Death and journalism have always maintained a delicate and sometimes weird relationship.  During my days as a news writer for the old United Press International, my first lesson on the subject involved events with death tolls.  Any time the death toll is uncertain, the rule was to always go with the lowest ascertainable figure available.  The logic for low-balling death counts was clear as crystal; in news copy, it’s easier to kill people than it is to bring them back from the dead.

Julianna and Theresa Rolle

I was also taught the standard rules that applied to reporting on deaths.  There’s weren’t a lot of them but they managed to cover most circumstances:

• Was the person a minor?  (Child deaths are always more sensitive)
• Was the person a public official? (The public’s right to know is paramount)
• Was the death a public event? (Was it caused by a natural disaster? A fire? A crime? People have a natural and legitimate interest)
• Did the person occupy a degree of public awareness? (Movie stars and other non-elected but notable persons fit into this category)
• Did the circumstances of the death include a societal or public safety issue? (Death caused by bad roads, bad policy or bad ideas are absolutely fair game)
• Was it a freak of nature? (People are just sort of attracted to, well, freak stories)
• Is it a slow news day? (Like it or not, it’s a fact of life when covering death)
• What is the geographic depth of interest? (A routine death in a smaller town is far more newsworthy than a routine death in a major city)

Regrettably, even these somewhat loosy-goosey protocols of decorum and judgment have been lost in what passes for 21st-century reporting, the most recent example being this dreadful breach of professionalism from Gawker. (more…)

The lurid website Gawker.com recently posted a story about the suicide of a Fox News employee that was entirely empty of any real newsworthiness, but did serve as a platform to throw a dig at Fox News. In fact, it seems the only reason that Gawker posted the story at all is to attack Fox News. Exploiting this poor woman’s death and mental anguish just to get a dig at Fox News is over-the-top even for Gawker, but it is the culture our friends on the left have fostered in America today.

Featuring a giant Fox News logo, the Gawker piece blares in a bold headline that “Former Fox News Producer Committed Suicide, Investigators Say.” From all the hoopla Gawker gave this story one would think that Fox News was central in the story. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Certainly the suicide of a Fox News employee could be newsworthy. If it had involved a high profile, on-air personality or high executive of Fox, perhaps the news of his suicide might be somewhat newsworthy. But the woman whose death Gawker and its commenters are chortling over is nothing of the kind. (more…)

A young woman’s mother dies recently, and a few weeks later, suffering from severe depression, she herself dies, falling off a cliff in California in an apparent suicide. In the old days of responsible journalism, publications didn’t report suicides unless they were of high-profile people. So why was this apparent suicide worth of coverage on the leftist snarksite called Gawker?

The woman just happened once to work for the Fox News Channel:

Julianna Rolle, a 39 year-old former Fox News producer, was found dead at the bottom of a 100-foot cliff last weekend in her hometown of Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Authorities now say she jumped to her death…

Rolle’s father said that she had joined Fox News in New York as a producer after graduating from UCLA, and “traveled through Europe and worked as a bureau chief in Iraq, covering the war.” We can’t find any further information about her employment online, however. We’ve emailed Fox News for confirmation and we’ll update if we hear more.

While many of Gawker’s readers displayed the appropriate sentiments, some of the tolerant, compassionate liberals predictably showed their true colors, which was probably the whole point of publishing the obit in the first place.

Dear other Fox News employees: Julianna Rolle is a shining example for you all.
— scarletmenace

There’s more: (more…)