Representing Death in the News

There are some common accusations about the way in which today’s news media cover death and dying: death on television is portrayed in increasingly graphic ways, news programs are full of death and suffering, and death is being more and more sensationalized by the media. The list goes on in a similar vein. The general perception is that we live in a time of over-saturation of violent and graphic portrayals of death and dying. News broadcasts are ostensibly full of wars, crimes and disasters, creating an image that things have never been worse. And as news organizations are competing as never before for the attention of audiences, this supposedly leads to increasingly sensationalized news coverage, where the old motto ‘when it bleeds it leads’ rules.

With the benefit of an historical context for the display of death in the news, I want to now examine in more detail some of the finer aspects of how the end of life is represented in today’s media environment. I will focus here particularly on empirical evidence in terms of how prevalent death is, which deaths are accentuated in the news and, in the next chapter, how death is displayed through photographs. Interestingly, while death has substantial news value, and, as we have seen, has featured quite heavily in the news, very few studies have made death itself the center of attention. Mostly, studies have focused on deaths from violence, and have often been conducted within wider studies examining war reporting. Another focus has been on deaths from natural disasters, and how the locations of those disasters can have an impact on how prominent the reporting will be.

An overwhelming majority of the literature discussed so far has painted a rather bleak picture of how the news media deal with death and dying. Some of these arguments include that journalists are ostensibly only interested in showing ever more graphic deaths in a pursuit of ratings. A tendency in such studies has been the portrayal of journalists as emotionless, almost robotic figures whose only purpose of existence is to select ever more graphic photos and videos to titillate audiences. Quite often such scholarship has allowed for only a very limited degree of agency on the part of journalists. Yet, the effect that the coverage of death has on news workers has often been neglected, despite the emergence of a very vibrant field of study into how doing their work may lead to serious post-traumatic stress disorder in journalists.

So far, this book has examined the processes of selection, production and transmission of news reports of death. As we have seen, there exists quite a variety of studies into the way in which the news media approach the issue. At the heart of many such studies, however, have been not only the actual messages, but also a concern over the meanings that audiences may extract from such reports. And while empirical research has shown that death is rarely displayed in graphic detail in the news, some have argued that there are too many such images, which are driven by the voyeuristic demands of the audience. The result, they believe, is an audience that cares less about others. This notion of compassion fatigue in Western society has been a topic of much debate as of late. The term compassion fatigue actually goes back to earlier notions of burnout among trauma workers, who experienced feelings of avoidance and other secondary stress symptoms as a result of their work (Figley, 1995). And while this concept has been applied to measure traumatic stress in news audiences, the term has also been adopted by media scholars. In a media studies context, compassion fatigue has come to be seen as a process of ‘becoming so used to the spectacle of dreadful events, misery or suffering that we stop noticing them’ (Tester, 2001, p. 13).

In the previous chapters, we discussed how deaths have been represented in news reporting, both in text and images, over the past centuries to today, and some of the reasons why certain deaths are reported and others less so. These have been dominant paradigms in the scholarship of death in the news over the majority of time, but, in the past two decades, a new approach has entered the fold. This approach, which developed out of a cultural approach to the study of journalism and the media, takes a more qualitative approach and explores the way in which journalists construct meaning from current events. Scholars in this field argue that journalists legitimatize their role as authoritative storytellers in society through the way in which they shape the society’s collective memory (Zelizer, 1993). In particular in relation to journalistic reports on — predominantly high-profile — death and its aftermath, many now believe that such stories are actually also shaping modern responses to death, in that they instruct audiences in the acceptable ways of dealing with grief. This form of journalism is generally referred to as ‘commemorative journalism’ (Kitch, 2000) or ‘memorializing discourse’ (Carlson, 2007).

As death moves back into the public sphere in the early twenty-first century, many people in the Western world are presumably beginning to feel more comfortable talking about their grief. A large part of this development may be thanks to the rapid development of new media technologies over the past couple of decades or so. New technologies, particularly the Internet, have allowed the audience to reclaim part of the public sphere in that ordinary people are now able to publish their own news for the consumption of a worldwide audience. This trend has affected traditional news media in an enormous way, to the extent that some now argue that newspapers, and even television, will die within a relatively short time-frame. What role new media may be playing in how death is reported in the news, how visible it is in the public sphere and in what way they affect the way societies are dealing with death, are all aspects addressed in this chapter.

If the majority of scholars are to be believed we are on the cusp of entering a new era in our relationship with death. A topic that was taboo for most of the twentieth century now seems to be experiencing somewhat of a renaissance. All of a sudden death is becoming a mentionable subject again, whereas it had been largely avoided previously, something to be hidden away rather than publicly discussed. Only during the latter part of the past century did death begin to make its reappearance, and the news media are believed to have played a role in this. We don’t know for certain whether increased public discussion of death is caused by increased media coverage, or vice versa. Other social developments are likely to play their part also. Yet, undoubtedly, we are now exposed to a multitude of mediated representations of death through newspapers, news broadcasts and, especially, the Internet.