Just on a related theme. some time ago I posted here with what I hope were a few tactfully and respectfully considered opinions on how the British class system might have impacted on this case and kept in in the public eye for so long. (That the McCanns didn't have to fight too hard to maintain press interest and awareness as they're from the same social stratum that contains, for instance, senior journalists in national media and newspapers: they'd move in the same income bracket and social circles, are likely to have been to university alongside people who today will hold down senior journalist jobs for BBC and ITV or work for national papers, they'd live in the same districts of town, they'd perhaps shop at Waitrose rather than Spar, their children would be privately educated at the same schools... they'd have avenues and networks not open to parents of a missing kid on a council estate).
I got to read the Daily Mail earlier. It leads on the really sad, tragic, thing about the multiple stabbing murder in Nottingham. (Is this Fortean in itself? As the temperature rises and even nights are hot, does this push people over the edge?)
The Mail gives this tragedy the front page and the reporting spills over into six pages inside. It stresses that the murdered students were from good respectable families in professional households from nice areas and had glittering lives ahead of them which have cruelly been taken away. This is of course true. Absolutely so.
But I still wondered if instead of socially upscale university students, how the papers might have covered it if the murdered young people were, for instance, unemployed street kids on a council estate, people with no prospects or in dead-end jobs. I'm getting this might have merited two or three paragraphs on page seven and nothing tomorrow, with an inference they'd somehow brought it on their own heads and a stock photograph of a rundown street on a council estate. In fact... I don't need to guess. There was a similar murder in Stoke- on- Trent at the same time; Sunday 11th June; two kids of seven and eleven were stabbed to death, possibly by their mother. (Ethan and Elizabeth John, brother and sister). Now the area where this happened is socially deprived, the average house price appears to be £95,000, and the John family were mixed-race. Compared to the Nottingham murders, press coverage is practically zero and the implications, even in such BBC coverage as there has been, is "well, only to be expected, really, unstable people in a rented property in a sink postcode, can't say we're surprised". .
So the same unspoken social class thing is applying again: the Nottingham murders are exponentially more important to the press because it happened to People Like Us, who could be our friends and neighbours, in fact it might even have happened to us....