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Miscellaneous

: Law & Humanities Blog

Journalism and Murder

By Christine Corcos

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The Guardian considers how journalists today present murderers, and may, with hindsight, tend to exaggerate the circumstances of their everyday lives.

Different newspapers emphasise different aspects....The Guardian, for example, ran "profiles" of Wright and Dixie. The first "lived in a world that centred around his local pub and golf club, where regulars knew him as a quiet, unassuming guy who dressed well". Dixie was known "as an ordinary guy" whose latest girlfriend recalled "a 'normal' sex life, which occasionally got 'a bit rough' but nothing more".At the other extreme, red-top papers emphasise the abnormality of a murderer. Words such as evil, monster, beast, sick, vicious, brute, and fiend are scattered randomly, as though to ward off evil spirits. Anything that might seem ordinary is given sinister connotations. The stuffed toys in the bedroom Wright shared with his partner are "bizarre"; a front door isn't just a front door but "an entry to evil". Past relationships are portrayed as dysfunctional. After Bellfield's conviction, the News of the World featured a former partner who suffered "10 years of horror", while the Sunday Mirror had his daughter recalling how he "gave her vodka to drink at 10 ... and mustard powder to eat".

The piece contrasts George Orwell's comments on murder in a 1946 essay published in News of the World with what reporters write today. A thoughtful piece.

Full post as published by Law & Humanities Blog on March 10, 2008 (boomark / email).