A TALE OF TWO FRONT PAGE LEADS

Last Saturday's New Zealand Herald front page lead story was a classic example of the beat-up of a story on a slow news day. "Teen dies at party in reality TV house" - the sensational headline shouted, as if we'd had a death at a Big Brother house or something of that ilk.

A young woman had tragically died at a house in Mt Maunganui that Greenstone Pictures had been filming at for the reality series Neighbours at War, but her death was as a result of a congenital heart condition and had very little to do with the TV show.

The Greenstone crew had left the house three hours before her death and the Police had no criticism of the production company, who they had in fact invited to the notorious party house, in the hope that the Neighbours at War mediators might actually help an ongoing situation they were struggling with.

Yes, the young people at the house may have started behaving even more badly for the sake of the TV cameras, but it seems Greenstone - one of the more principled and responsible TV production companies around - left as soon as that started happening. They didn't deserve to have their names dragged through the mud in this way. The Herald and other print media outlets do have something of a habit of picking on television, and the angle of this story just seemed unnecessary.

Rather ironically, there was a far better story buried in the very last paragraph of the Herald piece, which read: "Courtney is the third of five siblings to die suddenly. The other two collapsed and died when they were aged 13 and 16."

Now there's a story. And, to its credit, the Sunday Star Times recognised this on Sunday with its front page lead story headline - "Parents mourn third dead child." This was a really moving piece about this family's tragic and difficult situation.

To be fair to the Herald, it may have been difficult to get this second angle in time for their deadline, but in these increasingly challenging commercial times for our publications, it all just smelt a bit like taking the easy sensationalist option.