One of the things we’re very aware of here at Hobby Towers
is that we see and experience the world through a prism that is shaped by our
preconceptions.
So if the newspapers take a particular view of Mairead and
Mick Philpott, it’s as much about the newspaper as it is about the Philpotts.
The Daily Mail’s approach to all of this is utterly unsurprising. In fact it
would be more of a surprise if the Daily Mail didn’t take such an approach.
You can draw quite a few conclusions from the case of the
Philpotts.
One of them is that the criminal justice system failed Mick
Philpott’s victims, all of them, from the very first woman he assaulted and
tried to kill to the six children he killed. Not because of the welfare system,
but because a system of fixed penalties, tariffs and assumed rehabilitation
meant no-one took cognizance of the fact that Mick Philpott was a violent,
abusive man entirely unchanged by his first spell in prison.
The problem of the tabloid press is that they don’t have to
tell the truth, or even attempt a reasonable facsimile of it. The Daily Mail
wants to use Mick Philpott, and pretend that somehow the welfare system made
him a murderer. It didn’t. That particular die was cast at some point in Mick
Philpott’s childhood. That personality defect contributed to the death of his
children, but it almost certainly contributed to how Mick Philpott lived as
well. Not for the first time, the Daily Mail has got the chain of causation wrong.
The welfare system did not make Mick Philpott the way he is; the way Mick
Philpott is made him a corrupt exploiter of the welfare system.
The problem is that the Daily Mail makes this mistake
routinely, not because its edited and published by fools, but because its
editor and journalists are not objective reporters, but activists campaigning
for a particular view of the world that legitimizes inequality and unfairness.
Jeremy Kyle, on the other hand, is just a prick.
Due to lack of time when writing this post I didn’t include
the comparison that needed to be made between a very similar, but in some ways
worse case and the Philpotts. Here’s the link to the Mail coverage in thatcase. Mr X was a rapist and abuser. His own sister alleged that he was making his
daughters pregnant to claim child benefit, but the focus of the Mail is not on
benefits, or the accusation that Mr X was a baby farmer, but on attacking the
social services who failed his daughters. Social services were the bete noir of
the hectoring classes then, so the Mail focussed its attack on them, not the
benefits system.
Now, we’re not in the business of over-analyzing the Daily
Mail; that way madness lies, but we’re content to argue that if you can look at
similar evidence and form different conclusions about it, you have no right to
claim that you are a logical, well intentioned observer engaged in a full and
frank search for truth.
We would argue that both Philpott and MR X have very similar
conditions, lacking in empathy and conscience to a clinical degree that would
require indeterminate sentences and a ‘presents no further risk of offending’
pre-condition for release. Based on its published output, the Mail has no
similar understanding of causation, or indeed of the responsibility of the individual
for their crimes.
Oh, and by the way, Jeremy Kyle is still a prick.
No comments:
Post a Comment