Towards a More Ethical Framework for Journalistic Death Knocks

The second speaker in this ANZCA 2023 is Alysson Watson, whose focus is on the journalistic ‘death knock’: the way journalists approach families who have lost someone in newsworthy circumstances. This is obviously difficult, given the circumstances; it has moved from a literal knock on the door to the use of other technologies, including now especially also social media technologies.

How and why do Australian journalists use such digital death knocks? Alysson conducted a survey of some 100 journalists with extensive experience of death knocks, and interviewed 10 of them. The journalistic field is a microcosm with its own rules, and this research thus explores how journalists act in this field – following what they perceive as doxa (rules) and nomos (culture) as well as developing a habitus in their activities.

Journalists tend to go into the highly emotional and intrusive experience of the death knock without much training or preparation, and have no agency to resist death knock assignments; this also generates personal impacts up to the level of post-traumatic stress disorders to them, but can sometimes also be a positive experience that helps families grieve for their loved ones. Journalists sometimes use the term ‘moral injury’ to describe these experiences: they feel they may have breached their own ethical and moral guidelines, and this can generate feelings of guilt, shame, and especially anger.

This can be mitigated by better peer and supervisor support, building also on stronger ethical codes; in Australia, the code that applies is especially the Media, Enetrtainment, and Arts Alliance’s Code of Ethics, which however also allows for a breach of such codes ‘in the public interest’.

A more advanced model for an ethical death knock might involve considerations on the preparations, precursors, and professional identity of journalists: first, there is a need for journalists to prepare more directly for such death knocks by engaging in interviewing training, building up knowledge of grieving processes, receiving advice from more experienced colleagues, and being supported by colleagues and supervisors. None of these are particularly common at this stage – there is a need for better doxa, nomos, and habitus in all of this.

Necessary precursors for death knocks require substantial levels of honesty, respect, empathy, a very personal approach, and a justifiable motive; these are not necessarily met in current practice, where for instance journalists will still sometimes use social media content about dead family members without the grieving family’s consent. Changes in habitus can make a difference here.

A third element is professional identity: adhering to and valorising ethical standards, and thereby also reframing the death knock away from understanding it as a journalistic initiation experience or a commercial imperative and towards recognising it (under appropriate circumstances) as a form of public service journalism. This might use a changing journalistic habitus to influence newsroom practices.

Such a repositioning of the death knock may then also mitigate the moral injury that journalists experience as a result of death knock practices. A more ethical approach to the practice provides the key skills and support journalists need for it, sets up ethical conditions for death knocks, and repositions them as a more positive and public-interest activity. The establishment of habitus that implements these principles can serve as a change agent for good in journalistic practice – but efforts towards this might struggle against prevailing technological and commercial imperatives in contemporary journalism.