Should journalists interview grieving families?
Many times families are eager to talk about their loved one
(My apologies for the second column in two days. I aim for once per week so as not to overburden your in-box. But this felt like it needed to be written.)
The school shooting in Perry raises an important question for journalists. Should they reach out to the families of those killed and injured and ask for interviews? And if the answer is yes, how should they contact the families and what guidelines should they follow?
I believe there is merit in asking families to talk about their loved ones. Not all families will wish to do so, and if a family declines, the reporter should respect their wishes and leave them alone. This is not the time for persistence.
But many times, the families do want to do an interview and discuss their loved ones. I learned during coverage of the first Gulf War that reporters could approach families respectfully and ask about a family member who had died serving our country. More times than not, families were not only willing but eager to talk about their family member. I could only guess as to why. Perhaps media coverage somehow validated the sacrifice their family had made. Perhaps the families enjoyed talking about all the good their loved one had done. Sometimes it’s cathartic just to talk about grief.
I realize there’s a difference between a loss on a battlefield and a victim of a senseless crime, but over the years, our newsroom interviewed many crime victim families who wanted to use the media to let the community know what they were going through.
The shooter certainly is getting his share of publicity, so why not the families he hurt? Now that we’ve heard his name and seen his face, it would be fine with me if news reports dropped it from here on out and just referred to him as “the shooter.”
Guidelines
There are several ways reporters can respectfully approach families. Often, contact can be made through an intermediary, such as a pastor, who might be better equipped to ask the family if they wish to be interviewed. Police public information officers can sometimes contact the family on behalf of the media. If those avenues don’t exist, it’s okay to call the family or even knock on the door. But as I said above, if the family declines, it’s time for the reporter to say thank you and walk away. Reporters are trained to not take no for an answer, but this is not such an occasion.
Some reporters are better at it than others. They have the ability to talk to families in a caring, sensitive way. The old made-for-TV-movie trope about crass reporters shoving a camera and microphone in a family member’s face and shouting, “How do you feel?” doesn’t really exist anymore, if it ever did.
Normally, I’m not comfortable agreeing to ground rules for an interview. If a newsmaker says, “don’t ask me about this” or “I don’t want talk about that”, we usually walk away from the interview.
But when interviewing family members of victims, it’s perfectly fine to let the families dictate what they’re comfortable talking about and what’s off limits. Good reporters will respect those limits.
Understanding the true cost
If done properly, the stories can be compelling. Sad. Visceral. On occasion, surprisingly uplifting. It’s exactly what journalists should do – report as best they can on the impact of a 17-year-old with a gun on innocent people. Doing live shots outside Perry High School and interviewing police only goes so far. Our community – and our leaders will be better equipped to find solutions to school shootings if they understand the true cost. If they see the faces of a family who lost their 6th grader to violence and they hear the voices of a family helping a loved one recover from multiple gunshot wounds, they will better understand the true cost of our current approach to guns and school shootings. Whatever we’re doing now is not working. It needs to change.
The families can use the media to communicate their sorrow. But it’s up to our leaders to listen and do something about it.
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Great column Dave.
As an editor and prior to that a reporter, I have always firmly believed that many people - even those experiencing tragedy - find purpose and clarity in telling their story. A respectful and sensitive reporter can absolutely play a role in helping them do so. As noted, it must be approached with the utmost care and consideration.
I received the following email from Herb Strentz, retired dean of the Drake University School of Journalism. Another reader forwarded this column to him, and with his permission, here's what Herb had to say. He provides some good information:
Thanks for sending Dave's piece on interviewing in times of grief. It resonates with me.
For one thing, to me, asking whether reporters should interview grieving people is like asking whether they should interview public officials.
And of course it can be done poorly or offensively.
As I recall, Nick Lamberto, a veteran Register reporter from the old days, was known for his ability and concerns in getting through to people in trying situations, serving the people and readers well.
In the course of a few years, Herb Strentz as a young reporter must have interviewed, mostly by phone, several hundreds of people in grieving situations. The's because his newspaper, the Fresno Bee, with a circulation pf 100,000 or more, made it a point to write and run obituaries on everyone who died in the area. Everyone. So in the course of a workday, depending upon one's shift, you routinely wrote an obit or two. (There was a "dead board" with listing and information about the deceased and you were expected to go to that as time allowed.)
Christmas Day was an awful time to make such calls, but we'd do it and families did not mind. We'd call mostly to verify information received from a funeral home, but of course would get into other topics.
What Strentz learned:
• The death of a loved one or friend is always shocking regardless of cause or age.
• There would always be at least one person in the family who would take charge of handling such calls or accepted the call as non-invasive
• People really appreciated that their newspaper cared enough about them and the deceased to call and write the story. This was before paid obits became the rule, severing newspaper-community ties in many ways.
Before the onset of social media when it came to deaths by non-natural causes, the reporter might be the one to break the news of a death. That happened to me twice — veteran reporters and common sense were helpful then, of course, because routine obit tasks went out the window.
What bugs me most about death coverage today is not the interview so much as when the reporter suggests that Iowans respond to deaths in better, more helpful ways than other people might. That's what makes us special, kind of thing.
Herb