Leave the kid alone

Ruben van Assouw, the only survivor of a plane crash in Libya last week, returned to the Netherlands today.  The fact that his recovery and return was an international news story has left me feeling a bit queasy.  This picture from his hospital bed appeared on the evening news, with sober news anchors reporting daily that he had not yet been told that the rest of his immediate family had been killed in the crash.  Taking cameras into the hospital room of a bruised, unconscious nine-year-old boy seems a step beyond invasive journalism.  


The desire to put a human face to a tragic story is a perfectly understandable impulse.  Pictures of a nine-year-old orphan are much more compelling than saying "Only one person of the 104 people on-board survived."  But the fact that something is more compelling doesn't mean it needs to be reported on.  A plane crash, 100 people dying is a public matter.  But a boy finding out he lost his brother, mother, and father after waking up from a coma is a private tragedy.  We don't have any right to know the details of his life as a private citizen, and more importantly, we have no need to know them.  The fact that he has returned to the Netherlands doesn't change our foreign policy or aviation safety.  The only people it affects are the boy and his family.  Journalists, we know he survived, and we know he's recovering.  That's all we should know.  Please, leave the kid alone.