Media Assisted Suicide
This is a little something I’ve been meaning to write for a while, and since thinking about the subject initially I decided to hold off and build up some source material to back up my point. However, me being me that thinking fell by the wayside, but since I’m in a clearing up kind of mood I’ve decided to just let rip and see where the chips fall.
British media has an unhealthy fixation with celebrity, earned and generated. As a regular commuter into London this is never more obvious than within the pages of the daily, free tabloids The London Lite and The London Paper.
Not for nothing do I refer to these two periodicals as “The Daily Winehouse”, as they are currently obsessed with every minute detail of highly talented singer Amy Winehouse’s day to day goings on. Not because they’re particularly gripping, important or newsworthy, but because the poor bitch is having a tough time of things, made ever tougher by the evil fuckers selling news media off the back of her suffering. She’s hit the big time, in a hurry, and like any other early 20-something is keen on having a good time. However unlike every other 20-something her antics are on public display through the pond scum villifying her activities. From my attemptedly passive observations of the poor girl, she may well have contemplated ending it all to try and get some privacy.
Herein lies the rub – I’m attempting to be passive but everything put forward by the media is unified in the singular message that she’s a wreck of a woman heading for disaster, and that becomes the opinion of those who consume this media. I don’t know what her life is like behind closed doors, so my statement of her state of mind above is based purely on the salacious gossip I’ve also consumed. She may be perfectly happy, I honestly don’t know, but you what, it’s none of my damn business. That I’m even speculating is serving the needs of the media nicely.
This brings me to a more severe example; Heather Mills, who last year was deemed public enemy number 1 by the tabloid media for getting a divorce. Yes, indeed, getting a divorce from “national treasure” Paul McCartney makes her the source of all evil. It was the media’s treatment of Ms Mills that first prompted my thinking about this particular rant because it occurred to me that I had decided she was a wrongun despite knowing absolutely nothing about her circumstances. What pissed me off is that I realised that this opinion had been purely shaped by the media I had been consuming, at which point I opted to become Ms Mills’ conversational defender.
This position was reinforced after her much written about appearance on GMTV, which I for one applaud entirely. The most quoted section pulls two sentiments from the following quote :
They make up such lies. They’ve called me a whore, a golddigger, a fantasist, a liar, the most unbelievably hurtful things, and I’ve stayed quiet for my daughter… I’m so upset about this… I’ve had worse press than a paedophile or a murderer and I’ve done nothing but charity for 20 years … Look what they’re doing to the McCanns. The woman has lost, and the poor father, have lost their daughter. What are we doing as a nation? What are we doing persecuting a woman that is devastated behind closed doors and trying to hold it together, as I have for 18 months. What did the paparazzi do to Diana? They chased her and they killed her.
The “they” in question is the same scandal-mongering bottom feeders I set my aim on in this piece. Following this interview, in which she quite justifiably lost her rag, the headlines along these lines (paraphrasing on my part – check some examples):
Mills Compares Herself To Diana, McCanns
Mills Is The New Diana!?
Which immediately pissed me off no end, because that’s not what she was doing at all.
What she’s saying, in an emotional fashion, is that the media gets its kicks from persecuting people, and highlights two especially strong cases to substantiate her argument. She made the error, however, of comparing the treatment she’s been getting to that of the overrated “People’s Princess” which was a guarantee of easy column-inches full of bile aimed at herself.
This also puts me in the mood to start lining these fuckers up against the wall – Princess Diana, like her or not, was killed by the media. There is no other way to spin it, call it manslaughter if you like, but it was bastard photographers who got the woman killed.
The McCann’s case was another one I reviewed in my post-Mills moment of revelation. Until that point I, along with the rest of the country and at the behest of our media overlords, had been speculating about what had happened to their daughter, when in fact I had nothing to really base any opinion off which was not already tainted by news media. For every “Help Find Maddie” headline in The Sun and its brethren there’s a “McCanns on the verge of cracking” or “New Evidence Implicates McCanns” strap which is subsequently reversed in position days or hours later. If I were in the position of the McCann’s I’d be grateful for every column inch received – keep their girl’s disappearance in the public concious, and maybe it’ll help turn her up – but the hell they are being put through by the media is quite a price to pay.
What Heather Mills was saying can be paraphrased, “You have killed people before, you’ve driven them to suicide, you’ve murdered them in their pursuit and you’re coming after me. Stop it.”
I want my news to be important. I want it to be unbiased. I want commentary from both sides of every conflict. I want to draw my own conclusions.
And on a lighter note, regardless of your opinions of the following people, please congratulate them if you happen to bump into them :
Lindsay Lohan
Keanu Reeves
George Clooney
Britney Spears
Prince Harry
Pete Doherty
Danny Glover [Bonus points!]
Jay Kay
Paris Hilton
Hugh Grant
This list goes on… and on… Ask yourself, are all these celebrities very violent people, or is there a reason they hit paparazzi scum?
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