Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom recently passed away. The news swept across the world and became a hot topic in group chats everywhere.
In the hours before her death was officially announced, news outlets were continuously reporting concerns about the Queen’s health, with members of the royal family hurrying to Aberdeen, Scotland, where she was staying. “Stable condition,” “resting comfortably”—the language in the news carried a careful evasiveness while still making clear that the Queen had little time left.
Given today’s medical advances and average lifespans, it is unlikely that Britain will see another monarch reign for seventy years. A reign of more than seven decades rivals those of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, and the commemorations following Elizabeth’s death were sure to be grand. During her lifetime, the Queen had taken part in rehearsals for her own funeral ceremonies multiple times. For someone aged 96, death is probably no longer an unimaginable subject.
When I was doing my master’s degree in the UK, I visited the BBC. The staff mentioned that their live studio had a dedicated indicator light for the Queen’s death, and that the special programming for her passing was rehearsed every year. The Queen’s death was a matter of enormous significance, and one that could happen at any moment, so everyone had to be involved in the contingency plan. I couldn’t help but wonder: had that indicator light really never been lit in 70 years?
The media thrives on news, but when faced with a subject as ominous as death, it often finds itself in an awkward position. How the press handles death frequently prompts reflection on how we view the press itself, and stirs up debates about media ethics.
Take the Queen’s passing, for instance. At 96, hers was very much a “happy funeral” by Chinese standards. Given her advanced age and recent health, most media outlets had long been prepared. Many news organizations had already drafted obituaries for influential international figures, ready to publish the moment death was confirmed—writing on the fly simply wouldn’t be fast enough. This is especially true today, when news of the Queen’s death spread across social media and group chats within five minutes. Even setting aside the lingering, fading days that gave major outlets ample time to prepare, even if the Queen had died suddenly without warning, many outlets could still have published within a minute. The same goes for other political figures.
This kind of situation generates the least controversy, because those who receive such treatment tend to have lived monumentally and died notably—ordinary people find it harder to empathize. Occasional controversy stems from the figure themselves: when Shinzo Abe was assassinated, for example, coverage that leaned cold risked seeming gleeful, while emotional coverage risked accusations of crocodile tears.
Then there are events like the China Eastern Airlines crash—a disaster, whether natural or human-caused. More than a hundred people died in the freak misfortune of a plane crash. Ordinary people’s stories are the hardest to tell. A death toll of over a hundred is a cold number; it can never move the heart the way a vivid, individual story can. So some outlets gathered information from social media, piecing together timelines and interviewing grieving families to tell the stories of several passengers in the moments before they boarded. Readers were moved, recognizing how much the deceased resembled themselves—ordinary people simply making their way through life.
Many criticized this approach, calling it exploitation of the dead for clicks, or secondary harm to grieving families. No matter how much the news industry tries to raise its standards through unwritten rules and frameworks, neither the media nor its audiences anywhere in the world have ever drawn a clear moral line around death. Photographs of corpses, especially graphic or gruesome ones, are clearly off-limits. But how deep a story can be dug depends on what that digging turns up. If it advances the investigation, or reveals some hidden truth, then reporting is warranted; if the result is trivial, it’s just exploiting the dead for traffic. The moral dilemma is that the results of digging cannot be known in advance—and interviewing the bereaved may itself already be a second injury.
Or consider Yao Beina, who died young. At 33, her singing career was on the rise. The year before, she had performed a solo of “Heaven Blesses China” on the Spring Festival Gala, only to suddenly succumb to cancer. The media couldn’t have anticipated such a tragedy; neither her age nor her stature would have prompted them to prepare for her death. I remember that as she lay critically ill, news reports described how a large crowd of journalists had gathered at the hospital in Shenzhen. I imagine those reporters had already drafted Yao Beina’s death notice and were just waiting for first-hand confirmation to hit send. The more scrupulous among them may also have prepared something in case of recovery. But a group of reporters gathered at a hospital hardly looks like people waiting for good news. In my mind’s eye, those journalists were like vultures hovering over carrion, alert and waiting for a particular moment.
Whether it’s preparing “funeral arrangements in advance” for heads of state, or “feeding on the blood of the dead” among ordinary people, how the news media treats death reflects each person’s complex feelings about it. Fear and acceptance, empathy and indifference, respect and contempt, voyeurism and a sense of boundaries—when faced with death, these opposing emotions often coexist within the same complicated human nature. It’s not a simple either/or. And because human beings are this way, the news media, in handling the subject of death, often carries both profound compassion and extreme cruelty at once.
Translated and posted by AI. Please check for accuracy. Original post written in Chinese by Xiaoming.