Dear Editor,
I am writing to question the policies and judgment of your newspaper, specifically regarding your front-page article of Tuesday, March 1, 2022, titled “Unrelated shooting deaths ruled suicides” by Mac Cordell. In this article, two individuals who had completed suicide were listed and their names were printed.
In a previous J-T article from Aug. 8, 2018, titled “Body found in truck was missing veteran” by Will Channell, there is a paragraph in the article which states “While the man has been identified, the Journal-Tribune does not publish the identification of those who commit suicide.”
Can you please explain when exactly this stated policy was changed and for what reasons? While I understand the power and magnitude of the First Amendment of the Constitution granting freedom of the press, I find the March 1 article to be in extremely poor taste by listing the deceased individuals by name. These two people have family members who are grieving over their sudden and tragic loss. It just so happens that I am a member of one of these families and I am beyond infuriated that this paper would do such a thing; especially on the same day that one of the obituaries is listed, right next to the continuation of the article on page 2.
The amount of trauma and grief that my family is currently experiencing cannot be measured; and then the Journal-Tribune has the audacity to print this for the entire community, and beyond, to read? I hope that someone has brought this to your attention prior to my letter but I want this to be made known to the same amount of people that were exposed to the initial article.
At the very least, I would expect nothing less than a full apology from the Editor, as well as Mr. Cordell, for your callous and unfeeling treatment of this matter. Two families are directly affected by this article and the stigma of what has occurred now falls upon our shoulders. It isn’t enough that we must cope with the pain and loss of losing loved family members in such an abrupt and violent manner; now we must deal with being identified with the circumstances from those who knew the connection between us and the deceased.
I sincerely hope that immediate changes will come about in your organization because of this. I would like to see policies put in place and made public to the readers of this paper, so that when events like these occur again, other families will be spared the pain that two families are currently being put through. We have not yet begun the healing process and the Journal-Tribune has done nothing to help ease the pain we are experiencing. In my opinion, discretion and compassion should have been brought into consideration with this article but sadly, they were not. Shame on Mac Cordell for naming the victims in his article and shame on you for printing it.
Nebbie Brown,
Brown Moder Road