Sunday Express Smash World Record For Tabloid Limbo

Anniversary Shame of Dunblane SurvivorsEven though you’d think I’d learn, I’m instead constantly shocked at the astonishingly ridiculous shit that the tabloid press continue to attempt to justify. The image on the right is the front cover of last Sunday’s Scottish Sunday Express. The story, if you can find it amongst the loud offers and advertisments jostling for space, is a very simple and monumentally ill-judged story about the survivors of the Dunblane school shooting 13 years ago. At the time, the children were five years old, and therefore granted certain protections. Now that they’re 18, the Express has apparently decided they’re Fair Game.

This is all well and good except that none of them has done anything remotely wrong. They’re 18 and they’re acting like any other 18 year olds. They, or at least some of them, are drinking and fighting and having sex and then posting about it on social networking sites. That all sounds pretty reasonable to me, and it’s actually good to see that the shooting hasn’t totally wrecked their abilities to live normal lives. But the Express seems to think that that’s somehow Not On. No, these people are Dunblane Survivors, and that means they have to spend their every waking second Honouring The Memory Of Their Fallen Classmates. If they do anything else, like have fun or something, they’re Shaming Their Fallen Classmates.

DUNBLANE survivors have ‘shamed’ the memory of their dead peers with foul-mouthed boasts about sex, brawls and drink-fuelled antics as they reach adulthood. A number of the youngsters, now 18, have posted shocking blogs and photographs of themselves on the Internet, 13 years after being sheltered from public view in the aftermath of the atrocity. ... In the days and months that followed the survivors, then aged just five and six, were the subject of overwhelming worldwide sympathy. But now the Sunday Express can reveal how, on their web-based social networking sites, some of them have boasted about alcoholic binges and fights.

Well, no. Obviously nobody at the Express really expects anything else. That would be ridiculous. They just wanted a scandal that nobody else had, and the easiest way to make sure your scandal is exclusive is to engineer it. Nobody else could happen upon a scoop that didn’t exist. If that’s not possible, something that superficially resembles a scandal (such as a sandal) will do. So presumably the journalist, if that’s what you want to call her, Paula Murray, waited until some people who survived a horrific shooting turned 18, looked them up on Facebook, and printed quotes. And pictures. She must have known in advance that some of the survivors were going to be loutish – that’s true of any group of teenagers – so she had this massive ready-made ‘scandal’ she could unleash as soon as the last of the surviving children turned 18.

Then you just need a quote from someone who lost a grand-daughter…

‘It is insulting. They were damn lucky to come out of it and they should be making the most of it. Maybe that’s what they think they are doing, but it is in bad taste. We go to the cemetery every Sunday and we nearly always meet some people who are visitors, and they come and have a wee look. I think that is lovely and I always say to them that it is nice they remember. So the behaviour of these children is a real contrast to all those caring people. It’s shameful.’ ...she would consider confronting the survivors involved. She added: ‘Can it really be genuinely these same young people? I think it is totally out of order to put something like that on the Internet. It is a bit nasty really.’

…because nothing adds credibility to your story like the emotional reactions of people whose loved ones have been killed. I object pretty strongly to everything she’s said there, but I’m not going to blame her for it. Sixteen pupils died. They presumably had thirty-two parents and sixty-four grandparents. It must be pretty easy to find one of those 96 people that you can whip up into an emotionally charged state and then get a nasty quote out of. That’s why their opinions shouldn’t be in newspapers. It’s also why Murray got a quote from MSP Elizabeth Smith and pasted it into the article as if it was relevant. In an email posted as a comment on the Enemies of Reason blog, Smith says

My comments were not made in the context of Dunblane. The journalist did not ask me anything about Dunblane nor did I comment on it or on any individual involved. It would be quite wrong for me to do so. I have made comments recently to several newspapers about the issues related to young people using internet sites and the inappropriate use of that material. ... What the Sunday Express chooses to print as the context is a matter for the relevant editor.

The other comments on that post are also well worth reading (as is the post itself).

The Express have since deleted the story from their website, which could be taken to mean that since receiving all those complaints they’ve realised how contemptible the article was, except… what really angers me about this whole thing is how pre-meditated it all is. Bad journalism as a result of ignorance or incompetence is one thing. Laziness is a bit worse but still basically forgivable, but this could only happen if people set out to do bad journalism. This isn’t something Murray happened on and misinterpreted; this is something she has engineered. She went sniffing around the personal lives of innocent people looking for something she could frame as a scandal. It makes me wonder how long she sat on it waiting for that magical birthday that transformed the last of these people from Innocent Child Victims to Celebrities.

It is perhaps the single worst piece of journalism I’ve ever read.