Responsible reporting?
I was listening to ‘Morning Ireland’ on Radio One on my way to work this morning.
I heard Pascal Sheehy, R.T.E.’s Southern Reporter, talking about the terrible burning of a 13 year old boy in Cork.
The boy and his friends had been inhaling petrol vapours from plastic bottles.
To increase the vapourisation process they were heating the bottle with lighters.
Needless to say tragedy stuck and now a 13 year old is fighting for his life in Dublin.
My difficulty with the report was the detailing of the whole process of the inhalation of petrol, from plastic bottle, to petrol, to lighter.
The R.T.E. anchor on the programme asked Pascal Sheehy to reclarify it again …. just in case we hadn’t heard.
Teenagers and others now have a new way of inhaling …. so new that even the Guards in Cork hadn’t heard of it before.
The newsreader at 8.30 bulletin called it an incident related to petrol.
The morning is a time when the radio is on in a lot of households and in a lot of cars with lots of impressionable ears listening.
It was very irresponsible reporting.
I hope the 13 year old boy will recover.
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Paddy
I wholeheartedly agree with you here.
I remember almost screaming at the radio over the years in frustration when I heard news reporters or anchormen go into great detail of bomb making or the horror of how someone had committed suicide. I often wondered how many lives were lost because of these reports.
Ok, I am an old lady, but very much aware of how bombs, drugs and inhalants can damage lives. We all need to protect the youth of today by our words as well as our deeds.
That left me feeling sick with anger.
I hope that the child recovers and that enough peole have complained to the Radio Station.
What is missing in society that children( or anyone ) feels the need to use these drugs and solvents? I enjoy wine, beer and some spirits but I think I have only once ever felt so negative as to imbibe too much…but this deliberqate dicing with ones health at any age is frightening.
Society fails us all a lot of times …. there but for the grace etc. ….. I guess we all have our own coping mechanisms.
Unfortunately children and teens haven’t the full use of coping mechanisms yet.
I wish our society would slow down a little.