson et al.’s (2003) study. Interviewing journalists at the beginning of the 2000s, Jamieson et al. found reporters largely uneasy with or disinclined to report about suicide unless compelled by a clear, ‘hard news’ reason, for example, the death of public person or a murder-suicide. More than a decade later, with the rate and visibility of suicide rising in communities across the United States, we spoke to journalists voicing a desire to do more than obligatory, episodic coverage of bridge-jumping or celebrity suicide. Many of our journalists felt compelled to inform and educate their reading publics about suicide as a pressing public health issue affecting their communities.

Journalists approached the complexities of this task with considerable caution and consideration. Journalists treated suicide as a stigmatized issue, and, by and large, showed great sensitivity and deference to the privacy and emotions of surviving family and friends. Most of the journalists we interviewed were aware of and at least somewhat concerned about potential contagion effects. Although relatively few journalists we spoke to knew of or referred to national recommendations regarding the responsible reporting of suicide, there was nevertheless widespread knowledge of the central tenants of these recommendations, especially the prohibition against disclosure of method and location.

Journalists and newsrooms grappled with, debated, and even created policies around how to write about suicide while mitigating these risks and ethical concerns. In many cases, though, our journalists described ultimately making news decisions that conflicted with reporting recommendations, the advisements of those in the mental/public health community, and even the requests of surviving family members. Journalists do not break with these advisements because they are callous or indifferent. More than anything, the journalists we spoke to struggled with competing professional values and social responsibilities.

We find two major reasons – stemming from the conventions, routines, values, and role conceptions of journalists – why they may deviate from or reject suicide reporting recommendations. Many of the news values prompting coverage of an individual suicide death, such as those that occur in public, in the context of a crime, or a novel, unusual event (Beam et al., 2017; Jamieson et al., 2003), are written in episodic, event-centered frames (Iyengar, 1994). The nature of episodic news framing is not conducive to educational, public health framings (Kristiansen, 1988; Lupton, 1994). Journalists approach these stories as not really ‘about suicide’ (as a social issue), thus obviating attention to suicide reporting recommendations. And when employing episodic newswriting frames, they fall back on routine newswriting conventions that violate recommendations.

In contrast to routinized, episodic stories about murder-suicides or bridge-jumpers, however, our interviews suggest that many US journalists approach reporting on suicide with great care and consideration, feeling a professional obligation to report on suicide as a social/health issue. But even in these cases, our interviews revealed that journalists often made deliberate decisions to bend or break from special precautions around the reporting of suicide. In doing so, journalists often invoke a core journalistic value of ‘telling the whole story’, weighing this against the public health community’s recommendations to not disclose certain kinds of information because they believe that detail and depth are the most effective way of ‘shining a light’ on an issue of public importance. By telling the ‘whole’ story of suicide, many of the journalists interviewed articulate that full disclosure is the best way that they, as journalists, can advance public health efforts to raise awareness of a social problem, doing so in a different way and playing a different role than those of the public health community. In previous studies outside the United States, journalists have voiced this same tension as a major reason for deviating from national reporting recommendations (Collings and Kemp, 2010; Gandy and Terrion, 2015).

Previous studies of how journalists negotiate the special dilemmas of reporting on suicide suggest that those in public health show better recognition of journalists’ professional values and involve them more proactively in the creation of guidelines (Bohanna and Wang, 2012; Collings and Kemp, 2010; Gandy and Terrion, 2015; Pirkis et al., 2006; Skehan et al., 2006). This study supports that suggestion. Journalists are eager to engage with those in the public health community about how they can better report on suicide. However, they aren’t necessarily interested in creating more guidelines or policies. They want partnership in creating stories. Perhaps, going forward, those in the public health community can think more about leveraging journalistic training, values, and the power of news storytelling rather than pushing against such training and instincts.

Conclusion

Suicide is a tragically common occurrence in the United States, but it remains culturally taboo, greatly stigmatized, and often associated with other social ills and deviance, such as crime, substance abuse or bullying. For these reasons, news coverage of suicide is an illuminating window onto journalists’ sense of social responsibility; it also speaks to enduring and fundamental differences between journalists and those in the public health community (Atkin and Arkin, 1990; Chapman and Lupton, 1994; Southwell et al., 2013). For the public health community, communication about complex problems such as suicide should be selective and prescribed, offering specific public solutions and responses. For journalists, such selective disclosure is fundamentally at odds with prevailing values and practices of transparency and openness increasingly embraced in and idealized by the US public and private domains, including the profession of journalism (Schudson, 2015). For journalists, their communicative imperative is to engender public debate and conversation about a problem. To paraphrase the words of one of our interviewees, journalists ‘write the world as it is, not as we want it to be’.

But in ‘writing the world as it is’, journalists must contend with the consequences of that communication. Unlike most news stories, writing about suicide is believed to have potential direct and dire consequences on the reading public: Stories about suicide may influence vulnerable individuals to take their own lives. In the current news environment, the same concern about contagion surround a growing number of prominent news topics, from the coverage of mass shootings (Perrin, 2016; Towers et al., 2015) to terrorism (Nacos, 2010). Without a doubt, these are news stories that must be covered. But when covering these events and issues, the long-held journalistic norm of full disclosure should perhaps be more intensely scrutinized. When reporting on domestic terrorism, does the public’s ‘right to know’ (Schudson, 2015) extend to description of the terrorist’s bomb-making process? What is the social value in publishing a mass shooter’s troubled manifesto? When reporting on particular situations and particular facts, the journalistic presumption of full disclosure, of writing the world as it is, is potentially risky. And this raises a particularly pressing question for today’s newsmakers: When does the journalistic obligation toward transparency and disclosure no longer serve and benefit the public, but endanger it?

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The University of Washington, Department of Communication and the Dart Professorship in Journalism and Trauma provided financial support for this research.

Notes

Author biographies

Michael Mead Yaqub, MA, is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. His research focuses on news media, journalism, and political communication in developing democracies, as well as on news media coverage of suicide and mental health problems.

Randal A Beam, PhD, is the Dart Endowed Professor in Journalism and Trauma in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. His research focuses on journalists and on factors that shape the production of news.

Sue Lockett John, PhD, is a news media scholar, editor, and former journalist. Since earning her Doctorate at the University of Washington, she has worked with the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, the Washington State Coalition to Improve Mental Health Reporting and Forefront: Innovations in Suicide Prevention to advance responsible coverage of trauma, mental illness, and suicide.

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