Reporting Deaths

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Your reporting of the tragic deaths of four Harvard students during the past weeks has been insensitive to the needs of the community you serve. In your effort to be professional and objective, you emphasize graphic facts--circumstances of death, detailed quotations from policemen and medical examiners, speculations about motive or cause. Attempts to convey the students' characters or accomplishments are relegated to a generic comment describing each as friendly and well-regarded.

But you are not the the New York Times, writing for millions of anonymous readers Often your article contains the first and last word on a student's death--at once breaking the horrifying news to friends and summing up the significance of a life. You have a minimal responsibility to inform gently and pay proper tribute.

Perhaps you could have reduced the facts to a single paragraph and devoted the rest of each article to tribute from teachers and friends. If time constraints made it impossible to prepare an appropriate article on short notice, you might have given notice of death in a small box on the front page and printed a full memorial on the editorial page several days later.

No one envies you the difficult task of helping your peers deal with tragedy. But if you do not at least make the effort, then Harvard students might as well be strangers who happen to live in the same city, rather than a true community of classmates, trying to support one another, particularly in times of sorrow. Jeff Rosen '86