The pictures of a woman leaping to her death from a hotel that appeared in the Evening Standard last night and again in the Times and Sun today are certainly dramatic and horrifically eyecatching, but should they have been published?
Some people have already complained about the photographs – one showing the woman's body in mid-fall - to the Press Complaints Commission. And the PCC's code appears to give their arguments some credibility. "In cases involving personal grief or shock, enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively," the code states.
Clearly editors have been wrestling with ethical issues here. The Daily Express chose not to use the picture of the woman jumping, though it did show her on the ledge outside her bedroom window. And while the Daily Telegraph reported the story, it did not use any images. Other papers ignored the story altogether.
It should be pointed out that suicide in itself is not such a rare phenomenon to rate much attention in newspapers, unless someone famous is involved. It is tempting to think that this story has been reported only because of the pictures. The fact that she was a successful lawyer, and a female one at that, perhaps adds to the attention the images will get, but without the pictures themselves, what would the story really amount to, in cold news terms?
So can these pictures really be justified against accusations of prurience and bad taste? Are they not a gratuitous invasion of the grief likely to be suffered by the friends and family of the dead woman? And though she chose to end her life so publicly, doesn't the victim herself deserve more respect?
