Wednesday, August 04, 2010 

Scum-watch: "Sick, thick and deluded".

Never one to beat a dead horse when you can instead eviscerate the damn thing, the Sun takes the trouble to conduct a full interview with the mother cited in yesterday's leader contrasting the funerals of Raoul Moat and Alex Higgins. It is the silly season, after all, and why miss a perfect opportunity to attack all those things that the paper professes to loathe? Teresa Bystram is not just "sick, thick and deluded"; according to the paper's editorial by her actions she also proves "herself to be an unfit mother", whose kids should be put "in care". It would of course be interesting to know whether Bystram was paid by the Sun for the interview she gave, especially when unless she really is as thick as the paper claims she must have realised just how they were going to use it, as that might put their rage about how she's using her benefits into some sort of perspective, but never mind.

Far more instructive is that currently the article has 32 comments, a rather poor showing for a piece clearly written with the intention of causing widespread anger at Bystram's fecklessness and indolence. By contrast, yesterday's article on the murder of Robert Coello in Grendon prison has 43, which even taking into consideration a couple of multiple responses is still far higher. Then again, you can't blame them: delighting in the violent death of a child rapist isn't even close to the sickness required to be able empathise with another murderer. That sort of thing demands a front page and a fulminating editorial in the country's biggest selling daily newspaper. Anything less would be a journalistic dereliction of duty.

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8/04/2010 10:14:00 pm | |

Tuesday, August 03, 2010 

Scum-watch: "They must have deserved it".

The Sun, still amazed that anyone could possibly find Raoul Moat worthy of sympathy, dedicates most of its leader column to contrasting the funerals of Moat and Alex Higgins. Higgins, in case you couldn't guess, is a hero, whilst Moat is a zero. The paper intones:

Moat was only a hero to anti-police ghouls. The fact people travelled miles to display admiration shows how damaged Britain has become.

One woman dragged her three teenage sons from Surrey on the overnight bus. She thinks Moat is a hero. She "absolutely loved him".

To the innocents injured and killed she said: "Fair enough, people died. But they must have deserved it."


The leader writer has a point. Why bother travelling miles to display admiration or declare that people who were killed must have deserved it when you can do the latter on the paper's website? For reasons known only to themselves, the paper has left the comment section open on the article detailing the death in prison of Robert Coello, who was serving a life term for raping a child. The responses are wholly predictable:

Best news I have read all day, just one question why waste 7 1/2 hours of valuable NHS resouces. My compliments to the attacker!!!!!!!!!!!

great news, we can live in hope this may inspire others to do the same!

if the crimal justice laws were sorted out.
we won't need so called scumbags to bring justice to these animals

why waste 7 1/2 hours of nhs time and resorces?...sounded like the guy was sub-human any way. they should have taken him to a vet and had him put down

There are, it must be said, some noble individuals going against the grain:

whilst he was vile, i don't believe anyone should take the law into their own hands. it makes that person as sick as the offender, despite the fact that this coello clearly deserved it

Well, clearly. To be fair, there are two others in the thread who demur from open celebration at the taking of Coello's life, but they're most certainly in the minority.

While hinting at it, the Sun's article doesn't explain how Grendon is different to other prisons, only noting it "offers unique therapeutic care for warped offenders who are required to express a genuine desire to change and stay drug free". The BBC steps into the breach:

If a prisoner is identified as a potential candidate for the treatment available at Grendon, staff assemble probation and psychiatric reports and intelligence from the prison service's offender assessment system. The prison's head of psychology decides which prisoners are appropriate to be admitted.

Once admitted, inmates are subject to three months of initial assessments before being allocated to one of five wings, each of which operates as an autonomous "therapeutic community".


These details might have softened the feelings expressed by some in the Sun's comment section, although probably not all of them.

In any case, this is hardly the first time the paper has "forgot" to close the comment section when reporting on the suspicious death of a convicted sex offender: it left them open when Gordon Boon was killed, subsequently it turned out by a fellow con and not by a vigilante, and also when Andy Cunningham was murdered, both with the same gleeful end result. Boon's son made the obvious point when appealing for information about his father's death:

"Even if you can't forgive him, please remember what we are going through," he said. "We can't ignore what he's done, but nobody deserves to be murdered."

Coello almost certainly has relatives and friends out there now in the same situation, who loathed his crime but still loved him as a family member or former companion. Seeing comments openly welcoming his death and lauding his murderer, even if they might have expected as much, is far beneath what a newspaper should ever consider publishing, regardless of how it comes to appear on their site. For a paper so disgusted and outraged that anyone could ever feel sympathy for or think a murderer should be celebrated as a hero, it's strange that it seems to think it's perfectly acceptable when the victim is also a criminal.

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8/03/2010 09:29:00 pm | |

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