Assessing the Quality of Media Reporting of Suicide Deaths in Bangladesh Against World Health Organization Guidelines

Abstract

Background: Media reporting of suicide events has thus far gone without sufficient scrutiny in Bangladesh. Aim: The purpose of this study was to assess the quality of newspaper reporting of suicides in Bangladesh against international guidelines. Methods: We used content analysis to assess the quality of suicide reporting in six daily newspapers in Bangladesh. The newspapers were hand-searched between November 2016 and April 2017 and 327 articles reporting on suicide deaths were retrieved. Results: The mean number of suicide articles per day per newspaper was 0.3 (range across newspapers 0.11-0.70) and the mean length was 11.3 sentences. Harmful reporting practices were very common (fo..