Once upon a time, cave man hunted and gathered while cave woman looked after cave kids and cave kitchen. Life was a struggle. Survival was the only goal. Then came, not too soon after, trains, cars, welfare, television, the microwave, celebrity big brother and so on. For most of us, survival is second nature, giving us plenty of time to think about the ambiguity of our purpose beyond it. We all know death is coming and well, we'd all like to do something or be somebody before the curtain falls.
In 2002, a journalist asked comedian Ricky Gervais: "what advice would you give to someone who wants to be famous overnight?" to which he replied, "go out and kill a prostitute."
[...] Hodson feels that the media at home sometimes instigate that fear: “From a world perspective, we're very narrow minded and concerned about our own backyard. Sometimes the media, apart from the BBC, which has a different agenda, is desperate to sell its products. The sexier the product the better.” Since 9/11 the news media have felt it necessary to show us everything there is to know about our so-called enemies; from the hook-waggling bearded man to the videos purportedly from Osama Bin Laden and his pals. [...]
[...] Like Phillip Hodson says, there is a demand for stories that show extremes of human behavior; however there does seem something grotesquely tedious about school shootings. The repetitive interviews of fellow pupils who say of the gunman: always kept himself to himself,” and the helicopter cameras panning over the area long after the drama occurred. Perhaps it shows a lack of creativity in the reporting of these kinds of stories, maybe these are a journalist's only options or maybe these stories are all just very similar. [...]
[...] Rarely does it show us something completely new and unheard of. If Karen Matthews did not magically think up this bizarre plot out of the sky then it is quite likely that the Madeleine McCann coverage inspired this. It was also well publicized by the media how big the Find Madeleine Fund had grown and with that, Karen Matthews's desire to make money grew. The McCann family received several emails and letters demanding financial help to find Shannon Matthews. One man even turned up on their doorstep claiming he represented the Matthews family. [...]
[...] The media stirred up a campaign in support of Shannon Matthews's return to her mother, Karen. The Sun newspaper offered a £20,000 reward, and then that ludicrously unthinkable thing became reality when Karen Matthews was arrested and convicted of kidnapping her own daughter. The media had already extracted widespread sympathy from the public over the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and it does make the mind wonder if Karen Matthews watched all this and spontaneously decided to kidnap her own daughter. [...]
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