Where the coverage fell short... (From The Northern Echo)

Where the coverage fell short...

12:07pm Tuesday 8th June 2010 in

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THE way the Cumbria mass shootings was reported does not reflect well on some sections of the media. For instance, a local radio station gave updates while the massacre was in progress, saying: “We’ll bring you more as things progress... that’s after the Carpenters”. Cue for a merry tune.

It reminded me of something similar on Radio Leeds years ago. A wildly exuberant presenter – the sort who thinks he isn’t doing his job properly unless he keeps the listener in a constant state of hysterical excitement – announced: “Two pensioners killed in a house fire in Bradford. Now here’s Barry Manilow.” Rather macabre, don’t you think?

They should not have repeated so many times that eerie interview with nine-year-old Jordan Williams with his lurid description of the killer staring at him “with eyes like a hawk”. Should it have been aired at all? Nor the interview with the witness who “cradled a dying woman who was covered in blood”.

Mass murders are extremely nasty events and that is why they have to be reported with restraint. There is the world of difference between accurate reportage and prurient voyeurism bordering on pornography.

They would insist on calling the incident a “tragedy”. It was not a tragedy. It was an atrocity. A tragedy is the story of some great, gifted person brought down by a single, personal flaw: Hamlet by his indecision; Julius Caesar by ambition; Othello by his consuming jealousy. It’s no excuse to say this is only a matter of the use of words. We are talking about journalists whose whole profession is the efficient use of language.

If the reporting was, in some quarters at least, bad, the analysis was worse. Talking heads came on to spout psychobabble about what “caused” the killer to embark on his serial killing spree. Nothing caused this – nothing extraneous anyhow. Derrick Bird caused the killings. He was the sole perpetrator. He alone was responsible for what took place.

As for inquiring to what caused the killings, you might as well ask what caused my Aunt Flo to have two cups of tea and half a grapefruit for breakfast. Our system of public life, morality, law, rewards and punishments is based on the principle of free will.

Remove that and we become mere machines.

If we are right to praise people for doing well, then we are obliged to disapprove when they do badly. We don’t ask what caused the soldier to go back into the minefield to rescue his comrade. We assume he did so out of courage, love and a sense of duty. And we praise him for it – him and him alone.

So when someone robs a bank or shoots people at random in Cumbria, we must say he was mad and bad. We blame him for it – him and him alone. Let’s have no more of this superstition that our behaviour is manipulated by unseen causes over which we have no control. As Dr Johnson said: “We know we have free will, and there’s an end on’t.”

And then there was the fatuous inquiry as to how something so vile could take place in such beautiful countryside – as if it would have been not so bad if it had happened in a particularly dark suburb of Wolverhampton.

The antidote to this kind of stupidity is to recall the thousands of men machine-gunned in Flanders among the glorious poppies, or to look again at the desolation wrought by the bombers while Mount Fuji rose serenely into the cloudless blue. Three things please: accuracy, restraint and respect.