Death and Journalism — What Are the Boundaries Of Professionalism?

Death and journalism have always maintained a delicate and sometimes weird relationship. During my days as a news writer for the old United Press International, my first lesson on the subject involved events with death tolls. Any time the death toll is uncertain, the rule was to always go with the lowest ascertainable figure available. The logic for low-balling death counts was clear as crystal; in news copy, it’s easier to kill people than it is to bring them back from the dead.

I was also taught the standard rules that applied to reporting on deaths. There’s weren’t a lot of them but they managed to cover most circumstances:

• Was the person a minor? (Child deaths are always more sensitive)
• Was the person a public official? (The public’s right to know is paramount)
• Was the death a public event? (Was it caused by a natural disaster? A fire? A crime? People have a natural and legitimate interest)
• Did the person occupy a degree of public awareness? (Movie stars and other non-elected but notable persons fit into this category)
• Did the circumstances of the death include a societal or public safety issue? (Death caused by bad roads, bad policy or bad ideas are absolutely fair game)
• Was it a freak of nature? (People are just sort of attracted to, well, freak stories)
• Is it a slow news day? (Like it or not, it’s a fact of life when covering death)
• What is the geographic depth of interest? (A routine death in a smaller town is far more newsworthy than a routine death in a major city)

Regrettably, even these somewhat loosy-goosey protocols of decorum and judgment have been lost in what passes for 21st-century reporting, the most recent example being this dreadful breach of professionalism from Gawker.

The website decided to publish an article about a suicide in California. Depending on the identity of the victim, suicide can be an issue of legitimate journalistic interest, but in this case, there was nothing inherently newsworthy about the incident. Unless, of course, one wishes to exploit a tragedy to bash a news organization with which the website disagrees namely, Fox News.

The story involves a 39-year old woman, Julianna Rolle, who died after falling from a 100-foot cliff last weekend, and police attributed the death to suicide. The woman also used to work for Fox News. So how might this qualify as news under any recognized, professional standard?

While Ms. Rolle had once worked at a TV news organization, she was not an on-air talent recognizable to millions of viewers; she was a producer who toiled off-camera. She wasn’t even a currently employed or recently departed producer for Fox News. Had she been working for Fox at the time of her death it might make the story defensible, but according to a statement from the news channel, she had last worked at Fox in 2005, having started there in 1997.

A local paper noted that the woman was “devastated” by the death of her mother, Theresa, several months ago, and a physician ruled the death a suicide because of depression. Even if this speculation is correct, the fact that people grow depressed over the death of a parent isn’t unique and certainly not illustrative of any larger societal concern.

The woman’s death is legitimate news in her home town of Rancho Palos Verdes (Pop. 41,145 according to the 2000 census) but in no discernable way does it constitute national news. She was not a public figure, she was not nationally known or widely recognized by the public, there were no societal implications involved with her death, and she had worked as a producer for Fox for only eight years (as opposed to someone who spent the larger part of a career there).

This all begs the question of why Gawker chose to promote this particular story as newsworthy. The only plausible explanation is that it’s a cheap shot against Fox. A comment following the story by its author, Hamilton Nolan, comes across as the defense of one who has knowingly done something wrong yet subscribes to the “That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it,” philosophy so well articulated by country singer Collin Raye.

This is a media story. A former Fox News producer committed suicide. Had I had a good and available photo of Rolle, I would have run that instead of the Fox News logo. You will notice the vitriol here is coming from some crazy commenters; it is not contained in the text of this post. This is “reporting a media story,” not “exploiting.

To call this a media story is preposterous. The death of a current or retired TV producer might qualify as media story in the trade press (as this story originated) but a woman who had been away from the business almost as long as she was in it doesn’t pass that litmus test for national coverage.

It’s impossible to look into a person’s skull and figure out what they are thinking when they do something dumb, so I can’t speculate what went into the ill-advised decision to publish this. The fact that it fails every known test of journalistic judgment might be rooted in animus against Fox, or something more pedestrian, such as having a rookie on the editor’s desk. Whatever the case, however, it’s an unusually disrespectful treatment of a dead woman and her family.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant is credited with saying that ethics demands we do not treat other people only as a means to our ends. In the case of Gawker and the death of Julianna Rolle, it looks like that is precisely what they did. Which tells you all you need to know about Gawker.