KCBD General Manager Dan Jackson Target of New Petition

I never really thought about this until now, but yeah, it's kind of wrong for the news to divulge a person's medical past or present in a story.

It is illegal for hospitals to divulge medical information, but for some reason the news media will take secondhand info from police, who get it from neighbors or victims, and broadcast it all over the place.

For instance, saying a suspect is bi-polar means nothing. It's not cool to the law-abiding folks who have the same condition and is rarely relevant to the story itself.

Then, there are the people in the stories themselves. It's bad enough that they've made some type of wrong choice that landed them in the media, then the have to deal with whatever stamp of mental illness they were given by reporters unqualified to make or back up the diagnosis.

Think of it this way: What if the media report said 'a man was caught shoplifting today, the man was said to have herpes.' Not cool, right? Well, neither is broadcasting their medical mental diagnoses, either.

A young woman has started a petition to have Mr. Jackson stop releasing a person's mental health diagnosis in KCBD's new stories. The petition itself does a fine job of explaining the problem and citing a specific example. If you'd like a peek, you can find it here.

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