YOUR FIFTEEN MINUTES ARE UP

Raoul Moat: it’s a name for a character in a comic novel, isn’t it. Perhaps one by David Lodge or Tom Sharpe. Come to that, so is Derrick Bird, especially spelt that way. Well, perhaps not now.

I tended to avoid coverage of Moat’s week on the lam in Northumberland, as far as I could. So I don’t know whether commentators were drawing clever parallels with Derrick Bird’s rampage through Cumbria last month. But somehow I doubt it. Bird is last month’s chip paper.

For my readers who do not or are not able to follow what now passes for news on television and radio and in the papers in Britain, the tale is easily told. Raoul Moat, a bouncer and small-time criminal, was released from gaol at the turn of the month, despite giving every indication that he intended his former girlfriend no good. He promptly shot and wounded her, shot and killed her new man (whom he believed to be a police officer), shot and gravely wounded a traffic policeman, went to ground for a week and was cornered for some six hours at the end of which he fatally shot himself.


Moat in the media's eye

Derrick Bird, a taxi driver, shot and killed his twin brother, then led police on a frenzied chase across Cumbria, killing eleven more people, some of whom he knew, some evidently at random, before shooting himself dead. By a curious coincidence, Cumbria County Council has offices in the small town of Brampton. In Moat Street.

The media calculate that there is a strong public appetite for stories like this, particularly ones that are decently contained. Had Moat held off the police well into a second week, he would have lost his place as the lead story. As it was, he timed it nicely to allow the result of the World Cup final to become tonight’s pressing report. His death almost closes down his news value, save for the fact that his brother is now giving the media an extraordinarily fanciful account of what he reckons took place in Moat’s last hours, though of course he wasn’t there.

Such stories hold little interest for me. I’d much rather have proper reporting of the spy-swap negotiation, the details of the government’s botched cancellation of school rebuilding projects and other real news. I can’t be doing with the question upon which the media harp – “why did he do it?” – because I know perfectly well that if they essay an answer it will be of the most banal kind, psychology got out of a total ignorance of either the particular circumstances of the case or the accumulated literature of psychopathology.


Derrick didn't get to do bird

During the days and days of coverage that succeeded Bird’s killing spree and death, BBC reporters several times observed in so many words that what the residents of Whitehaven most fervently desired was for the media circus to go away. But as so often when they talk of the media, they mysteriously exclude themselves from it, as though nobody in their right mind could possibly object to several BBC camera crews recording everything that moved, researchers collecting endless pointless vox pops in the street and a succession of senior correspondents doing grave think pieces to camera. Clearly, the BBC reporters implied, what the good folk of Cumbria really didn’t want was tabloid reporters trying to work up something salacious. I suspect that the BBC and other television news outfits rubber-necking on the assumed behalf of the nation was no less unwelcome.

What makes one situation a major candidate for a nightly fiesta of “human interest” overkill and another only worth a paragraph in a weekly local newspaper? There were 648 homicides in England and Wales in the twelve months to March 2009 (the figure for the following twelve months is due out this week). Interestingly, only 38 of them were shootings, the preferred method of Bird and Moat.

Meanwhile, the child murder rate runs at more than fifty per year but only a very few receive the attention accorded to Peter Connolly – “Baby P”. No one knows how many children go missing each year – the definition of “missing” is elusive and the police and other authorities have difficulty amassing reliable statistics – but there cannot be much doubt that the coverage accorded to Madeleine McCann in the first weeks of her alleged disappearance was vastly more extensive than that lavished on any before or since. Without belittling the ordeal of the McCanns, there was clearly a certain iconography about the case of their child that commended itself to the media, from the relatively exotic holiday setting to Mrs McCann’s gambit in always carrying her daughter’s “favourite” toy. Kate and Gerry McCann were themselves highly skilful at keeping the story bubbling.


McCanny Scots

It’s debatable whether the McCanns exploited the media or vice versa, just as you can argue that, in such cases, the media is satisfying a public appetite or creating it. News professionals of my acquaintance have hung on every word of the Moat, Bird, Baby P and McCann stories, professionals for whom, you might think, the real substance of news was the playing out of the fates of the Con-Dem coalition, the Labour leadership, the Obama administration, the tottering rules of Sarkozy, Merkel and Berlusconi, the perilous government of Zimbabwe, the fractious coexistence between Russia and her former satellites, the defiant regimes in Jerusalem and Tehran and the still new, still scorned leadership in the European Union. I don’t mind admitting that those Shakespearean dramas engage me much more than the pitiful soap operas unfolding in picturesque little northern towns.