chibamSenior Contributor
More Confused Coverage About Suicide
I could've probably tacked this post on to last week's chat thread about Stigma In The Media, but the thread's been locked now, so, following @espressologic 's advice, I'll start a new thread.🙂
Last night, I encountered a brief video about this distant cousin of Prince William's that has recently died; and this video really ties in well with the points I was making during that chat session last week.
The video pointedly refuses to say the word "suicide" - I mean it is just so obvious that the creators are deliberately going out of their way to not say that word. But at the same time, they give you pretty much every other piece of information you need to build a crystal clear picture of what happened. They tell you what condition the body was in when it was found; including which area had a "critical injury". They tell you what implement was found beside the body. They tell you that the body was found inside a locked room; that authorities "do not consider the death suspicious" and that "they are satisfied that nobody else was involved."
They don't bluntly say "he [did X to] himself", describing his method of suicide - as the official media guidelines discourage. But they give you absolutely every other piece of information you need to unambiguously deduce precisely how he did it. Seriously, nobody with an IQ over 30 could possibly be uncertain about his method after watching this coverage. So it's almost as if these media outlets are sticking to the letter-of-the-law regarding these media guidelines, while actively trying to defy the spirit of them. They are still getting the information about precisely how these people are kil|ing themselves out to the public. Whether this is just for the viewcounts, or whether there's some deeper agenda to it, I can't say.
But at the same time, they are averse as hell to actually saying the word "suicide", even though all the information they provide leads exclusively to that conclusion.
I don't know. I get the sense that there's some manner of bitter rebelliousness in there. As if somebody's told these journalists that they aren't aloud to say "suicide", so to thumb their nose at the 'free speech police' who are stifling their ability to freely report the news, they are crafting their reports to convey all the information they wish to convey, while still carefully dodging the handful of problematic words and phrases that other people have previously given them a hard time over.
Maybe I'm misreading/misinterpreting the undertones of what's going on here. But there is something funny going on beneath the surface of journalism, regarding the coverage of these issues. The language has become unnatural, and communication has become indirect and cumbersome; presumably because there are forces at work stifling it in some way.
I'm not sure I fully understand the problem, nor what ought to be done about it. But I can see that there is definitely something not right out there.
BTW, @espressologic , I only just discovered your post at the end of that "Stigma In The Media" thread. I didn't get any notification about it at the time, so it appears whatever was wrong with the notification system is still going on.😐
