large extent, neglected by national journalists in the early days of the Bridgend coverage.
Even when it is not, it is mostly mentioned to support the view that the Internet could also cause a similar effect and not to actually criticise the press’ part in potentially spreading the contagion (see Gunnell, cited in de Bruxelles and Malvern, The Times, 2008). Nonetheless, as the suicides keep coming and the media’s attention to the story increases, this partial view, which demonises new, but exonerates traditional media from all responsibility or even praises the latter’s role in raising public awareness around the Bridgend problem (Clark, Daily Express, 2008) is more and more frequently challenged.
The concerns over news media inciting a Werther effect in the Bridgend case result in the development of the ‘Media Responsibility’ (MR) sub-frame, which is present in 82 out of 358 sample articles.
Figure 6.13 and Table 6.C indicate that this sub-frame appears earlier and, with the exception of the Telegraph, more frequently in broadsheets than mid-sheets or tabloids.
As the close examination of its content in the current section will reveal, the MR sub-frame offers no explanation regarding Bridgend’s high suicide rate before January 2008, but looks at the level of journalists’ responsibility for the subsequent incidents, that is, for those that took place while the issue was at the centre of media attention. In that way, it points out the two-fold role of journalists both as critics and recipients of criticism, both as constructors of and contributors to the Bridgend suicide problem. The two newspapers taking the lead in the construction of MR are The Independent/Independent on Sunday and The Guardian/Observer, with the first chronologically preceding the second in addressing the issue of appropriate suicide reporting, though eventually not dedicating as many articles to it in the overall Bridgend coverage.
Table 6.C:
First appearance of the MR sub-frame
‘Natasha, 17, is the seventh victim in town hit by series of copycat suicides’ (The Times, January 23, 2008: 13)
‘Death valleys’ (The Sunday Times magazine, May 25, 2008: 44-53)
‘The passion plays of youth are often just wayward self-love’ (The Sunday Telegraph, January 27, 2008: 29)
‘Boy, 10, hangs himself after talking to his mother about craze’ (The Daily Telegraph, February 16, 2008: 5)
‘Let’s not tell our children there’s a place called ‘Suicide Town’ (The Observer, January 27, 2008:
13)
‘Suicide ‘axis’ crosses Welsh valleys’ (The Observer, January 27, 2008: 17)
‘Sensitivity and suicide’ (The Guardian, MediaGuardian, January 28, 2008: 6)
‘When the subject is suicide, reporting on it requires the utmost sensitivity’ (The Independent, January 26, 2008: 18)
‘Police warn of Bebo ‘internet suicide cult’ (The Independent on Sunday, January 27, 2008: 35)
‘Found hanged, the boy aged ten who wanted to be a girl’ (Daily Mail, February 16, 2008: 38)
‘Suicide of boy who read of tragedies’ (Daily Express, February 16, 2008: 5)
‘They want to be dead for a bit…but if you’re dead there’s no coming back’ (Sunday Express, February 24, 2008: 10-11)
‘We can’t bring back hanging’ (Sunday Express, February 24, 2008: 29)
‘Telly ‘copycat’ (The Sun, February 16, 2008: 11)
‘Mum fears copycat death’ (Daily Mirror, February 16, 2008: 21)
‘When the subject is suicide, reporting on it requires the utmost sensitivity’, reads the title of Deborah Orr’s (2008: 18) comment in The Independent of January 26, 2008, which is the first among the national press articles under study to elevate journalists’
involvement in the Bridgend case to its main theme. This piece offers a quite different view on the local suicide problem, since, unlike most Bridgend-related articles appearing on other newspapers of that day, it clearly abstains from any attempt to establish online or offline links between individual victims and discover a ‘suicide pattern’. Orr (The Independent, 2008) points out that sensationalist suicide reporting is not just disturbing for the victims’ families, but also likely, if not to cause, at least to trigger imitative suicides.
With regard to the attention attributed to Bridgend, she argues that this is chiefly due to the ‘entertainment’ value of the story, which could easily be read as fictional drama, and to a ‘grotesque fascination’ (Orr, The Independent, 2008: 18) with the subject rather than actual compassion for the people involved. At the same time, she criticises traditional media’s tendency to demonise the Internet, since the risk of triggering imitative behaviour is present in all forms of communication giving excessive emphasis to suicide.
In that sense, she openly questions the IS frame, suggesting that the press is as likely to cause a ‘contagion’ effect as the Internet or any other medium. That is precisely why, Orr (The Independent, 2008) concludes, journalists need to acknowledge their responsibility and ensure sensible and sensitive suicide reporting.
Furthermore, Barbara Ellen (2008: 13) expresses a similar concern in The Observer a few days later, when arguing that the media’s obsession with apportioning blame is as disturbing as the Bridgend suicide problem itself. According to her, any conspiracy theories about the town being cursed, the Internet being ‘evil’ or local youngsters being doomed risk reducing the Bridgend events to some ‘corny horror movie’, thus trivialising the seriousness of the issue. No matter how dramatic and newsworthy the ‘suicide epidemic’ narrative might be, journalists always need to bear in mind, she maintains, that their stories have an impact on real people. Cultivating an impression that there is no way out of this ‘unstoppable craze’ creates a climate of hopelessness amongst the people of Bridgend, leading to mass hysteria and increasing the risk of future suicides. Addressing her colleagues, Ellen (The Observer, 2008: 13) states: ‘for these people, […] Bridgend is their home, not a Hammer House of Horror set. Bearing this in mind, maybe we should back off, stop rubbernecking and let those raw wounds heal’.
B. ‘[The link] is you, the media’: the ‘Media Responsibility’ debate expanded: In the course of the claims-making process and while the issue of sensitive suicide reporting acquires more and more prominence in The Independent and The Guardian (and respectively, The Independent on Sunday and The Observer), the MR sub-frame is embraced, not just by journalists, but also by a number of other key stakeholders. First of all, in early February, the Bridgend MP, Madeleine Moon (cited in Williams, The Independent on Sunday, 2008a: 44), clearly expresses her fury at journalists’ tendency to demonise Bridgend. She states that any discussion around ‘suicide cults’ as well as the overall media portrayal of Bridgend as a ‘suicide town’ are absolutely ‘disgraceful’ and constitute a breach of the PCC’s (2009b) Editors’ Code of Practice. She openly accuses the media of being ‘part of the problem’, since she sees this construction of Bridgend as a hopeless
‘death town’ as likely to increase the risk of imitative suicidal behaviour (Moon, cited in Hughes, The Independent, 2008a: 6). She also makes a similar point during our interview, when asked to comment on the implications of insensitive media reporting in the Bridgend case:
‘[By ‘insensitive media reporting’,] [y]ou mean ‘lying’? […] [T]here have been statements […] that yes, deaths were caused not only in this country, but also abroad as a result of the British media’s reporting of the Bridgend events. […] I’ve got no problem with newspapers who report accurately and newspapers that inform; […] that highlight failure; that demonstrate there is a problem here that needs tackling. […] We have this moral outrage about footballers who get drunk or take drugs. Well, newspapers also have responsibility as exemplars and they shouldn’t be running stories that they haven’t checked and that aren’t accurate; that can add to the vulnerability of an individual.’
(Madeleine Moon, interviewed on March 10, 2010)
Likewise, on February 5th, 2008, that is, after the death of the second female victim, Angie Fuller, and as the Bridgend story gathers momentum, Papyrus urges for the reporting of the local suicides to stop temporarily. Its chairwoman, Anne Parry, underlines the imperative need to defuse the media frenzy and implement a period of calm in order for imitative suicide attempts to be prevented (Laurance, The Independent, 2008; Papyrus, 2008). Explaining the rationale behind the charity’s decision to call for a temporary cease of coverage, Papyrus Press Officer Rosemary Vaux notes:
‘[W]e called for a temporary cease of coverage because our trustees were concerned there would be more deaths. And there were because it was just snowballing and you get this hiatus effect. So, I spent a lot of time trying to say [to journalists] why we felt that they shouldn’t cover the story, just not for the moment. And [one journalist] said:
‘But I don’t get it! Reading something in the paper and going and topping yourself?’ His words, not mine…But I said: ‘We are not talking about you and me. We are talking about vulnerable young people who can be feeling extremely distressed, just feeling […]
that life is not worth living and there is no way out. That is how they are feeling at that time and sometimes it is difficult for some of us to understand that.’
(Rosemary Vaux, interviewed on May 18, 2010) Nevertheless, at the time when these criticisms are expressed, they are mostly regarded as individual viewpoints rather than widely-accepted allegations which media professionals need to address. They receive minimum attention by the press and it is uncertain whether even that would be present had it not been for the high status of the claims-makers in question. Therefore, the MR sub-frame is at that time still resisted by the majority of journalists. It is only when the South Wales police publicly accuse the media of aggravating the Bridgend suicide problem that the preceding arguments are revisited and acquire an increased prominence in the press. After the press conference of February 19, 2008, when these accusations are articulated, journalists evidently decide that they have no choice but to respond to them. Figure 6.14 shows that the number of sample articles discussing the issue of MR is in the fifth week of the Bridgend coverage (February 20-26, 2008) more than five times higher than in the fourth one (February 13-19, 2008). This notable rise indicates a collective effort on journalists’ part to counter these media-hostile claims made by the police and, by extension, everyone else before them.
Figure 6.15: Assistant Chief Constable David Morris openly blaming the media during the press conference at South Wales police headquarters on February 19, 2008. Retrieved
November 14, 2011 from
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/02/reporting _bridgend.html.
‘What is the link since Natasha Randall’s death?’, Assistant Chief Constable of South Wales police, David Morris, rhetorically asks at the February 2008 meeting on the Bridgend suicides just to address journalists and answer right away: ‘It is you, the media’
(for the full video of his statement, see BBC News, 2008). With this statement and as the causal uncertainty and media interest in the local deaths reach their peak, he openly rules out any deadly links between the victims and puts the blame on journalists, bringing them face-to-face with their responsibility for accurate and sensitive reporting.
Showing articles from the South Wales Echo and the Sunday Express as typical examples of sensationalist coverage, he underlines the risks deriving from the boundless speculation about the ‘grim secret’ that Bridgend is allegedly hiding (Paul, Sunday Express, 2008: 15). More specifically, he maintains that the town’s unjustified stigmatisation by the media puts pressure on and generally deteriorates the mental state of vulnerable local youngsters.
The role of the media in pushing susceptible young people over the edge is in the same press conference also pointed out by victims’ parents with first and foremost those of Nathaniel Pritchard (Hughes, The Independent, 2008a; Laurance, The Independent, 2008).
It is precisely this turn in the discourse around the Bridgend suicides in February 2008 and the fact that, in the process of assigning causal responsibility (Iyengar, 1989;
Loseke, 2003a), journalists come to be seen as ‘folk devils’ themselves that make the Bridgend case so unique. Reflexively examining the level of their involvement in the Bridgend case in the wake of these criticisms, media professionals often take a rather defensive stance. This consists in either fully denying the insensitivity of the Bridgend coverage or most frequently admitting to it, but only in order to condemn other cases of inconsiderate reporting, while praising their own allegedly accurate and responsible account of the problem: the leader of the Express the day following the press conference in Bridgend refers to the police claims that the media are to blame as ‘nonsense’. It suggests in response that the local suicide problem pre-existed the media attention; that
there is a clear link to social networking sites; finally, that the media have a responsibility to inform and raise awareness over youth suicide, which constitutes a genuine issue of public concern (Daily Express, 2008: 12). Likewise, writing in the same newspaper, which is the one in which the MR sub-frame is mostly rebutted (Figure 6.13), Clark (Daily Express, 2008: 11) sees these police claims as ‘pathetic’, ‘dishonest’ and ultimately ‘a feeble attempt to blame the messenger’. Though he acknowledges the risk of glorifying suicide through irresponsible reporting, he argues that, as far as Bridgend is concerned, this is hardly the case, since the overall coverage has been nothing but appropriate or even beneficial. It has, according to him, clearly focused on the tragic loss of young lives and also informed the public, especially vulnerable youngsters and their parents, of the risks of social networking sites as well as charities working on suicide prevention. In a similar fashion, the editorial of the Daily Mail from February 21, 2008 insists that blaming the media for the Bridgend deaths is not just wrong-headed, but also dangerous, since the problem needs to be widely known and discussed in order to be tackled. It also sarcastically criticises the attention given to Bridgend by some ‘so-called quality newspapers’ and claims that the Mail is aware of the risks and has made every effort to report the story responsibly (Daily Mail, 2008: 14).
Despite admitting the shortcomings of the Bridgend coverage, Ed Caesar of The Sunday Times argues that these were over-emphasised by the police, who thus failed to see the complexity of the local suicide problem:
‘[T]he police leant so heavily on this [MR] angle […] that they closed their ears to anyone who was telling them there was a bigger problem apart from the media. […]
You didn’t see a lot of 16-year-olds in Bridgend with copies of the Daily Mail under their arm. They communicated in a completely different way. I’m sure having newspaper reporters and TV crews around probably didn’t help in terms of glamorising what was going on, but they didn’t commit suicide because newspapers reported that. It is really, really complicated and to say that it was the media’s fault seems to me a completely bogus argument. […] They [the media] definitely made claims of their own, but that’s what the media do! […] And I don’t think it’s the media’s role just to pair at what the police officers are saying. Because, actually, what the police officers said in this case was quite often obstructive and not very helpful.’
(Ed Caesar, interviewed on June 23, 2011) Furthermore, Caesar along with journalists Zack Newmark and Tony Bonnici castigate Madeleine Moon for the way she dealt with the media and the Bridgend situation in general:
‘[Madeleine Moon] had a problem on her doorstep and she was very happy to talk to me off-the-record, but she wouldn’t be on-the-record and I felt it was slightly cowardly after that to then go and file a PCC complaint against one of the only examples of in-depth and sensitive reporting that had actually been written about her area [referring to his piece for The Sunday Times magazine; the PCC complaint in question will be further discussed later on]’
(Ed Caesar, interviewed on June 23, 2011)
‘I have nothing to say about [Madeleine Moon] anymore. […] By threatening [to take legal action against] me and claiming that my interviews were somehow untruthful, even though I was open to showing her the documentary to begin with, by making that threat, you are already taking a stance where the freedom of expression and the freedom of the press is not something that is important to you. And if freedom of expression is not important to a collection of MPs, then you kind of see the area that they are going to drive with their policy as well.’
(Zach Newmark, interviewed on June 18, 2010)
‘I’m afraid I often find that calling stuff ‘sensational’ is the last refuge of the scandal.
[…] I’m not sure what Madeleine Moon had been doing up until the spate of suicides, up until the press took an interest, but she was certainly very vocal afterwards…’
(Tony Bonnici, interviewed on June 22, 2011) Following the South Wales police’s accusations, broadsheets appear, once again, more receptive to the possibility of media blame than tabloids and mid-sheets. However, this does not mean that the former are less eager to divest themselves of all responsibility by putting the blame on the latter, whenever they get the chance. For example, Peter Wilby (2008) of The Guardian views the Daily Mail’s (2008) self-proclaimed commitment to sensitive reporting as a signal of hypocrisy, since it was this very newspaper that gave from the beginning the most prominence to the Bridgend case. As more and more journalists join the debate, numerous issues are raised: the clause on the avoidance of
‘excessive detail’ about the suicide method in the Editors’ Code of Practice and the questionable efficiency of the PCC in ensuring responsible suicide coverage; the use of graphic imagery as well as of visuals copied from the victims’ online profiles without their families’ permission; finally, the inaccuracy and sensationalism of some Bridgend reports and generally the volume of the overall coverage, possibly portraying a romantic image of suicide (Laurance, The Independent, 2008; Pritchard, The Observer, 2008;
Cadwalladr, The Observer, 2009). These issues will be discussed in more detail in the following sub-section.
C. Sensitive suicide reporting as perceived in the aftermath of the Bridgend experience