We don’t need City Hall’s advice on how to cover air tragedy | Opinion

About the most difficult thing a journalist ever has to do is reach out to those left behind when their loved one has died tragically in a high-profile accident.

But it’s important that family and friends in such situations be given the opportunity to speak, to tell the community about their lost loved ones and their lives.

The main thing we want to stress here is that news media provides the bereaved families and friends that opportunity to share. For many victims of tragedy, it’s an important part of the process of grieving — at both the personal and community level. It’s why obituaries exist.

Unfortunately, the city of Wichita appears to believe that it’s government’s function to tell journalists how to cover a community in mourning.

The following ill-informed and inappropriate post by the city’s Department of Strategic Communications was placed on the city’s official Facebook account over the weekend:

“Families impacted by this week’s air tragedy are being inundated with questions and requests for interviews from local and national media by phone, social media, and at their homes and workplaces.

We understand and appreciate the news media’s interest in this tragic event and for their need to tell stories to their audiences.

However, some victim’s families and loved ones have contacted us to ask media partners to honor and respect their privacy as much as possible.

We know this is a difficult time for our entire community, but most especially for the families and loved ones of those lost on Flight 5342. Thank you to all for respecting their privacy.”

It’s unclear how we earn this signal honor, because City Hall never tells Koch Industries how to drill for oil, or Cessna how to build airplanes, or Dillons how to sell groceries.

The first thing to set straight here is that we are not “media partners” of Wichita City Hall nor its communications department.

They have their job, which is to control information flow to present City Hall’s actions, officials and executives in the best possible light. That’s why the department is called “Strategic Communications.” They have a track record of impeding inquiries by the press and paying social media influencers to say how great city government is.

That’s their job (or at least how they see it). Ours is to overcome interference, including City Hall’s, to bring you the most complete, comprehensive and true report we can.

As part of that, the Wichita Eagle and Kansas.com are committed to reporting on the human cost of last Wednesday’s tragic crash in Washington.

So far, we have run profiles on 47 of the 56 people who have been positively identified as victims of the crash, which claimed a total of 67 lives.

We’ve been assisted by our colleagues at several other McClatchy news organizations in other places that also lost people in the crash, including the Charlotte Observer, the Raleigh News and Observer and the Kansas City Star.

We are committed to producing and publishing as many of these profiles as we can. We’ve been working overtime on it, because it’s important.

We don’t expect city Strategic Communications staff to understand. They are not reporters. They’re PR people.

They don’t have our experience in amplifying the voices of grieving individuals caught in events beyond their control — which is as necessary as it is difficult.

We have requested that city government provide details on any complaints they’ve received. Thus far, nothing has been provided.

Absent that, we can only assume someone at City Hall is projecting what they think the bereaved should be feeling, rather than what they are.

Indeed, some people prefer to grieve alone. Some families will ask a specific relative or close friend to speak on their behalf.

Anybody who doesn’t want to talk to us has only to tell us. We simply express our sorrow for their loss and leave it there.

The only way to know is to ask.

Long experience tells us that the majority of relatives and friends prefer that their loved ones’ life stories be told and shared as widely as possible, so that they might be remembered as individual human beings who mattered — more than just another name on a list of victims.

It is our obligation as a news organization to do the work and allow those affected by this horrific occurrence to tell us — and through us, their community — about their people, and what we all lost in the crash of American Airlines Flight 5342.

No matter how hard it is.

This story was originally published February 3, 2025 at 3:54 PM.