Sensitive issues have been very much at the fore of the news coverage recently – not that you’d know it from the way some corners of the media dealt with them.

First came the sad news that one of the conjoined twins born to Shrewsbury couple Laura and Aled Williams had died.

I would like to think that we, and the other newspapers and media organisations which covered the story, did so with some degree of decorum.

Obviously, for us it was never going to be anything but front page news, but there was nothing sensationalist about the way the death of baby Hope and the subsequent stories of surviving twin Faith were dealt with.

I’d like to think the same applies to the Shropshire Star’s coverage of the decision by Sky to screen a paralysed man’s assisted suicide at a Swiss clinic.

Some newspapers were not so suitable – and either didn’t see the irony of their coverage, or simply didn’t care.

One tabloid – I won’t name it, but I have one in my bathroom – had a question about Sky’s coverage: A man is helped to die as cameras roll. Is this an insight into the issue of euthanasia or just a cynical attempt to boost ratings?

And where did it choose to ask this probing question? On its front page which it dedicated entirely to the story with a picture of Craig Ewert’s dying moments under the banner headline SUICIDE TV.

Obviously this was in no way an attempt to boost sales of the newspaper, while still appearing to take the moral high ground. And neither were the two pages inside with four more pictures.

The debate about assisted suicide, euthanasia, call it what you will, has now been opened with the TV show coming, as it did, hot on the heels of the decision not to prosecute the parents of paralysed rugby player Daniel James for flying him to a clinic to help him end his life.

But has it been opened in quite the right way – by self-serving editors and TV execs? THAT is also open to debate.

By Dave Burrows