Senseless Media Mobbing

Is it wrong for the media to pray on those who are in misery? That's the big question that posed by Ed Wasserman of the Sacramento Bee. In days of school shootings, bridge disasters and mine cave-ins, is it right to focus on those most hurt by the events and basically live off their tragedy. It's an interesting topic. Now I want to know what you think.

--That's not a ridiculous question. Largescale, violent loss of life leaves hundreds of victims behind. Some have visible signs of injury, but all are torn and all are suffering. Their lives will never be what they were.

Yet the public is accustomed to thinking it's fine to summon these achingly vulnerable people, many of them bewildered and half-insane, to the microphone and the camera. Whatever their other needs, they first take part in the spectacle called news.

What if this is bad for them? Suppose the cameras and questions, the act of providing raw accounts of harrowing events whose full import they haven't begun to fathom, actually harms them -- and slows their recovery from trauma.

Moreover, suppose the media mob thwarts their community's overall response by preventing survivors from gathering privately to grieve and make sense of what has befallen them.
What prompts these speculations was a conference panel I attended last month in Washington that comprised reporters who worked the aftermath of last April's murders at Virginia Tech, where 32 students and their killer died.

Because a disaster site is basically a vast trauma center; just about every potential news source is injured, highly susceptible to further injury and probably shouldn't be talking to the media.

Because media mobbing may destroy the private space a community needs to gather itself quietly and tend to its wounds.

Handling those matters responsibly is impossible unless media agree to restrict their own access. Media pools are nothing new; journalists traditionally pool their efforts and accept feeds from one another when they must. If they can share when courtroom seats are limited, they can share to respect the needs of the grievously hurt.

A cardinal tenet of the ethics journalists subscribe to is minimizing harm. It's time that injunction took practical form in dealing with people who are already severely harmed.