Two young people chose to end their lives in a very public way in Tirana this week. But don’t flip through our news pages, because this editorial is the only part of the newspaper that mentions their premature deaths.
If you want the gory details of the jumps, the letters, the assumptions of lost straight and gay love, the intrigue of the pits of depression these young folks were under – pick up any Albanian newspaper or open any Albanian news site and it will be all there – media ethics and common sense be damned.
It has been the policy of this newspaper to keep itself to a higher standard when it comes to ethics, particularly because so much of what happens in Albania seems to shove a lack of ethics down the people’s throats. These range from the fact that we won’t run copyrighted materials without asking for permission – as virtually every media outlet in Albania does – to the fact that we won’t cover suicides of private citizens, even when they act publicly, unless there are other elements to the story that make it newsworthy — being part of a political or social protest, for example, as was the case with the self-immolation of the former political dissidents a few years ago.
It is not a policy we invented. In Tirana Times‘ case, it was borrowed straight out of the ethical book of Canada’s newspapers. (Media in other developed nations have similar ethical approaches.) When someone jumps in front of a train or from a bridge in a major Canadian city, for example, it doesn’t make the newspapers unless there are other circumstances that would make it news – if we are dealing with a public person, for example. Canada consistently ranks as one of the freest countries for the press. So this is not about censorship, but rather about serving the interests of the public. It’s about not traumatizing the public at large, but more importantly, it is about not giving any ideas to the most vulnerable parts of the public — those contemplating suicide themselves.
Albania is a country where there is very little help and very little information about mental health and depression. In this country, these still hold a stigma that is unnecessary in the modern world. There are some resources, such as the Nuk Je Vet (You are not alone) platform run by Kosovo’s Together Foundation, which offers free advice to Albanian-speaking youths online through licensed psychologists. They were founded to help with the post-war trauma in Kosovo, but found out they were getting just as many hits from Albania, and so they have shifted their focus on this country too. But more resources like it are needed, particularly from the public health system. A societal shift is also needed to remove the stigma associated with talking about mental health issues.
The media also holds responsibility to the public, however. But trying to tell Albanian media to tone down their gory and unethical coverage of suicide might be a mute point. Not talking about it doesn’t get the eyeballs the owners so desperately need to prove they are still relevant at a time when the public is shifting away from the highly politicized and sensationalized media into the increasing options of the online world.
However, for Albania’s sake, the people likely to be reading this editorial can help put some pressure on the Albanian media to be more ethical in its approach to covering suicides and mental health as well as steer a new generation of journalists and media managers through proper ethical journalism training.
Written by Andi Balla, aballa@tiranatimes.com.
