For this article, it was one of the first one’s that brought a question to my mind. How do you truly handle grieving a public icon right away? I know the wrong way to do it, is to release the news before any kin finds out or even before first responders arrive on the scene. An important statement from this article that I found while reading was, “Experiencing breaking events in real-time is a relatively new phenomenon. On that day, it was as if the entire world was following the same Twitter timeline, waiting for more information.” The world is changing every single second and by the time the next major celebrity suddenly passes away, we could be hearing the news a completely different way. But the reason this statement stood out to me so much was because that’s exactly how myself and the 6 of my friends reacted. Just silence and reading our phones and no one knew what to say. I’m sure this is exactly what Vanessa Bryant felt, before she got the phone call confirming the article she saw on her phone.
This article relates back to our text, Media Ethics, very well. On page 155, it states about case 5-C and a case about Joe Mixon, a professional football player. His story sort of relates to Kobe’s on simply just how it was reported.
A pro to this article is that even though the media produced the news to the public prematurely, we learned a lot of what to do and what not to do. A con to this article is we still don’t know how to handle news like this properly. The ethical conflict to this story is that if you are a celebrity or if you have any significant knowledge to the public, you have no right to privacy. A solution to this article would have to be just to simply have a written rule on when you can produce the news to public and when you can’t.
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