Forum - View topic

Stop publishing articles on the identities of the victims of the KyoAni Studio Fire

Dont understand why there is a need to keep the victims and such secret and hidden as we owe it to the victims to not forget them but to remember them and highlight their contributions to the field and to their family and community.

However, in this case, KyoAni is asking for journalists to break established protocol. They are asking journalists to disregard statements from the family and wait for KyoAni to announce the deaths after the funerals.

Is it an abnormal request in Japan? I'd imagine journalists there might operate under a somewhat different set of ethical standards than those in the West.

Dont understand why there is a need to keep the victims and such secret and hidden as we owe it to the victims to not forget them but to remember them and highlight their contributions to the field and to their family and community.

It's certainly your right to disregard KyoAni's request and make the decision to publish whatever you decide to. But I would hope that the bar to decide what to publish and what not to publish goes beyond 'another outlet published it so it's okay'.

I'm not a journalist, but I understand that deciding whether to disregard their request, especially in the context of the Japanese media environment, would depend on whether it serves the public interest. In that sense, I really can't see what is so pressing and vital for your audience, especially for such a sensitive situation, that you felt you had to publish this immediately instead of waiting.

To be honest, I'm not really surprised that newspapers in Japan will go totally low, considering they typically look for the next big scandal everytime... but do these so-called journalists get incentives when they get a scoop?

A few years ago, when I was a metro reporter for The New York Times, an editor sent me out to try to get an interview with a grieving mother, whose son had just shot and killed two New York City police officers before killing himself. The shootings happened not long after the killings of Eric Garner and Mike Brown by police, and there was the sense that maybe Ismaaiyl Brinsley killed the two cops in retaliation. It was the kind of news event that sends the press into a frenzy.

I drove to the mother’s house way out in Brooklyn and rang the buzzer. I knew that other reporters had been, and would be, way more aggressive than I wanted to be. When a man responded through the intercom that the mother wasn’t available, I politely gave him my name and left without trying to convince him to let me in. In my mind, the mother was grieving, even if her son had committed a despicable act. I didn’t tell my editors that I had given up so easily.

There is incredible pressure in these situations. The whole city is pressing for information. Funnel all of that desire into one or two editors who are constantly calling or emailing for updates. There is a feeling that we reporters are allowed to be less decent than we would be under other circumstances. But it really hit me when I was standing at that mother’s doorstep, when we are out in the field on our own, we are on our own—it’s just us and the person we hope to connect with. The interaction can be much more intimate than the news crush would have us believe. I try to preserve the humanity of that interaction. This anecdote has a happy ending, reporting-wise. I ended up getting the interview with the mother. When I called later, the man who answered the intercom and who was helping the mother to manage the press liked that I wasn’t so pushy.

Яeverse wrote:

Dont understand why there is a need to keep the victims and such secret and hidden as we owe it to the victims to not forget them but to remember them and highlight their contributions to the field and to their family and community.

Well, in situations like this, it's standard journalism policy to not announce any deaths until they are announced either by the police or by the family of the victims.