Today’s Lurid Newspaper Front Covers Reveal There’s Many Contenders In The Race For The Bottom
The front page of many of this morning’s newspapers invite their readers to lock eyes with a woman who is moments away from her own death. These are the eyes of Alison Parker, a 24 year old broadcast journalist who, but seconds ago, was conducting a routine interview with a local official on Live TV. This image has been carefully selected by various editorial teams across the country; zoomed-in, screenshotted and digitally enhanced to give you the best possible view of imminent death etched in the eyes of another human. The decision to use the POV shot from the assailants point of view is a deliberate one, positioning us so we can easily imagine what it might be like to hold and shoot the lethal weapon ourselves. The Sun have even taken the liberty of adding in their own cartoon CGI explosion, like the ones you get on TV. To whet your appetite further, inside many of today’s editions you’ll be greeted with a whole smorgasbord of images, each one capturing the contorted face of a young woman at various stages of being murdered.
Perhaps then, this is as good a time as any to pause and reflect on where the British press stand on the reportage of death, live and in the flesh. This is an era where America’s gun laws have seen one mass murder every week of 2015. It’s also an era where unfiltered, streaming HD videos can be instantly uploaded and disseminated worldwide. Unlike in previous generations where the press have acted as content-gatekeepers, we now inhabit a world where newspapers can only play catch-up to the lawless abyss of The Internet. In theory this shifts power away from establishments and into the hands of individuals, but when those individuals are firing bullets at point-blank range, newspapers cannot join them in toying with the blood.
What we see on the front cover of The Sun, The Times and The Daily Mail appeals to the same carnal impulse that drew Victorians to squeal with delight at serialised Penny Dreadful horror stories. But we should surely not see our modern selves reflected in the pages of those lurid and archaic magazines. In 2015 it seems so base and perverted that so many of our national newspapers seek to tittilate and tease us, commoditising murder with the promise that we can ‘see the chilling video online’, an action only achievable by logging onto The Sun’s website and therefore driving up their ad revenue. It is hard not to imagine editorial offices up and down the country staffed by normal human beings licking their lips like lavacious cartoon dogs after seeing a trail of sausages upon hearing the news of yet another on-camera murder. And so now we’re left with no choice but to enter our air-conditioned supermarkets and be met with the same nightmare image repeated thousand-fold, an innocent woman caught at the precise moment she realises she is about to die.
As circulation figures circle the drain, we have now reached a point where newspapers seem engaged in a race to the bottom. Make no mistake about it, this is a snuff film that you are watching. Try to imagine that those eyes are the eyes of someone you know and love, and that right now the Internet is throbbing with individuals desperate to reanimate and relive the scene by swarming onto the thesun.co.uk. It is morally abject, and to profiteer from it reveals our press to be little more than a national indictment. And yet it will continue. As the atrocious beheadings by IS soldiers show, instantly uploaded and unfiltered footage of gruesome events now forms part of our digital DNA. This is in part because smartphones have made it possible, but it’s also been greatly aided by a national media who greedily push it on us under the guise of public interest. Here, it seems, we must choose how to respond in the face of a free press for whom moral limits do not apply, and whose actions repeatedly defy both regulations and sanctions.
It would be too nihilistic to conclude that we get what we deserve, that we are little more than savages dressed in smart clothing like the boys on Golding’s desert island. But as the world lurches towards dystopia with every passing day, those 3.3 million Sun readers and 1.2 million Daily Mail readers (not forgetting The Times, whose cover is equally abhorrent) really need to question what it is that they want from their news. Because if the press, as is so often stated, holds a mirror up to society, then the reflection cast here is an ugly thing indeed.
