Some Caribbean Trakker readers might realize that it is editorial policy – influenced by governments’ appeal to patriotism and good business sense – for many newspapers to keep reports of crime and death off their front pages.
The reason is that Caribbean (Tourist) islands don’t want to scare potential tourists off. Murder, crime and security lapses are dealt with, inside the papers. I am so interested in the significance of death and the media.
I know that this is tough to do in places like Trinidad and Jamaica. Guyanese newspapers have no such restraints. Daily, it’s Death on the Front Pages!
Put another way: the scant regard with which the careless, the lawless and the ignorant regard human life, and the media’s reaction to – or use of that sordid reality.
I mean especially the unbridled, consistent and yes, sometimes sickening regularity of daily front-page headlines and stories of death in the country’s major dailies.
The Publishers and Boards of Directors of newspapers will trot out noble “mission statements” with objectives. These messages will invariably have to do with press freedom, the right to free (responsible?) expression and assembly – those sacred constitutional and human rights and, no doubt, the role of their particular newspapers in the development and preservation of the “society”. International covenants and agreements regarding Press Freedom and sometimes (only sometimes) the responsibilities and duties of genuine journalists are invariably quoted.
However, downstairs at the Editors’ desks and computers, they deal with the realities of, among other (more mundane) matters, the so called public’s right to know, significant (sensational) issues of the day, development plans by government – especially those projects policies and programmes which easily attract criticism; rumours which indicate exposés or scoops and innocent but useless social gossip-and the profitability through increased circulation of the newspaper. How editors respond to that latter consideration – often with their publisher’s silent consent – is the subject of comment in this piece today.
Delighting in death for dollars? Of course not! No self-respecting religious, civic-minded, professional newspaper editor endowed with a conscience which reeks of the sensitivity regarding the sanctity of human life, would seek to exploit death for dollars. To sell their papers, to boost circulation, to become “popular”.
What a paragraph above, this! But wait. The daily evidence does seem to suggest that some rationale, some reason, motivation or dynamic is at work here. Resulting in pure death on the front pages. One senior sub-editor put this to me: “the competition plasters the front pages with death; death- like sex – sells; the editor claims to know that the “public” wants to see, hear and read of death and its details”. In order words, the editor – despite his noble training and sense of (national) professional responsibility, is merely responding to his readership.
Ha! Given the profit-making bottom-line, how valid are the editors’ arguments?
In New York for example, a metropolis long known for its outrageous goings-on – I think it is agreed that gore would be kept off the from pages. (I’m not too sure…). Well, I was somewhat surprised at my elder daughter’s annoyance at an inside-page photograph of a Labour Day reveller who was shot dead. The picture showed him lying on Eastern Parkway with just a few spots of blood visible. Perhaps because of having left Guyana before this society plummeted into unfortunate levels of grossness, she was upset with the New York paper. Then I showed her a copy of the Kaieteur News with the man’s head separated from his body. She was outraged. For our newspapers, our children, our level of new-found indecency.
Because I had abhorred that particular Kaieteur photographic offering, I discussed the issue with her. One of the views I offered, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, was that so professionally “objective” I thought that editor to be I’m sure he would have plastered also – a picture of his father’s, brother’s or son’s head on his front page.
So much for grief, sorrow, empathy and the sensitivities of forlorn relatives. What’s your view Trakker reader?
You must be logged in to post a comment.