Oct. 6 to 12 is National Newspaper Week.
If you are like most folks, you likely think Canada is more free with information given to the press than the U.S.
Nope.
This was brought home to us in The Squamish Chief newsroom last week when, tragically, a local climber died while climbing Mount Baker in Washington State.
Our newsroom put in a call to the Whatcom County Medical Examiner’s office, who patched us through to the actual medical examiner, who confirmed for us right then, on the phone, the information we were looking for: who died, what they died of and if it was accidental.
We then put in a call to the Whatcom County Sheriff’s office.
The communication official’s voicemail directed the media to text her. Moments later, she texted back with a news release, which included information about where the climber was, how he was reported missing, the agencies involved in the search and the steps of the mission. It also included officials’ quotes, and a photo to use.
The officials treated us like it was our right and job to ask for this information and their job to tell us.
Our accurate and informative story based on what we learned was up within an hour.
That is not how it works if someone dies in Squamish, B.C. or Canada.
First, usually, no official agency releases the deceased person’s name.
The B.C. Coroners Service used to release the names of the deceased whose deaths it was reviewing, but that stopped in 2017.
RCMP are usually tight-lipped as well.
Now, dear reader, we aren’t saying that media should be told before family or that we need gory details. And this certainly isn’t a shot at the front-line humans of these agencies, who aren’t to blame for the policies in place that they must abide by. There’s also the simple capacity issue: not enough staff to deal with media questions.
But deaths in public are often in the community’s interest to know about, so worthy of journalists’ coverage. As humans, we want to know what happened, who it was (or wasn’t) that passed away, how they died, and what can be learned from the death.
Take reporting on Sea to Sky Highway deaths: letting the public know what happened serves as a warning, a deterrent, raises awareness and may make the public push leaders to do something about the state of driver education, or of the highway.
Not having timely, accurate information leaves the public in the dark, or worse, circulating misinformation on social media.
That isn’t good for anyone.
It seems to us, if the U.S. population is worthy of timely and accurate information distributed through its free press, so are you.
