Caution urged in reporting

After the shooting at Sparks Middle School in Sparks last month, there was a report that the attacker might have been motivated in some way by an anti-bullying video the school uses, and some students said they believed he had been bullied.

A few days before that shooting incident, a 12-year-old Florida girl named Rebecca Sedgwick killed herself, and two teenagers were arrested for allegedly bullying her.

The Poynter Institute, a journalism education organization, then posted an article advising journalists that their coverage should not exaggerate bullying or suicides, because there are no data that support notions of epidemics or trends.

“All suicides are tragic and complicated,” Poynter researcher Kelly McBride wrote. “And teen suicides are particularly devastating because as adults we recognize all that lost potential. Yet, in perpetuating these stories, which are often little more than emotional linkbait, journalists are complicit in a gross oversimplification of a complicated phenomenon. In short, we're getting the facts wrong.”

There is no evidence to support many of the conclusions in reporting on these incidents, she wrote, and suggesting cause and effect is incorrect.

“There is no scientific evidence that bullying causes suicide. None at all. Lots of teenagers get bullied (between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 teenagers report being bullied in real life, fewer report being bullied online). Very few commit suicide. Among the people who commit suicide, researchers have no good data on how many of them have been bullied.”