We are all told to pay attention to detail at school and as lawyers it is paramount. Many a case has been won when a tiny, apparently trifling detail has been uncovered, often at the last minute.

The late George Carman was a master of the undiscovered detail, which he would theatrically flourish before the judge and jury in his high-profile criminal or libel actions. And it is not just lawyers. Any rookie reporter may disconsolately drag himself and his sloppy copy back from his editor’s office with the following words ringing in his ears: ‘Detail, I want detail.’

But detail is not always the order of the day. The Daily Sport has recently received a sharp rap across the knuckles from the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) for a breach of its code of conduct, precisely for providing too much detail.

Dougie Patterson of Choose Life, a Scottish government initiative to reduce suicide in Scotland, complained that a Daily Sport article in May 2008 bearing the snappy headline ‘The Top Yourself 10’ contravened clause 5 of the code. This deals with intrusion into grief or shock and provides that ‘when reporting suicide, care should be taken to avoid excessive detail about the method used’. The purpose of the clause, according to the PCC’s adjudication in this matter, is to ‘prevent the publication of unnecessary information which might encourage "copycat" suicides’.

Suicide hotspotsThe article – following the disclosure by the British Transport Police that 25 deaths had occurred on one stretch of railway line in three years – was a list of the top-10 ‘suicide hotspots’ in the UK. The complainant argued that the article might encourage vulnerable people to visit the places shown and to take their own lives. This was highly irresponsible, said Patterson. In its defence, the newspaper argued that it was well aware of the seriousness and sensitivity of mental health issues but that its article was a fair and balanced factual report of public domain information.

The PCC did not agree with the defendant and upheld the complaint. The code did not prevent the general reporting of suicide or the investigating of suicide patterns in a way that served the public interest. It does not even prevent publications which include references to the whereabouts of individual suicides in the context of a report of a newsworthy event. But that was not the case here. It found that the article in question was ‘an entirely gratuitous guide to where individuals have killed themselves’ which pointed out that there were a number of options about how and where to attempt suicide – ‘clearly excessive’ in the context, according to the PCC. The tone of the piece didn’t help the Daily Sport either. The PCC was not particularly impressed with the reference, for example, to ‘top yourself tourists’. Consequently, the article had glamorised suicide and as such did precisely the opposite of what the code sought to prevent.

Suicide is without doubt distressing for all concerned. The taking of any life should not be trivialised, particularly in light of the much-reported spate of suicides among young people in the UK over recent years. It is easy to see why the PCC considered that the media should be severely warned against publications which might exacerbate a real and difficult problem.

Curtailing freedom?However, there is perhaps another question to be considered – whether the media really can and should be held responsible in this way. Suicide is a sensitive subject and taking anything other than a hard line is likely only to generate further complaints. But it is at least worth considering that an extrapolation of this decision might in due course have a detrimental effect on freedom of expression. Would the press be censored from publishing details of, say, the top-10 fish bars in the UK for fear that the weak-willed will launch themselves on a cholesterol crawl, ending in heart attack or stroke? Would the media be acting irresponsibly by publishing a news story about how local man John Smith rescued his neighbour’s cat by climbing the guttering if local man Jay Smythe decided to do the same thing, only to fall and break his neck?

The UK press is valued as a vital part of the fabric of our democratic society, acting as the bloodhound and watchdog of that society, rooting out and alerting us to wrongdoing and corruption. This is in addition to the education and entertainment it provides. The decision raises an interesting question as to whether the press will still be able to fulfil that role if it decides to self-censor the news out of concern for the minority, or whether the power with which it is entrusted is such that it needs to do more than act as the eyes and ears of the public, acting as its moral compass too.

Perhaps the retort of the rookie reporter to his editor in the future will simply be to quote from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar’.

Amber Melville-Brown, David Price Solicitors & Advocates, London