On Friday, Aug. 26, during her return to campus for her junior year, 20-year-old Sarah Brady lost control of her car, crashed and died. The next day, and for the remainder of that week, the Graphic reported on her death and the grief of the Pepperdine community. Along with dozens of other news organizations around the nation that reported the story, the Graphic also ran a photo of the wreckage of Sarah’s car on the front page of its website, a photo that was not gruesome and did not violate journalistic standards of decency. At the request of Sarah’s mother, that photo was promptly removed out of sensitivity to Sarah’s loved ones.
The Graphic received some criticism for running this photo, and even the story in the first place. According to those complaints, our reporting exploited Sarah’s death and hurt her family and friends. As a staff, we deeply regret if our journalism brought any pain to the people Sarah left behind. However, we respectfully disagree with the idea that reporting a death is an exploitation of tragedy.
The motives of the Graphic were to memorialize the loss of a much-loved member of our community, with clarity and honesty — a standard we demand of ourselves as ethical reporters.
As the primary student news outlet of the Pepperdine community, our mission is to serve that community through the impartial publication of relevant occurrences. We have a responsibility to our readership and to ourselves to deliver accurate, factual and intelligent reporting. We take this duty seriously.
The choice of what is published in the Graphic is not made for the sake of sensationalism. The events we cover are chosen because they are worth acknowledging and facing head-on. We are the mirror to the community we serve, good or bad. Stories are reported for the sake of those in the community who care and care to know. We report these stories out of respect to the people we’re writing about, the people whose stories we are telling.
Any attempt on our part to sanitize or censor our reporting of the accident in an effort to coddle our readership, would have diminished the tragedy of Sarah’s death, rather than respected it.
By writing about loss and grief, we do our part for the community and individuals that are suffering. As journalists, we cannot allow these things to be swept under the rug and forgotten. We cannot shy away from harsh truths, no matter how painful.
Sarah’s death was a terrible loss to the entire community; it’s a type of loss that many of us are intimately familiar with. While the non-collegiate media ran the same copy-and-pasted paragraphs off the national newswire, paired with the photo of the accident itself, we at the Graphic did our best to cover the story with a personal connection in a way only we could. We wanted to honor Sarah’s memory by sharing with the community not only the facts of what happened, but also what a bright, wonderful person she was in life. We did just that.
Unlike other media sources with no connection, we covered her memorial and the aftermath of the accident in a manner acknowledging the personal impact on our community.
At the request of her mother, the photo of her accident was immediately removed from our website. No other press agency would be so responsive to the feelings of the family. That was our responsibility to our community, not to demean or devalue the loss and grief of Sarah’s loved ones, but to acknowledge the loss itself.
The decision to run the photo of the accident was made initially because other local and national news outlets set the precedent of the coverage; and after much debate, we decided that the photo was within standards of decency and we would run it. Decisions like these are not made on the fly — we give constant attention not only to the stories we run, but also to how we present them. We do our best to consider those who will be affected by anything the Graphic publishes, both online and in print.
Reporting tragedy is the unfortunate duty of any news organization, but it is a duty nonetheless. We always try to handle these stories with sensitivity that they deserve while holding true to the principles of accurate and pertinent reporting.
As ethical journalists and members of the Pepperdine community, we reported the story of the tragic loss of one of our own: a bright student, a loving daughter and a devoted friend, someone who should be remembered as more than a statistic. It was, in our minds, the very least we could do.
