MEDIA STUDIES
The frightening game now played by serious newspapers and the BBC
STEPHEN GLOVER
There are people who maintain the indefensible about crime'. Ignoring the evi- dence of their own eyes, they say it has not really risen. What looks like an increase is really a statistical quirk, the result of much more widespread reporting of crimes. This is said to be particularly true of sexual crimes, which people are more likely to report than was once the case. There has been no enormous rise.
On the whole this is a rather chumpish view. No doubt there is a tendency to report crimes which in previous genera- tions might have been swept under the car- pet. But past under-reporting cannot explain so prodigious an increase. In 1955 the incidence of crime had only just broken through the barrier of 1,000 crimes per 100,000 of the population, at which level it had stood for a hundred years. By 1991 the rate was 10,000 crimes per 100,000. Tiny improvements over the last few years are Unlikely to be maintained, if recent history Is any guide.
Many of these new crimes are not very serious. But there has been an almost com- mensurate increase in offences such as armed robbery and murder. Sexual crime, including rape, has also gone up sharply. So have cases of child abuse. The number of reported rapes in England and Wales (pop- ulation 52 million) rose from 1,100 in 1981 to 4,600 in 1993. Even if we accept that some of this fourfold increase is attributable to better reporting, it is unde- niably alarming. On the other hand, given that there are some 21 million women in England and Wales over the age of 16, the likelihood of being raped, though much increased, remains quite small. The causes of these changes need not detain us now. Deviant sexual behaviour is more and more being blamed on the break- up of families and the absence of fathers. Others look towards pornography and the triumph of relativist morality in our schools. Fascinating and tempting though these theories are, what interests me here is the way in which newspapers and broadcast media report rising crime. For in this age our view of the world is not so much condi- tioned by our own experience of reality as by what the media tells us reality is. A sim- ple test is to ask yourself how many people You know have been murdered, raped or, to the best of your knowledge, sexually abused.
The answer is probably few. And yet many of us believe that we live in a very dangerous country in which deviant sexual behaviour is rampant. We take precautions and worry about dangers not so much on the basis of the evidence of our own experi- ence as because we have greater faith in the version of reality offered to us by the media. Once it was the tabloids which spe- cialised in a diet of violent and sexual crime that cumulatively provides a distorted pic- ture of the incidence of depraved behaviour. Now the tendency has spread to the supposedly respectable media.
Two recent examples illustrate the point. Last Sunday's Observer led its front page with the eye-popping headline, 'Boy, six, raped by girl, 14'. It was a squalid story whose details need not concern us. But even if is is true, it should be clear to the editor of the Observer that there is hardly an epidemic of rapes by 14-year-old girls, nor is there ever likely to be. This was grossly aberrational behaviour. It certainly should have been reported, but to make it the lead story of one of only 52 issues of the Observer which will appear this year was to give it greater weight than it deserved. Its intention was to make the hair on the back of our necks bristle with terror. We were being told that we live in a society even more depraved than we had supposed.
Monday's BBC Nine O'Clock News ran a prominent item about parents who abuse and torture their babies. This must be very uncommon. Yet the news was presented in such a way that it was not immediately apparent that the mothers and fathers pho- tographed by covert cameras in two hospi- tals over eight years were suspected child abusers. In 33 cases they were discovered doing what they had already been suspect- ed of. The momentary impact of the item on me was to make me think that child abuse is much more widespread than I had believed. In fact, it proves nothing of the sort.
In both these cases something had hap- pened which it was right to report. But sen- sationalist editors made no attempt to put extraordinary behaviour in the context of normal conduct. If the Observer had run its piece on an inside page, the reader would have got the right message. As for the BBC, if it was felt that its story was really worthy of inclusion on a busy night, it should have been made clearer that the parents involved were previously believed to be child abusers, and so their depravity offered no guide as to how most mothers and fathers behave towards their babies in hospitals.
Until recently serious newspapers and the BBC were usually anxious to help us attach the right importance to scary stories. More and more they are now in the fright- ening game. It takes quite a robust mind to be able to put all their scares in perspec- tive. If we believe that the grotesque ver- sion of life which they offer is the real thing, we and our children will think we live in a world that is even uglier and more warped than it really is. I shall stick to this view even if I am murdered on my way home tonight.
Last Sunday the Sunday Mirror pub- lished a picture of the married ex-Tory MP Piers Merchant and his girlfriend, Anna Cox, under a duvet. The previous week it had threatened to publish this picture if Mr Merchant did not own up to the affair. He did so in an article in the Daily Mail. Nonetheless, the Sunday Mirror published the photograph on the grounds that Ms Cox had misleadingly claimed to be a vir- gin. In short, the paper was determined to find any pretext.
Disturbing reports reach me from the Sunday Mirror's offices that senior execu- tives at the paper have been watching the covertly taken video from which this pic- ture was taken, and making ribald remarks. If this is true, Mr Merchant has cause to complain to the Press Complaints Commis- sion. Lord Wakeham, its chairman, must consider the uses to which this video is being put, and give us some guidance as to whether he thinks the Sunday Mirror was justified in photographing Mr Merchant and Ms Cox having sex. Preposterously, Bridget Rowe, editor of the Sunday Mirror, is a member of the Commission's 'code committee'. I can't believe this will influ- ence Lord Wakeham.
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