Friday, December 05, 2008 

Mother of all moronic headlines.

Prize for the worst headline of the year must undoubtedly go to the Mirror, via 5cc:

How in fuck's name did no one on the paper manage not to notice that rather than describing Karen Matthews as "pure evil", their sentence actually suggests that it's her offspring that are?

Then again, considering the humbug that's descended from today's papers, especially from the Sun, the Mirror's crimes against the English language are probably the least of it. As a correspondent to the Guardian's letters pages noted, the same journalists that failed to see through Karen Matthews' lies and deceptions are the same ones that have been leading the witch-hunt against the Haringey social workers. The Sun even has the audacity to blame social services in this case, even when it was their £50,000 reward that Matthews was after, having succeeded in manipulating them more than any other media outlet. As Polly Toynbee notes:

Interestingly, the Sun accuses social workers of failing to detect the elaborate lies of Baby P's mother or the men living in the house, who hid in a trench in the garden when officials called. Yet in the Matthews case, Sun reporters were even more gullible. They put up the £50,000 reward money to find Karen Matthews' "little princess". They noted a message scrawled on Shannon's wall that she wanted to go and live with her real father, without unearthing the true story of her home life. Lousy social workers they would make - and lousy reporters too.

Quite. As said yesterday, no one emerges from this well, and Mr Eugenides has a decent post up critical of the hacks on all papers. Rather than introspection, the blame game has started up all over again.

Update: the Heresiarch in the comments disagrees:

Nice try. But "of" here is not indicating a possessive genitive, but rather appositional, qualifying the noun "mother". Thus, KM is also a mother "of 33 years", and a mother "of low moral character", without either of those being her offspring.


Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

12/05/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, December 04, 2008 

Some last words on Karen Matthews.

Evil, as it is, is an overused and generally meaningless word. Even when used to described psychopaths and their crimes, where no remorse is shown and where none is forthcoming, empathy being a completely foreign concept which they have never experienced, it fails because it is a catch-all, because it cannot even begin to truly explain why someone, even in those circumstances, could do what they did and live with themselves, let alone with others around them.

It's therefore even less than helpful to use it to describe Karen Matthews, as Detective Superintendent Andy Brennan did today in what even if printed in the tabloids would appear hyperbolic. Matthews real crime, after all, was not abuse, although the apparent drugging of her daughter Shannon with the tranquilliser tamazepam on at least three occasions prior to her "abduction" might well indicate that and could well have been happening at a lower-level (or equally that Shannon herself had problems sleeping and was given it by her parents without consulting a doctor), but deception. All the more galling for everyone involved is that Matthews seems to have been able to turn her tears on and off like a tap, a consummate actor that could play people far above the level that most were ready to give her credit for. There were the indications, of course, and now with additional hindsight they will be all the more apparent, but Matthews more or less convinced everyone: the media, even if some sections of it hardly went out of their way and hardly hid their snobbery; the police, half the reason why Brennan doubtless described Matthews in the way he did, he himself being deceived by her; and indeed this blogger, who got his apology in early for monstering Allison Pearson over her criticism of Matthews' parenting.

The coverage in the press tomorrow will be doubtless all the more bitter, personal and hysterical because of how they themselves were fooled, although already some are claiming they moderated their coverage for fear of falling into "stereotypes", i.e. suggesting it was all Matthews' fault for acting like a stray bitch in heat and having so many different partners while daring to live on a council estate which the Sun, that bastion of working-class conciousness and pride, described as "like Beirut, only worse". The Grauniad, not known for mass working-class readership, had to do something approaching a more balanced view.

I wrote around the time that the press got bored with the idea that the McCanns were innocent bourgeois salts of the earth abroad that if it subsequently turned out that they themselves were involved in Madeleine's disappearance that the fury and hatred directed at them would be possibly beyond anything seen before, because of how they had been played, and while the coverage did subsequently turn, as the libel settlements have shown, none of the criticism which they faced, outside of the Express and Star and online forums, reached the contempt which some had for Matthews before anyone knew what had happened to Shannon. Some of that bile we have instead witnessed directed at those involved in the Baby P case, where "decent mums" without irony on social-networking sites discussed how they would torture his mother to death.

Should we take anything else from the Shannon Matthews case, apart from having our own perceptions and immediate reactions pulled out of joint, our trust in others' apparent grief and playing to the cameras made more circumspect and potentially cynical? If nothing else, we ought to at least take note of the way the Dewsbury estate pulled together in a way which those that talk about Britain being broken and how welfare dependency breeds idleness and fecklessness would not have expected: they searched high and low, held collections, distributed posters, taxi drivers waived fees and helped those searching get around and regardless of their effort, will almost certainly be tarred with the same brush as Matthews and Donovan now will be. They were duped like everyone else, or put their concerns to one side as even they could not imagine someone sinking so low. Evil was not involved, but introspection on all sides ought to be the order of the day.

Labels: , , , ,

Share |

12/04/2008 11:58:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, April 12, 2008 

More on the Moorfield.

After this week's Ruth Fowler antics, it's a joy to read Marina Hyde on her usual top form:

At last, a solution to all this bourgeois anxiety about the environmental impact of travel: class tourism. You don't have to leave the house and you always end up feeling better about yourself. It has certainly seemed a viable alternative in recent weeks, as people have been able to observe the denizens of the West Yorkshire estate on which Shannon Matthews lived, and apply all sorts of labels - the most popular referencing Shameless, the television series by the award-winning writer Paul Abbott set on a fictional Manchester estate.

To read the papers since the arrest of Shannon's mother, Karen, has been to see Britain as a nation of Gillian McKeiths - completely ill-qualified to pass judgment, but keen to shriek in horror at how these people do live.


And for those whom have ironically forgiven Fowler because of her appearance - Ms Hyde is more than aesthetically pleasing without having to take photographs of her rump.

Hopi Sen also went through the history books to show that the horror in the press at the Moorfield estate is hardly a new occurrence, regardless of Allison Pearson's shock and romanticising of her own council estate upbringing, while Justin is sardonic as usual about the latest "revelations" concerning how awful Karen Matthews is. Also worth reading is yesterday's Grauniad dispatch which typically went deeper than the superficial disgust elsewhere:

And yesterday the place had its own "conflict tourists" - five women from Huddersfield with a toddler cuddled precariously (and illegally) on their Peugeot's back seat. "We're here for a nosey," said the driver, looking optimistically at the sort of everyday redbrick semis you see on the edge of any town in the north of England. "It is real rough, isn't it?"

Cunts.

Labels: , , , ,

Share |

4/12/2008 09:25:00 PM | | | links to this post

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Last posts

Archives

Email me
Syndicate this site (XML)
Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates