In the context of news reporting, this claim seems contentious, even dangerous, because we have to juggle two ideas which sound opposing: that we can sympathize with a criminal and at the same time firmly condemn his or her crime. The news is tacitly convinced that its audience wouldn’t be able to pull off this conceptual feat, and that any sympathy it might express would lead the audience to want to open up the prisons and let murderers roam the streets. It hence remains steadfast in its refusal to undertake the narrative and psychological manoeuvres required to humanize criminals.
Instead it rushes through their stories. A performance of Oedipus Rex might last an hour and a half; the news story in which the doctor appears is 304 words long.
Inevitably, a feeling of outrage is likely to be at its height when we confront the headline:
Doctor had ‘sickening’ child porn
But, as we read on, our certainty might be challenged. Towards the end of the piece, we learn:
Ordering Taylor to sign the Sex Offenders Register for 10 years, the judge said: ‘As a result of this conviction no doubt your career will come to an end.’
We might feel a chill at the thought of how seven long years of medical school had come to this. The article gives a hint of the panic the doctor must have felt:
The court was told Taylor initially denied being responsible, but later admitted, during police interviews, that he had downloaded the images.
And the enormous price that he has subsequently had to pay:
Stephen Rich, defending, told Judge George Moorhouse that Taylor’s wife and newborn baby had left him and that his life had collapsed.
An addendum informs us that while in prison, the man tried to commit suicide. All this is no less sad than the plot line of Madame Bovary or Hamlet – and, let’s argue, the character of the doctor is not fundamentally any worse; Hamlet is, after all, a murderer and Emma Bovary is guilty of extreme child cruelty. We consider them ‘tragic’ figures – that is, entitled to a degree of complex understanding – because we imagine that there must have been something unusually noble and dignified about their nature and circumstances. But really it is only the generosity of spirit of Flaubert and Shakespeare that elevates Bovary and Hamlet above the ordinary criminal and dissuades us from judging them as harshly as we might the imprisoned doctor.
5.
WHEN REPORTING ON a tragedy, the news tends to make dreadful conduct seem unique to a particular person. It resists the wider resonance and the more helpful conclusion: that we are all a hair’s breadth away from catastrophe. This knowledge should, if properly absorbed, sink us into a mood of reflective, mature sadness. We are more implicated than we might like to believe in the misdeeds of other members of our species. A lack of a serious criminal record is in large measure a matter of luck and good circumstance, not proof of an incorruptible nature. A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination. Were life, or what the Greeks termed the gods, ever really to test us, we would almost surely be found wanting – an awareness upon which a measure of understanding towards the guilty should be founded.
The tragedians of ancient Greece never forgot this. They liked to tell us how vicious, stupid, sexual, enraged and blind we could be, but they allowed room for complex compassion as well. Through the examples they leave us, we are coaxed into accepting that we are members of a noble but hideously flawed species; capable of performing amazing feats, ably practising medicine or parenting with love for many years, and then of turning around and blowing up our existence with a single rash move. We should be scared.
6.
THE ANCIENT GREEKS saw tragic plays once a year, at a specific time, within a particular context and with some knowledge of the works’ larger purpose.
By contrast, we take in tragic news stories almost every day, but we rarely recognize them as belonging to a coherent narrative cycle with a distinctive moral to impart. The news doesn’t help us to place in a single genre all those incidents in which self-control is lost and the monster within is released. It doesn’t, as it should, gather all its varied tales of horror under the unified heading of ‘Tragedy’ and then narrate them in such a way that we can more easily recognize our own smouldering tendencies in the demented actions of the bloody protagonists.
(picture credit 15.3)
Father with his son – and the car in which he later killed him.
(picture credit 15.4)
After struggling to cope with the end of his 10-year marriage to wife Erica, Mr Pedersen killed their two children, Ben, seven, and Freya, six, and then killed himself. The bodies of Ben and Freya Pedersen were found stabbed to death next to their father after he knifed them on Sunday evening. Their father had recently split from his wife, 43. After frenziedly stabbing the children to death in a ‘terrifying’ attack, Mr Pedersen turned the larger knife on himself and drove it three times into his chest and once into his forearm. Mr Pedersen took the children to a remote country lane in Hampshire where he parked the car. The bodies were found by a dog walker, who saw Mr Pedersen’s Saab Convertible and then noticed a child’s leg.
Daily Mail
7.
MUCH OF THE news is in the end an account of people around the globe, in all sorts of positions, getting things very wrong. They fail to master their emotions, contain their obsessions, judge right from wrong and act decently when there is still time. We shouldn’t waste their failures. The news, like literature and history, can serve as that most vital of instruments, a ‘life simulator’ – which is to say, a machine that inserts us into a variety of scenarios stretching far beyond anything we might ordinarily have to cope with and that affords us a chance safely, and at our leisure, to hone our best responses.
Yet too often the news doesn’t help us to learn from the experiences of our wretched brethren; it doesn’t actively try to spare us and our societies the full force of error at every new turn. If, as we have already seen, a good life demands that we learn from, and imitate, the example of inspiring figures, it also requires us to undertake close study of those whose behaviour should profoundly scare, horrify and warn us. These are two sides of the same coin of growth and development, and it lies within the remit of the news, if not yet on its agenda, to help us with both.
Accident
(picture credit 16.1)
A father taking his daughter to school in Derbyshire has been killed after his car skidded into an icy river, only minutes before his wife, on a school run with their son, also crashed into the water. The two children and their mother managed to escape unhurt from the cars but, despite desperate attempts by local residents, the father could not be saved and died in hospital. He had been driving along a bridle path north of the A6 in Derbyshire, when his Toyota Aygo veered off the path and became submerged in the River Wye.
Huffington Post
1.
IT IS, OF course, an appalling story. The dead man was only forty-two; friends remembered him as a ‘wonderful, loving father, husband, brother and son’. To shock us further, the news story goes on to give details about the family’s frantic struggles in the freezing river; it describes neighbours’ failed attempts to rescue the driver from the overturned car; and it reveals the parents’ fateful last-minute decision to take this treacherous narrow road rather than their usual (safer, wider) route. It needed just a little patch of black ice for a life to be destroyed. It might so easily have been simply another ordinary morning. The crash dominated the headlines in Britain for several hours one January day (until a plane exploded into flames just after take-off in Nepal).