A Brief Whinge About Journalism

If I die in an unorthodox manner, am involved in a road accident, commit a crime considered worth reporting, or in any other way become newsworthy, I do not want to be described by the newspaper headline announcing the story. By this, I mean the practice (particularly beloved of North Staffordshire paper The Sentinel), of referring to the deceased, unfortunate, or malfeasant, as “mother,” “pensioner,” or “husband.” Today’s issue ran a story headed: “Dropped cigarette set husband alight.” From this description, one would be led to presume that the man’s wife had in some way been involved, maybe dropping the cigarette herself. But no. She happened to be there at the time, but other than that, the man’s relationship as husband to this woman was in no way relevant to the story.

The practice of depicting people in terms of their relationships to others rankles particularly with me on a personal basis. I am not a wife. Or a mother. My hypothetically newsworthy death would be overshadowed on the page by a woman who died leaving behind four children. This kind of lazy judgment of an individual’s worth, by a hurried hack of a local journalist, is insulting to everybody.

Of course, my personal antagonism towards labelling by status may be due to my own lack of it. I can imagine my own untimely demise throwing up the headline: “Unemployed woman, 31, falls under lorry drunk.” Or: “Dead woman, 31, lay undiscovered for four weeks.” Not: “Tragic mother loses life after night out,” or “Neighbours tell of sadness at pensioner’s lonely death.”

I suspect that the custom of describing a person’s relationship, rather than describing them, is done out of a misguided attempt to humanise the protagonist of the piece, as if the purchaser of a newspaper would wish to read a story about a “husband” accidentally catching fire, but not a “man.” Or perhaps it is a journalistic attempt to bring the reader into the action of the story, as if one might think “Ooh, I’ve got a husband. Maybe he will catch on fire one day, I should probably read that.”