Miriam O’Reilly and Joanna Yeates: their’s are two of the names which have dominated the media in the last month. Miriam, a television presenter by profession, won an historic victory when she proved that her employers had shown discrimination on ageist grounds. There can’t have been a person over fifty in the country, female or male, who did not cheer her on. Jo, less than half her age, pretty, a responsible citizen going places in her career, was murdered a few days before Christmas and her body dumped in a snowy ditch.
Is there a link between them? What befell both women, though entirely different in scale and outcome, showed once again how tyrannised we are by the media’s obsession to present the news as entertainment, dumbed down, irresponsible, wrecking of careers. Miriam O’Reilly was thrown out of her television role because her face was deemed too wrinkled and her hair in need of black dye. She was the victim of television’s obsession with youth. Unless you are a national treasure such as David Attenborough, and especially if you are a woman, forget the cameras and studios in your sixth decade and start cultivating your garden. Female television presenters nowadays have cleavages the width of the San Antonio Fault. ‘Breaking News’ is flashed on the screen with thudding urgency. Even routine news is introduced with a pulsating (and deeply irritating) musical beat, which underscores the headlines as though they were the culminating lines of a great play. Surely this is as much a manipulation of the news for dramatic effect as any doctored photograph or corrupted text would be.
In the same vein, the sad death of Jo Yeates was played throughout the Christmas period as though it was another case for Miss Marple. The body in the snow, the bungling police, the eccentric suspect with dyed blue hair. One life had been ended and it was right that there should be public concern about what had happened. There was no right, however, to ruin the life of a man called in by the police for questioning and who lived alone, enjoyed poetry, had a religious inclination, and who just happened to have a former colleague serving a sentence for sexual molestation. Smutty hints were piled on innuendo in a determination to label the man a murderer, a suspicion he will now have to live with all his life, unless someone else is conclusively found guilty, and though there may not a scrap of evidence. A sordid and upsetting crime became strangely glamourised as the newspapers and television outdid each other in their Agathachristilising of the case.
Where will the process stop? As television channels fight for viewing figures and newspapers struggle to survive, we can expect more of this conversion of serious news in to a running soap opera, with a new twist every day. Nigel’s demise in The Archers was expressed through the longest ‘Aaaaaaaargh!’ in recorded history. If, instead of falling off an icy roof, he had been watching the news on telly or reading it in the paper I can’t believe that his cry of anguish would have been very different.
Alastair Niven
Principal
To comment on what you read, email: comments@cumberlandlodge.ac.uk
