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...it's not harassment to try and contact the family of people involved in an attack to speak to them.
And this is where you and I must disagree.
You might think the note polite; I think tracking someone down and personally posting it through their door intimidatory.
That IPSO consider, what others would deem the most basic standard of common decency, worthy of inclusion in their Code of Practice, only demonstrates how utterly useless they are as a regulator.
Not that including something in a CoP makes it valid, reasonable or justified.
Apart from which, what possible purpose does it serve? Who needs to be informed of what the family is experiencing? "Your son is missing: can you give us a sense of how that feels?"
Scilly.Suffolk
I guess my main point is people getting angry about journalists doing journalism.
Take the Telegraph example - it's not harassment to try and contact the family of people involved in an attack to speak to them. Repeatedly doing so or doing so when it was made clear they were unwelcome would be harassment. Sticking a polite note through the door with your business card isn't. Journalists gather and report news and this is one way of doing it - people might find that distasteful and an intrusion but the IPSO code of practice says this:
In cases involving personal grief or shock, enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively.