How News Media Place Values on Life

Abstract

With the benefit of an historical context for the display of death in the news, I want to now examine in more detail some of the finer aspects of how the end of life is represented in today’s media environment. I will focus here particularly on empirical evidence in terms of how prevalent death is, which deaths are accentuated in the news and, in the next chapter, how death is displayed through photographs. Interestingly, while death has substantial news value, and, as we have seen, has featured quite heavily in the news, very few studies have made death itself the center of attention. Mostly, studies have focused on deaths from violence, and have often been conducted within wider studies examining war reporting. Another focus has been on deaths from natural disasters, and how the locations of those disasters can have an impact on how prominent the reporting will be.