I used to be a Sunday tabloid journalist. My heart was never in it as I couldn’t be bothered getting worked up about stating the bleeding obvious and then pretending to be outraged by it.
Apparently, it turns out that not everyone has a strictly vanilla sex lives. Whodathunkit? Criminals do nasty things. Lawks a mercy. And teenagers get drunk and take drugs. Hold the front page!
At the weekend I saw something that took that last gem to a new level. The Scottish Sunday Express splashed on Anniversary shame of Dunblane survivors. Many others have already kicked this crap and its author to pieces and it’s been pulled from the alleged paper’s sorry excuse for a site but I am still angry enough about it to put my oar/boot in as well.
As with most Sunday tab yarns, further investigation revealed that this was a flammed up piece of crap. No surprises there but it was the sheer scale of the flamming coupled with bad taste and hypocrisy that sticks in the craw.
In essence, the “story” reveals that a couple of Dunblane survivors are 18 now and have been using social networking sites to talk about drink, drugs and sex. This, claims the piece, “shames” the memory of what happened.
In essence, these kids are being condemned for being normal teenagers. When they were very, very young they went through a hellish ordeal that the rest of us cannot imagine. One of the kids in the story was shot. These teenagers have performed a miracle in A) still being alive and B) functioning like everyone else. They should be celebrated or, better yet, left alone.
This is what we have come to: desperate hacks cyberstalking the victims of tragedy in the hope that they don’t become monks.
Of course, we journalists are famed for never drinking, taking drugs or having sex. On no, not us, guv. Add to us our well-known love of veracity and we are exactly the kind of people who should sit in judgment on everyone else.
And the Express, which is owned by a pornographer, hardly has the moral high ground on matters of the flesh.
But what of the hackette who wrote this abysmal piece. Well, Paula Murray is getting the Julie Moult treatment. But before we burn the witch we should remember that reporters are not solely responsible for what appears under their byline. A newsdesk, sub editors and an editor all OKed this vile smear.
Did any of them put their paw in the air to say what the Express now tacitly admits: that this was morally reprehensible?
There is room for individual conscience. Many, many years ago, when I was shifting at a London Sunday tab far viler than the Express, I deliberately messed up a particularly nasty nasty because I thought it was wrong.
It didn’t feel good to be unprofessional but I bet it felt better than Ms Murray feels now.
