Standard of journalism today?

[northwichcat]

This is obviously a very terrible story. However, it seems in the lack of the foreign office or woman's family releasing any background information to the media and the family asking to be left alone, they've copied and pasted things from a Linkedin and a Twitter profile that they've found and it sounds like they may have guessed her age based on her educational record.

Police in Lebanon have arrested a man in connection with the murder of a British diplomat in Beirut.

The body of Rebecca Dykes, who worked at the British Embassy in the city, was found by a motorway on Saturday.

Police sources said the suspect was a taxi driver and Ms Dykes had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

Her family said in a statement: "We are devastated by the loss of our beloved Rebecca. We are doing all we can to understand what happened."

They added: "We request that the media respect our privacy."

Ms Dykes, who is believed to have been 30, had been working in Beirut as the programme and policy manager for the Department for International Development since January 2017.

...

Prior to her posting in Beirut, Ms Dykes worked with the Foreign Office as a policy manager for its Libya team and as an Iraq research analyst.

According to her LinkedIn profile, she studied anthropology at the University of Manchester, and had a Masters in International Security and Global Governance from Birkbeck, University of London.

She was a former pupil of Malvern Girls' College and Rugby School, and had also taught English at a Chinese international school.

Ms Dykes had reportedly been due to fly back to the UK for Christmas. She says on social media that she is from London.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42386721

 

[Domh245]

I think it's pretty cheeky of them to include the quote from their family "We request the media respect our privacy" in the article where they've gone snooping around...

 

[TheNewNo2]

That does seem like a lot of information, but honestly I don't see a huge problem here. The news media have found a story, and they are reporting it. By adding background they are trying to add colour and make it about a person rather than a faceless name.

 

[northwichcat]

That does seem like a lot of information, but honestly I don't see a huge problem here. The news media have found a story, and they are reporting it. By adding background they are trying to add colour and make it about a person rather than a faceless name.

Social media profiles, by themselves, are unverified sources. I see social media profiles all the time which aren't 100% factual - sometimes the mistake could easily be an accident like someone saying they left school in 2002 when they left school in 2001 or selecting an educational establishment in Birmingham, Alabama instead of one with the same name in Birmingham, England. Other times people are less than honest e.g. changing their job title to make it sound like they had a more senior position than they actually had, or deliberately giving an incorrect start/finish date so a gap in their record looks smaller than it actually is. Pulling information off one profile without verifying it is a bit like saying "The man in the pub told me that..."

 

[birchesgreen]

Well like many things its all done on the cheap now, the olden days where media companies would have dozens of highly trained and experienced journalists who knew how to (and had the time/resources) to properly research a story are long gone. Now a lot of it is copy and pasting by interns.

 

[jon0844]

We now have stories generated by bots to save on staff, so it's only going to get worse.

The idea is that many stories take a lot of time to write because of the need for accuracy that a computer can do better, such as company financials or person X moving from company A to B. But you can be sure that as time goes on more and more stories will be automated.

 

[TheNewNo2]

Social media profiles, by themselves, are unverified sources. I see social media profiles all the time which aren't 100% factual - sometimes the mistake could easily be an accident like someone saying they left school in 2002 when they left school in 2001 or selecting an educational establishment in Birmingham, Alabama instead of one with the same name in Birmingham, England. Other times people are less than honest e.g. changing their job title to make it sound like they had a more senior position than they actually had, or deliberately giving an incorrect start/finish date so a gap in their record looks smaller than it actually is. Pulling information off one profile without verifying it is a bit like saying "The man in the pub told me that..."

That's true to an extent, but it's seeing what the person said about themselves. So long as you state the source I don't see the issue.