22 November 2008
Sad saga of mental health patient and ‘media responsibility’
26 April 2007
Commentary by Sarah Lockwood: Te Waha Nui Online
When the media is faced with a judgment call needing it to weigh up an individual’s right to privacy against the public’s right to know, the Press Council code points it in the right direction. But more clarification is needed.
Weighing up an individual’s right to privacy with the public’s right to know, and making a judgment call on whether or not to disclose information, is a challenge commonly faced by the media.
The answer is not always clear-cut, but nor is it always as controversial as the Herald on Sunday’s treatment of a story involving mental health patient Mark Burton.
Stephen Cook’s article in the Herald on Sunday ran with the headline, “Mark Burton – killer at the zoo”.
Cook wrote that “the high-profile psychiatric patient who stabbed his mother to death six years ago has been working part-time at Auckland Zoo”.
The Manawatu Standard described the sad saga of Burton, a paranoid schizophrenic, who was discharged from a psychiatric hospital the day before the murder despite many warnings – including his own father’s – that he was capable of such action if released.
So, is the public’s right to know significant enough in this case to warrant publication of Burton’s personal history?
Clearly the Herald on Sunday thinks it is. Yet even within the four walls of the Herald family, there is conflicting opinion.
Depressing message
Brian Rudman, a New Zealand Herald columnist, said he wasn’t going to try to defend the story.
At a time when the government is spending millions on a celebrity-fronted campaign to humanise mental health issues, it was “depressing to see this message had failed to filter through to my Sunday colleagues”, said Rudman.
Ethical guidance may come in the form of the Press Council’s principles.
Principle three states that every person is entitled to privacy except where it interferes with obvious significant public interest.
But in the absence of some more concrete test, the term “obvious significant public interest” is still subjective and open to a wide range of interpretations.
It would be easy to say there’s clear public interest in the public knowing about Burton, considering the zoo is a public institution where people take their families, says media commentator Colin Peacock.
However, even the Herald on Sunday’s article points out the Waitemata District Health Board had assured the zoo that Burton posed no threat to the public and was “heavily supervised” at all times.
Burton has been in fulltime care of the Mason Clinic for six years.
High success rate
Clinic director Sandy Simpson says patients like Burton have an extremely high success rate, and in the last four years not one patient who has left the clinic has re-offended, according to a New Zealand Press Association article on Stuff.
Father Trevor Burton says: “I don’t believe Mark would have posed a risk to anyone at the zoo. In fact, I’d put my life on it,” according to Stephen Cook’s Herald on Sunday article.
Weighty words from a man who six years ago, prior to the murder of his wife, warned the authorities to keep Mark in hospital for fear he posed a serious and imminent threat to his family.
Six years ago, Trevor Burton was right about whether Mark could be out safely in the community and the authorities were wrong.
This time, Trevor Burton and the authorities agree that Mark poses no risk.
With assurances from the well respected and reliable Mason Clinic, and the same assurances from Trevor Burton – an ex-policeman who has been proven to know his son’s tendencies very well – it could easily be argued that there was not sufficient “obvious significant” public interest to justify the publication of Mark Burton’s identity and personal history.
It seems necessary to pin down exactly how much public interest is enough to ethically justify disclosure.
Perhaps a look at the legal position would provide a clue.
Growing tort of privacy
Media law expert Bruce Gray QC says he doesn’t think the Privacy Act 1993 has anything to say about what newspapers publish.
He says the tort of privacy that is developing in New Zealand may apply to this case.
“I think the law is clear, but because it’s quite new it hasn’t been applied to enough fact situations for us to be confident in how it will play out.”
“I think it’s an open question.”
In the absence of a clear legal position which might point towards a stable ethical stance, perhaps a useful place to look for clues is in tests or standards applied to groups other than the media.
Rebecca Palmer, of The Dominion Post, wrote that recently revamped police policy dictates police must only release information about criminals if they reasonably believe that not releasing it would pose a serious or imminent threat to public safety.
The Health Information Privacy Code 1994 holds health professionals to a very similar standard.
Rule 11(2)(d) states that disclosure is only allowed if it is necessary to prevent, or lessen, a serious and imminent threat to either the public’s or an individual’s health or safety.
Similar rule for media?
So why doesn’t the media have to abide by a similar rule?
Surely it can be argued that to breach someone’s right to privacy with a clear ethical conscience, the disclosure must be to prevent some serious and imminent threat to public safety.
But mental health professionals, the police and the media are not one and the same. There is something that sets the media apart.
The Human Rights Commission Report, Human Rights in New Zealand Today, calls it the “long-established democratic principle that the news be independent, and be seen as independent, from the State”.
This is consistent with section 14 of the Bill of Rights Act 1990, which states that everyone has the right to freedom of expression, “including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form”.
This underlying principle in New Zealand, that the media needs independence and freedom of expression above and beyond the norm, is fundamental to democracy.
But still the question remains, how much is enough public interest to satisfy the Press Council’s guideline of “obvious” and “significant”? Where do we draw the line?
Hypothetically, if the standard was that disclosure is only okay if it is to prevent a serious and imminent threat to an individual or the public, there is a strong argument that the Herald on Sunday article should not have gone to print.
Sensationalism not helpful
However, this is not the standard the Press Council principle advocates.
“I think the media has the right to disclose a story but I think their sensationalist treatment [of the Mark Burton case] is not helpful,” says Alex Stone, communications and marketing manager for the Mental Health Foundation.
And here, perhaps, might be a clue.
“The ethical consideration might be how subs amp up the headline to make it that much more dramatic, which changes the flavour of the story, even though it may be fair and balanced reporting below,” Stone says.
“Media responsibility is the best answer,” he says, “[the media] have the right to report but should have the judgment to exercise responsibility”.
Media commentator Colin Peacock’s views are comparable to this approach.
He says the media should have the right to disclose, and that the decision to publish should be at the discretion of journalists and editors.
Regarding whether Mark Burton’s story should have gone to print, Peacock’s position is somewhat similar to Alex Stone’s.
“I would argue not with that headline and not with that prominence.”
Run without identity
If it had been his call, he would have run the story without the name and without anything that would identify Burton, Peacock says.
The rationale behind this approach being that there is a public interest in knowing the situation, but not necessarily in revealing Burton’s identity and breaching his individual right to privacy.
When the media is faced with a judgment call requiring it to weigh up an individual’s right to privacy against the public’s right to know, the Press Council code points it in the right direction.
But more clarification is needed.
The law is not crystallised on the issue, and although standards for the police and health professionals might initially look promising – the democratic principle of freedom of the press seems to override such a stringent test.
The idea of “media responsibility”, as Alex Stone suggested, seems a sound one.
When applying media responsibility – another subjective term but helpful nonetheless – to Burton’s case, the ethical thing to do might have been to run the story, but without such a sensationalist headline and without identifying him personally.
Sarah Lockwood is a Graduate Diploma in Journalism student at AUT. This article was an ethics assignment in the Public Affairs Reporting paper.
Links:
- Mark Burton – killer at the zoo, Herald on Sunday.
- Health Information Privacy Code 1994, www.privacy.org.nz
- Zoo’s sacking of Burton less than a fair go, The New Zealand Herald.
- New Zealand Press Council’s Statement of Principles
