“We Don’t Cover Suicide … (Except When We Do Cover Suicide)”

Abstract

Unlike many other unnatural deaths, suicides are occurrences that journalists often hesitate to cover. “Our policy is not to write about suicides,” many journalists say. Except that often they do. This article, based on interviews with 50 US journalists, examines the rationales that journalists invoke as they decide whether to cover a suicide. This can be a high-risk decision because of the potential for suicide contagion and copycat effects. We conclude that in making a decision to cover a suicide, journalists go through a process of routinizing what, at the outset, they had considered an exceptional situation. This routinization provides a means to rationalize covering a death that they often say they would prefer to ignore.

KEYWORDS:

• contagion
• journalists
• news values
• newsworthy
• routinization
• suicide

Notes

1 “Contagion” refers to a phenomenon in which suicides or suicide attempts occur shortly after media reports about a suicide. The initial suicide is presumed to have been a trigger for the subsequent suicides or suicide attempts. “Copycat” implies that the method used in a suicide or suicide attempt (e.g., shooting oneself, jumping from a bridge) has been copied by another vulnerable individual, presumably because of the way that the method was described in media coverage.