Blood, crime, sex: the news bestsellers
We all feel fascinated about about morbidity, no matter whether that feeling is repulsion or attraction. Crime and blood and sex sell, we all know it. And we all read first the news story which has “sex” or “death” or “catastrophe” in the headline. But are those news that important? Isn’t the media focusing too much in bloody stories?
A panel of journalists and experts discussed this question in Crime News: Why All the Attention. The discussion was centered around some of the last crime or sex-related Italian stories.
Fiorenza Sarzanini, journalist of the Corriere della Sera, defends the role of journalists when dealing with these dark stories. “Our role is central”, she says, “but we don’t have only to communicate, we also have to be sentinels, watch out carefully, we have to help to set things right”.
She is the author of Amanda e gli altri: vite perdute intorno al delitto di Perugia, a book about the killing of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007. Meredith’s American roommate, Amanda Knox has been charged with murder and sexual assault, along with two more suspects. The case has been widely followed in Italy, the UK and the United States and epitomises the thirst of the general public for these sort of stories.
Massimo Picozzi, criminologist, explains: “If there is the detective plot, the mistery, the story works, the public likes it.” It’s like the TV series CSI but real. What else can the public ask for? “CSI looks cool but reality is not like that, it’s slower and much more complicate”, Picozzi says.
Caterina Malavenda is a media lawyer and she has a different perspective. “I’d say to the journalists: ‘Make yourself this question, if this was about my mother or my sister, would I publish the story?’ That’s the criterium for me.”
“It’s very easy to speak about journalists in bad terms”, Sarzanini replies, and she defends the value of these stories. “This kind of crime does matter, it makes a difference, and newspapers need to call the attention of the reader so these crimes work.”
But then again, how to report about such shocking facts? Massimo Martinelli, journalist of Il Messaggero offers an answer: “The media has to register what the official sources say – but when the press conference is over is when the journalists really have to start working to find out what actually happened.”
You may love them or hate them, but it’s clear blood, crime and sex will keep making the headlines annd the front pages. The question with which Paolo Poggio, a RAI Radio journalist, began the talk remains open at the end: “Should or shouldn’t the media excite the morbidity of the public covering bloody stories?”
Jose M. Calatayud
