It is November, and for television networks that means sweeps time. It is sweeps time, and for television networks that means ratings. It is all about ratings for television networks, and for network news programming that means sensational footage. Last evening, CBS News’ "60 Minutes" broadcast a video in which Jack Kevorkian killed a man.
Claiming that his purpose was to crank up the level of public discourse surrounding the issue of assisted suicide, Kevorkian stated that the time had come to move the debate to the real issue of active euthanasia by physicians. With that as his reasoning, he filmed a procedure which began by asking a man with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, to sign two consent forms, one a week before the other. Although he never had been a caregiver for the patient and never had significant time to form a relationship with him, Kevorkian then injected the man with a sedative, followed by a paralyzing agent to stop respirations and then potassium chloride to stop his heartbeat.
After a week of around-the-clock advertising for the broadcast, CBS anchor Mike Wallace quoted Kevorkian’s rationale for it as though it was his own: only a graphic portrayal of a death by euthanasia would force the issue into the place on the social agenda that it deserves.
The problem with that reasoning is that often times sensational footage does not include the characteristics that news programming about important issues is meant to include, such as information, education and broader contextualization of an issue.
Any discussion of such a dramatic change in social policy surely ought to have certain basic premises. A possible premise that might be widely accepted is that all policy regarding patients at the end of their lives ought necessarily to be based upon respect for the dignity of people.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the videotape was the lack of care tended this patient in his final moments on earth. Proponents of euthanasia and assisted suicide frequently tout these methods as demonstrations of compassion for the dying. Compassion means to "suffer with" those who are suffering.
In the videotape of his actions, Kevorkian never touched the man he was killing, never consoled or offered comforting words. Having been counseled by Kevorkian to absent themselves to avoid possible criminal implication, family members left their loved one to the technical ministrations of someone who wanted to make a point. Can there be a more dramatic way to see a human being reduced to being treated as an object?
Some will say that the graphic depiction portrayed in the footage might provide the positive benefit of making the subject of euthanasia more real, so that those who enter the public debate will know better what the debate is about. Surely if this gesture were really about improving the public debate, it would have brought together more voices with differing points of view and diverse perspectives. Since that did not happen, we can only conclude that, for CBS and Dr. Kevorkian, it is the ratings game and the dying man we saw is just a pawn in it.
M.C. Sullivan is vice president and COO of Midwest Bioethics Center, Kansas City, Missouri. This piece originally ran in the Kansas City Star, and is reprinted with the author’s permission. Visit the Center’s website at www.midbio.org.
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