Slashdot Mirror
A Suicide Goes Viral On the Internet
Hugh Pickens writes "Will Oremus reports that Fox News showed a grisly spectacle Friday afternoon during a live car chase when the suspect got out of his car, stumbled down a hillside, pulled a gun, and shot himself in the head. As the scene unfolded, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith grew increasingly apprehensive, then yelled 'get off it, get off it!,' belatedly urging the show's producers to stop the live feed as it became obvious the man was going to do something rash. Fox News cut awkwardly to a commercial just after showing his death and after Fox aired the on-air suicide, Smith apologized to viewers, saying, 'We really messed up.' However BuzzFeed immediately posted the footage on YouTube, where it garnered more than 1,000 'likes' in under an hour, sparking immediate blowback. 'Who's worse? @FoxNews for airing the suicide, or @BuzzFeed for re-posting the video just in case you missed it the first time?' posted the Columbia Journalism Review. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan called his site's decision to post the video 'ethical,' because 'it is news' but research suggests that graphic depictions of suicide in the media can spur copycat suicides, especially among young people, and the World Health Organization's guidelines warn against sensationalizing it. Virtually everyone who has studied it agrees that, at a minimum, suicides should be covered with a modicum of sensitivity and context (PDF). 'Of course it's news that Fox News accidentally aired the video. And you can make a good case that Fox was inviting this type of debacle with its habit of airing live car-chase feeds. But Fox couldn't have known that it was about to air a suicide. BuzzFeed, by contrast, knew exactly what it was doing,' writes Oremus. 'That might be good business for BuzzFeed, but it's hard to see the benefit for anyone else.'"
Of course they aired it because it was exciting, and statistically, suicides are rare.
On April 30, 1998, I decided to ditch the latter half of the school day with my girlfriend. On the news was the long, drawn-out suicide of Daniel Victor Jones [ WARNING: GRAPHIC! ] who was an AIDS patient protesting, on the Los Angeles' 710 freeway, teh lack of care he received through an HMO. The part that the video does not show is that he gets in his truck with his dog before he sets the truck on fire, then runs out of the flaming truck shutting the door behind him so that his dog dies in the inferno.
Then, he gets his shotgun and blows his head off. All of this was televised LIVE on the news, which caused the news networks to actually put counselors on the air after the incident, it was a huge shitstorm.
As for me, I felt sick to my stomach for the rest of the day. My girlfriend said, "well, that fucker deserved it. Let's go get some KFC. " I told her, "you want to eat right after watching a grizzly live suicide?!" She said, "Yeah, why not? He deserved it, burning his dog like that. Let's go to KFC."
-- Ethanol-fueled
Yes, nobody who dies from suicide could possibly have ever contributed anything to the benefit of society.
Let's face it: suicide happens. You'll get far more suicides happening by not talking about it than you will by revealing the truth to people - even if a few copycat suicides in the immediate aftermath are inevitable. Hint: people don't just kill themselves because they've seen a death, but may simply have seen a method for doing something they wanted to do anyway.
This is true, but they've noticed correlations between different ways that suicide is discussed and the suicide rate following it. The suicide rate tends to go down if it is discussed in a way that includes urging people who are thinking about it to get help. However, when someone's glorified for their suicide and no one says to get help if you're thinking about it, suicide rates tend to go up. Of course, that's all just correlation, not causation, but it is interesting.
I watched the unedited footage, it wasn't that bad. In Europe they show traffic accidents in all their horror, burned bodies and all.
I just don't get why this is such a big deal. I loath Fox News because they're the propaganda arm of the GOP, not because of something trivial like this.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I think that Fox, just like most of our mainstream media, are so fixated on the inflammatory and absurd instead of the productive and positive, that it is nearly impossible to avoid these kinds of scenarios.
You take a media system primarily driven by shock/awe/horror/fear (obviously the scared viewers hang around for commercials), and combine that with high profitability, and what do you expect? A perfectly censored viewing of something horrible?
We know there are pedophiles out there. We know there are horrible tragedies out there. We know that somewhere, someone at a workplace, did something unethical. And yet the news persists to demonstrate these rare (compared to the whole population) events and fixate on them. Eventually, what were small tragedies with few people inflamed/affected, become big talked-up national debates with wide scale fears and social responses.
Ironically, good things are happening far more frequently, but even big-scale good things (like scientific progression, community efforts, etc) are ignored or understated.
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So you have a media that is basically focused, and profiting, on rubbernecking bloody car accidents (metaphorically), and then a dead body (something horrible) shows up on the live stream..... What did those highly attentive, can't-wait-to-find-out-the-next-horrible-thing, viewers expect to see? When you're the consumer, and you show these orginazations that you're going to pay the most attention when horrible things are on TV, what do you expect them to give you?
You'd better be sure that the intense watching of the gay-meth-sex scandal of that (south carolina?) governor, was part of the juice that drives these news organizations to show more scary stuff, like live police chases, molested catholic kids, etc etc etc.... You'd better be sure damn sure, as a viewer, that when you paid so much attention to the child molesting teacher in LA this spring that you asked to see more of that....
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The major news organizations suck for not having an integrity beyond profit; that they will do what sells best over what is representative of real life.
The consumers suck for actually paying so much attention, getting scared, and then paying even more attention. People should be informed enough to know how their role as a consumer influences the values and actions of other elements in life. They should, also, spend less time in worry, seeking wrongs, and more time in reflection and planning, seeking positive answers for the wrongs they acknowledge.
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I don't blame Fox (for this). I don't blame the site that echoed it. If you were watching the chase, you wanted to see something nasty, and got more than you may have bargained for. If you watched the echo, then you know exactly what you asked to see.
Is it compassion to force someone that wants to die to live? Let's look at the person who committed suicide here - he was probably going to prison, and knowing US prisons death might have been a less cruel alternative. So why not let him die on his own terms?
When a society is successful, it finally has the luxury of protecting its weakest members. You may have your cause and effect reversed.
Hey, maybe those people were just pissed off at society taking their contributions and treating them like dirt, and decided to go on strike in a rather final way. If that's the case, trying to stop the suicide is just strikebreaking.
Turing particularly got the short end of the stick; Van Gogh famously sold only one painting in his lifetime, not counting "sales" to his brother. He also ate his paint and likely wouldn't have produced what he did if he wasn't crazy already.