GRIEVING FAMILY, PRIVACY INTRUSION AND AN INSENSITIVE MEDIA

A distraught family is mourning the loss of a loved one, after a terror attack in northeastern Kenya. A crew from a local media house is filming and asking questions about the victim. A composed family friend shares the information requested. But the mother of the victim can still be heard wailing. An insensitive media yet again puts a news story above the privacy needs of a grieving family.

What informs the urgency to cover such stories, and why can't the affected families be spared the media glare, so soon after learning about the death of one of their own?

It is utterly cruel for the journalists to not even have the courtesy to stop rolling their camera, until the victim's mother is emotionally stable.

Moreover, any kind of discussion about the victim in her earshot, is bound to augment the trauma being experienced by the grieving mother.

Couldn't the interview be conducted away from the distressed mother?

In any case, it is highly probable that whatever the family friend is saying to the reporter, does not register much with a viewer, because it is just not human to ignore the sounds of a weeping mother.

For me, it's as if the reporter here was trying to downplay the pain of the victim's mother, in trying to get details about the final moments of the victim.

Just as Joe Hight so accurately observes in the Colorado Springs Gazette:

"Most victims or victims' relatives face a wall of grief in the aftermath of a death or disaster....They don't see into the past or future; they see the present and feel the pain of the moment"

Fellow scribes, follow this principle and desist from blatantly violating the grieving space.

FROM AN EDITORIAL NONSENSE TO AN ON SCREEN NIGHTMARE

Long sentences in broadcast news can make the audience discern a script being read. The preferred perception is to make the stories sound more conversational, and short sentences are a big help here. Windy sentences can also yield editorial nonsense, where language mastery is a concern. If the nonsense is displayed on screen, the result is an editorial nightmare.

Trying to load as much information as possible in a single sentence might appear smart, but it requires an acceptable level of alertness.

To begin with, the strap depicted above is way too busy, for a viewer to comfortably read, never mind the elements of repetition.

And since the medium is TV,  the viewer is also listening to the voice of the anchor/reporter, while engaging the eyes to process the video element.

The required coordination of sensory organs is greatly jeopardised by the eyesore of a top line, in the lower third story tag, which sates:

"Court denies man charged with chopping wife's hands denied bail"

Oh dear! It almost appears as if the words were being randomly strung together, hoping the resultant sentence would communicate the desired meaning.

But evidently, even with editorial licence, news packaging is a precise undertaking not best left to chance.