News Stories of Tragedy and Grief Must Be Handled with Sensitivity

In the summer of 2000, my father died by drowning in Lake Superior. He was minor local government official in the community I grew up in, and so his death made the front page of the local newspaper. His death was also mentioned on local TV stations and was reported in various other newspapers throughout the general area. During this time, I was working as reporter at a community newspaper in another city. The way my father's death was handled by others in the media forced me to consider how I would approach stories about deaths, accidents, and other tragedies.

A family in the media circus spotlight

My father had been a strong swimmer his whole life. We have dozens of photos of him in various lakes and pools from the vacations we took all over Michigan and all over the United States when we were growing up. If it was summer and a body of water was nearby, Dad would generally be in it. For his sixty-third birthday, Dad requested a beach picnic party on the shores of Lake Superior. He went there with my mother, my oldest brother, my sister, my brother-in-law, and my sister's three kids, who were ages eight, 10, and 12 at the time.

Several family members were in the water that day, but only Dad was taken by the undertow. An emergency search took hours and hours, and his body hadn't yet been found when a television crew was on the scene, trying to stick a microphone in my distraught mother's face. My sister herded the reporter away from my mother, saying she'd talk to the reporter, but not on camera. He said that wouldn't do him any good and he was just doing his job. Later, after the body was found, some of the newspaper stories used my father's death as an illustration of the need for water safety. My mother was offended by the tone of the articles, and by the implication that my father was reckless or was unprepared and ignorant of the power of the Great Lakes. My father is the one who taught us to be careful of the undertow and told us not to swim directly against the undertow but parallel to it if you did get caught in one. My parents made sure all four children in my family could swim, either through informal family lessons or formal lifesaving classes, like the ones I took the summer I was eight years old.

Many members of my family are still bitter about that experience and are disdainful of sensationalism in the media to this day. In contrast, the local newspaper did a wonderful job of humanizing the story. They didn't talk to my family, but they did speak to some of Dad's co-workers. They put together a really nice piece that truly reflected who my father was, along with a photo of him looking out over the river that ran through my parents' property.

A young journalist considers her approach

At the time this all happened, I was on an email list for young journalists. A heated debate cropped up about covering death and tragedy. There was a discussion about contacting family members for comments when a murder or a horrible accident occurred. Some journalists were all for "hardening oneself" and asking people for quotes on the spot. Other young journalists felt that they should leave the family alone.

I confess that even before my father died, I shied away from asking the grieving family for comments on the death of a loved one. I had perhaps too much empathy for the family members and could only imagine how awful they must feel. That aversion intensified after my father's death. I did not want to be the equivalent of that reporter who shoved a microphone into my mother's face when her husband's body hadn't even been recovered.

On the other hand, it has since been pointed out to me that, often, family members really do want to talk about the dearly departed. They want the recently deceased to be seen as a complicated human being, rather than just as "the victim." As both a journalist and as a member of a family that was once hounded by the press during a family tragedy, I have come to see a sort of middle ground. The question isn't so much whether to approach grieving family members but how.

Handling tragedies with compassion

First of all, there's no need to "toughen up" and ask hard questions right at the point of tragedy. True, it's important to be objective when you're a reporter, but you're still human, and some empathy is required in these situations. When something tragic has just occurred, a soft touch will get you further than a tough guy approach. Prefacing your request by acknowledging you know this is a difficult time for the family can make the difference between getting a quote and being told to bug off.

Second, if the time doesn't seem right to ask questions of a family member, it's time to make use of your business card. You can slip a card to a family member while saying, "Please call me if you'd like to talk about so-and-so." This approach is less aggressive and gives the mourners time to think about what they want to say.

Finally, keep the Golden Rule in mind: how would you want a reporter to approach you if you had just lost somebody you loved? This is an important question to ask yourself, because as I learned, it's possible this scenario could happen to you one day.