Reporting Crossed the Line on Crash Victim

Re “God Took Him Away,” (Nov. 6):

The article regarding the funeral rites for Fuad Memon was certainly a local news story, but your writer crossed the line by making it a point to remind the family that Memon would have been spared the fatal trip home, had it not been for the pleadings of his daughter.

This was a little girl who missed her daddy. She and her family will have to live with the pain of their loss, but to make it a point to lay culpability for Memon’s choice to return home early at the feet of this child is outrageous. That may have been a small part of the story, but now when she looks at the story a few years or decades later she’s reminded that somehow her daddy’s death was her fault.

Sensationalism does sell newspapers, but it has no place in the grief of a family. You owe this grieving family an apology.

KEVIN O’BRIEN

Laguna Hills

* I am deeply offended by the photograph of the grieving family on the cover of Section B on Nov. 6 in the Orange County edition.

The photo was taken at the funeral of Fuad Memon, an Orange County resident who died in the Singapore Airlines plane crash last week. It shows Mr. Memon’s widow and mother-in-law crying in front of what appears to be the flower-draped coffin. I believe the photo invades the privacy of the two women at a time when their grief makes them vulnerable to an intrusive news media.

We all surround ourselves with circles of intimacy. We are alone with our private thoughts and emotions in the innermost circle; family members and close friends with whom we share our secrets are in the circle just beyond our private thoughts; and acquaintances are in the outer-most circle. The general public is beyond that circle of intimacy.

Your photograph takes a very private, emotional moment these women were sharing with family members and close friends and moves it outside their circles of intimacy and into the scrutiny of the general public.

More than 80 people dying in a plane crash is certainly newsworthy, especially if local residents were aboard the plane. But the funeral of one of the crash victims is not newsworthy enough to warrant two photos and a lengthy story. Memon was not a public figure whose death touches thousands of Times readers who would want to share the family’s grief. I suspect the need to gather news on a slow Sunday played a large part in the decision to give this private funeral such prominent display.

I teach media ethics, and I give my students tools to help them determine when an invasion of privacy is warranted. In a situation like this one, I would tell them to judge what they are doing by asking: How important is this photo? Does the public have a right or need to know or simply a desire to know?

How much protection do the people in the photo deserve? Are they in the news by choice or by happenstance? And finally, can I justify my decision to publish the photo to both the people in the photo and to my readers?

I think the answer to the last question is: No, I can’t justify publishing the photo.

TOM CLANIN

Department of Communications

Cal State Fullerton