Question: How does breaking news affect the “Bystander Rule”?
Answer: The “Bystander Rule” allows recovery for negligent infliction of emotional distress if a claimant can establish sufficient direct involvement with the incident. “Direct involvement” involves certain temporal and circumstantial factors. The temporal factor requires that the claimant be at the scene of the incident when it occurs or arrive soon after; the circumstantial factors require both the scene and victim to be in the same condition as immediately following the incident and the claimant to have not been informed of the incident before coming upon the scene. Without these requirements, an emotional distress claim fails as a matter of law. To allow a claimant to recover under a bystander theory when his or her emotional distress begins as a result of seeing a news story or the like would result in virtually limitless litigation. Our quickly evolving state of social media and instantaneous news coverage further underscores the importance of setting parameters for this tort. We are at a point in time when people are often subjected to seeing live, streaming footage—on high-definition televisions and smart phones of emergencies possibly involving their immediate beloved relatives. There must be a point at which a defendant’s exposure to liability for negligent infliction of emotional distress ends, but simply because pragmatism demands that the line be drawn somewhere.
