Quality of online news reporting of suicidal behavior in Bangladesh against World Health Organization guidelines.

Abstract

Suicide is a major, however under attended public health problem in Bangladesh. There is dearth of research regarding how newspapers communicate it to the mass population. We assessed the quality of online newspapers reporting of suicidal behaviors in Bangladesh against World Health Organization suicide reporting guidelines. We searched and scrutinized published contents of 8 Bangla online news portals against the World Health Organization suicide reporting guidelines retrospectively. About 85% of the reports were connected to suicide, 93% reported single suicide, single person was involved in 82.50% of reports, and associated homicide was found in 7.50% of reports. About 96% of reports mentioned the name of the victims, 97% mentioned occupation, 96% mentioned method of suicide, 69% mentioned life events, and 64% reported certain mono-causality. Suicide in headline was found in about 94% of reports, 19% mentioned method in headline and 32% reported life events in headline. About 14% reports posted images of victims and no article provided any potentially helpful reporting practices. Media reports of suicidal behavior in Bangladesh in online portal were found to be poor quality when assessed against WHO suicide reporting guidelines. Details of victims, methods, life events and mono-causal explanations were being mentioned regularly. Substantial lacking has been noticed in approaches of educating the population and introducing preventive measures in the reports.