Should a Disaster Strike...

When human tragedy strikes and somebody ends up committing a horrific act, such as woman crashes a car into a bus killing her children on Sunday in the North East of Finland, the news media always have a field day. Finally something happens and there are plenty of things to write about. This is naturally problematic from the perspective of the individuals whom are concerned with the real and actual events and their privacy. Through bits of available information, like what Ilta-Sanomat (Finland's biggest daily yellow press) has been able to put together on the case, is constructed a narrative of sad, unfortunate events created by a very sad,unfortunate person. And yet, it doesn't help us to understand it any better, so the question to ask is, is it justifiable to publish all this information?

Finland's Council for Mass Media (CMM) in its guidelines for journalists states that "highly delicate matters concerning people's personal lives" should not be shared without their consent, especially concerning minors, but the dirty laundry is often being washed at full speed already, taking this piece related to this horrific intentional car crash from another daily in Finland, Iltalehti, as an example. The CMM guidelines also emphasize the significance as an issue concerning the society as a whole, when determining the rights of privacy. Well, in Finland it typically seems to be important to ask the question "whose fault is this?" To know which part of the social system failed.

Besides the aspects of personal privacy and interpreting societal significance, over time disaster reporting on "iconic traumas", such as the 9/11, take on a life of their own. They become the tales of our times to explain why the world is the way it is. The antagonistic storyline of the struggle between the West and the Middle East has been repeated in countless films and the public anxiety created by potential terrorism has fully been utilized by governing bodies to introduce further measures of control in society.