By Josh Beavers –
I was on the couch Tuesday night when World News Tonight got to RJ Mitte. He played Walter White Jr. on “Breaking Bad,” and he was only 34. The anchor said he had died by suicide, and the broadcast moved on to the next story.
I sat there with the remote in my hand and asked the television a question it couldn’t answer. What was the point of telling us that?
I know the arguments for it. I went to journalism school and spent years in newsrooms, and I remember where I first heard a version of the industry’s answer.
I was a journalism student at Northwestern when I turned in a headline about a death. I had written that the person “passed.” My professor marked it and told me it should say “dead.” I told him, not very sure of myself, that “passed” seemed kinder.
He said journalists aren’t paid to be kind. Yes, he was, indeed, an A-hole. But I digress.
I didn’t argue. I was young and figured he knew something I didn’t, so I nodded and fixed the headline.
As Anton Chigurh said, if the rule you follow brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
If I could go back, I’d tell him a few things I can’t print here. Then I’d tell him that the people reading about a death in the paper are sometimes the people who just lost someone. A little kindness in someone’s tenderest moment doesn’t cost a newspaper a thing.
But I never wrote “dead” in a headline again. I didn’t do it once in all my years at newspapers, and nobody ever noticed. It was passive aggressive and petty, and I’m still a little proud of it. It’s all about the small rebellions you can get away with in a world devoid of common sense and empathy.
If you look up why news outlets report suicides, you’ll find the same answer in different words. Facts get reported. One journalism ethics argument holds that reporters have a duty to share important facts even when they are unsettling. After Robin Williams died, a writer in the Los Angeles Times argued the manner of his death was public information and should be reported as long as the public stayed interested.
That last part is code for greed. We used to say if it bleeds, it leads, and a famous name with a sad ending still leads. More clicks. More pennies in the pockets. Money > people.
“Facts get reported” is a cop-out. It lets a person be cold and call it professionalism, because a rule made the decision for them and all they have to do is point to the rule.
As Anton Chigurh said, if the rule you follow brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
In fairness, nobody had to dig for this one. Mitte’s representatives confirmed the cause, and Bryan Cranston mentioned it in his own statement. But being handed a fact doesn’t obligate anybody to read it on the evening news.
The paper you’re reading right now made a different choice. The Webster Parish Journal will report that someone in our community has died, but it won’t report that the death was a suicide. Nobody here has ever complained that they weren’t told enough.
I don’t come at this as a media critic. My father committed suicide.
I can say that plainly now. I’m not ashamed or embarrassed about it. It’s a pain I have, a gash in my heart and soul and reminds me I’m human. Our scars tell our stories. This one gives me perspective. Perspective I didn’t have back then as a youngin’.
What I remember most from that time happened at the visitation. A man came through the line, and instead of telling me he was sorry, he asked if my father did it on purpose.
I’m still stunned by that question. I don’t know what answer he expected, or what he planned to do if I confirmed it. He was standing a few feet from my father’s casket, and he couldn’t read the room.
That man was lucky. My mental state was not in a good place that night, and he came close to ending up in a coffin beside my father, or at least in the hospital. I’d have ended up in the lockup. I’m not proud of it. But it is what it is, as they say.
The survival instinct is the strongest force a human being has. I’ve watched lifelong believers, people who never doubted where they were headed, get scared at the end anyway. For a person to override that instinct, they have to be completely broken. My father was in that kind of pain, and the news still treats a death like his as one more item to read between commercials.
There’s a line that gets passed around online, usually credited to Dostoevsky, that people have beautiful things to say about you, but you must die first. With suicide, even that kindness gets taken away. Once the cause is out, people talk about how a man died instead of how he lived. Grief is hard enough in private. When everyone knows how someone died, they start to think they’ve been invited to ask about it. Every time a network reads a suicide into a newscast, it makes that kind of question a little more likely for some family it will never meet.
The thing is, journalism has rules for this, too. Newsrooms have had suicide reporting guidelines since 2001, written to keep coverage from putting vulnerable people at risk. An Ohio University study found that newspapers covering celebrity suicides followed only about half of them, and not one shared the message that suicide is preventable.
Those guidelines exist for a reason. One analysis of 20 American studies found suicide rates rose 8 to 18 percent in the two months after a celebrity suicide.
My professor enforced his headline rule like scripture. I never saw anybody that strict about the guidelines that might keep someone alive.
As Anton Chigurh said, if the rule you follow brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Some people think somebody’s arbitrary rule is reason enough to throw out common sense. I see it every day, in every way. When did common sense become so easy to expel?
I’ve started to wonder whether people who insist every rule must be followed to the letter have much capacity for common sense, or for the empathy that’s supposed to come with it.
We keep using facts and rules as an excuse to be colder and crueler to each other, and we lose a little more of our humanity every time.
RJ Mitte’s family has some hard days ahead. I hope whoever comes through the line to see them knows what not to ask.
And if anybody wrote a headline about him this week, I hope it said he passed.
Josh Beavers is an award-winning columnist who earned four Best Columnist awards from the Louisiana Press Association. He traded the newsroom for the classroom in 2013, convinced that teaching young people to write, to think, and to become productive members of their community was the more important work.