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What seems to be clear to everyone outside of the media bubble is that there are two different levels of story here.
There is a public tragedy, which encompasses 12 known deaths, underfunding of fire precautions, and potential issues with cladding, and a very intimate private tragedy of both those who have lost loved ones, and those who have lost their homes and might never feel safe living in a flat again.
No one is criticising the media for covering the first part - that is their remit. Instead people are criticising the media for focusing blindly on the second part, even when it is clearly unwelcome. There is a perception that the news cycle moves quickly because the media have learned that personal tragedies sell issues, so they focus on one persons tragedy until it is played out and then move on to the next, rather than actually do any journalism on the public front.
You say it is hard to know where the line is on something like this. I would posit that it is clear to anyone with any degree of empathy that in a situation like this, the line is pretty far away from people suffering unless they explicitly invite you over it.
If you wanted to stick your camera in someones nose, Gavin Barwell seems a prime target and might actually unearth something relevant to the public tragedy.
branwen-
You say it is hard to know where the line is on something like this. I would posit that it is clear to anyone with any degree of empathy that in a situation like this, the line is pretty far away from people suffering unless they explicitly invite you over it.
So your baseline is that we are all devoid of empathy. It's really quite hard having a reasonable discussion when people talk in such hyperbolic and insulting terms.
Anyway.
Photography and video produce far greater engagement than the written word, which is why there's always such an emphasis on collecting imagery.
And it can be hard to convey the scale of a tragedy without showing something of it.
Would the coverage have been so effective without images of the burning building? Would the upswelling of public support for our underfunded fire service have been as strong without the very moving images of exhausted firemen taking a break from battling the blaze on a street corner? To get all that imagery, photo and video journalists had to be there, on the scene, as the tragedy unfolded. And obviously a lot of the people directly affected were there too.
Talking to the victims of a tragedy is important for the wider public to understand how it affects them. And as I said before, sometimes people feel like they are being unfairly ignored if their story isn't told. There's often an understanding that getting their story out there is the best way to create pressure for change.
But in the immediate aftermath of an event, tensions are high, emotions are raw, and sometimes people mis-step. Yes, there's an important discussion to be had about how to be sensitive in those situations, and there are guidelines that not all journalists adhere to. They should. But in a very dynamic situation, sometimes mistakes are made.
I'm not defending the journalists in question. Maybe they overstepped the line - I don't know.
But there's a very strong line of thinking on this board that journalists should be compelled not report on things you don't like, that they should be compelled to report more on things you do like, and that we're all subhuman and violence against us is fair game.
I find that deeply disturbing.
h2o
The news cycle moves very quickly, and these things can drop out of the public eye if they're not covered. I said that I accept that the journalists in question may have gone too far in this case. But it's hard to know where the line is - I posted some academic studies earlier in this thread that went into the issue and showed that some people feel like their plight is being ignored if it's not covered. And I distinctly remember the media being heavily criticised in this thread for not covering things that people here wanted to be all over the news.
It's a damned difficult job to do, and we don't always get it right. I don't get why we deserve so much blanket hate, though.