Suicide or not – what makes the better Mail story?
Posted by 5cc
April 14th, 2009
Via Uponnothing comes a story about the Mail being less than truthful about the death of a teenage girl.
There are two main threads to the story that the Mail picks up on. From the local paper we learn that although the death of the girl looks very much like suicide, the Deputy Coroner rules that out as the cause. Apparently:
Deputy coroner Christine Freedman, recording an open verdict, ruled that there was no evidence to conclude that it was suicide.
She told the hearing at Ashford last Thursday : “This is a tragic case of a young girl who appears to have died as a result of hanging herself.
“I have found nothing that could really give a clue as to why this might have happened”
So, no suicide. Maybe a tragic accident, but the Deputy Coroner has ruled out suicide as the cause. That’s the first thread.
The second thread is this:
The inquest heard that some time before her death Georgina had had a row with two Astor schoolgirls who had gone to confront her at her school..
But that didn’t happen because staff intervened and Georgina believed the quarrel was finished, the inquest heard.
It seems that there was going to be a spat with a couple of girls from another school, which came to nothing because of staff intervention. Nothing to spark a suicide, it would seem.
By the time the story makes the Mail, it becomes ‘Grammar schoolgirl, 14, found hanged after row with pupils from nearby comprehensive‘, which neatly packages the story for the Mail’s audience as one of middle class girl hounded to her death by the savage lower classes. Great.
In this version of the story:
A girl at a top grammar school was found hanged amid fears she was bullied by pupils from a nearby comprehensive.
Georgina Williams, 14, was discovered in her bedroom by her parents at their £750,000 home in Dover following a feud with a group of girls said to be ‘after her’.
Messages posted by friends on the social networking website Bebo suggested Georgina may have been intimidated and upset in the run-up to her death.
Although the paper is careful not to use the word ’suicide’, except to say that no suicide note was found, and although the paper includes quotes from police later in the article to suggest that they thought nothing of the incident with pupils from the comprehensive, we’ve already been led to believe that the girl committed suicide. And those Bebo ‘friends’ appear to be firends of friends, who didn’t know her that well.
The Mail has form in misreporting suicides when it would make a better story. The PCC has upheld complaints about the paper moving a death forward in time by a year to fit it in with a spate of suicides in Wales; the paper reporting that a man had committed suicide the day after seeing his baby’s scan; and the paper saying a man had killed his wife and committed suicide when that wasn’t the case. There are others, and the Mail’s angle made a better story than the truth in all these.
And this one, it seems.
Get over and read Uponnothing’s take on this at the Angry Mob for more detail.
As someone who suffers from depression and has attempted suicide in my darkest times and often think about it I’m very upset at newspaper reporting of suicide (I live in South Wales, so have seen a lot of the misreporting of events around here). I believe the press routinely breach the PCC code on reporting suicide, particularly this clause:
Glorification of suicide: Stories presented in a way likely to romanticize suicide could have a serious influence, especially on vulnerable young people.
They are also asked not to provide details of methods of suicide. That said, although the inquest in this case has recorded an open verdict it’s a feature of our inquest system that coroners are extremely reluctant to record suicide verdicts; maybe for very good reasons, but as a former local newspaper reporter I can certainly report that was the view among most experienced journalists I knew (not all of whom were vile lying scumbags!).
Keep up the good work, I love yer site.
I love how they give the price of the girls house like its totally relevant to a suicide story! And Bebo as well, the site that makes teens commit suicide in DM land!
What really gets me is how familial Murder-Suicides are reported. If it’s a woman, a non-white or a man from an impoverished background responsible, they’re absolute evil hell-bound scum.
If however it is a rich white man, the tones is always sympathetic, and almost condoning of his actions, as if murdering his wife and daughter was an acceptable, even loving way, of ’saving’ them from the ‘indignity’ of losing the house/business/money, usually caused by evil ZanuLieBour’s handling of the economy (regardless of the fact he wasted his last million marketing chocolate fireguards)
The police shooting of the rich stockbroker a few years back was another classic example. It was as clear cut a case of suicide by cop as you can get, yet even though he was firing randomly into the street, it was seen as a brutal police over-reaction with the article peppered with details of his salary and house value like it had any fucking relevance.
If he would have been a black man on benefits and lived on a council estate in Manchester, they’d have castigated the police for not firing a missile at the house and then sawing his head off to make sure he was dead.
What is distressing in this case is that tabloids across the board reported this case as a suicide caused by bullying at the hands of other young girls from the nearby school.
How must those girls be feeling / being treated by others?
Read the Bebo memorial page for Georgina Williams and you will see hundreds of people who did not know her, have only heard of her through the tabloids, commenting on what a horrible thing it is to be bullied and forced into suicide.
I work in FE and i’m sick and tired of young people repeating the lies they / their parents read in tabloid newspapers.
The DM on this story (as so many others) are nothing less than a bunch of revolting c*nts, deliberately attempting to corrode the minds of the nation with their twisted vicious bigoted hateful sh*t.
We should put them on trial one day.
Then put them up against a wall.
Steady on, Mail Man.
Uptonothing is bang on – the story has been changed to one of a girl being hounded to death by other girls, when that’s already been dismissed as the cause.
It turns the story into one of certainty, with a definite set of baddies that just happen to fit in with traditional Daily Mail demons.
I just wanted to correct something I think is wrong on this post (although do correct me back if you know better).
The Coroner gave an open verdict and said there was no evidence of suicide. Coroners tend if possible not to give suicide verdicts because of the stigma historically attached to it. The coroner wasn’t suggesting it was an accident, she was very clear that this girl killed herself. It is just that she had given no indication to anyone of suicidal intention, so it goes down as open rather than ’suicide’. Lots of suicides are recorded in this way. I don’t think it is unreasonable, therefore, to report this as a suicide. The sense in which we use the term is looser than the very limited definition used by coroners.
You are absolutely spot on though about the DM’s totally irresponsible attempt to draw a link between her death and the earlier incident, and the casual disregard for the clear evidence between flippant newspaper treatment of suicide and follow-on deaths.
Not a fan of the DM, but I would take a middle view here – re the first point, the coroner says there is a lack of actual evidence to show the death was suicide (a note etc). It does not rule out the possibility it was suicide. Coroners have to talk in this kind of very factual way. As for the second one the fact some girls came to the school seeking a confrontation but a teacher intervened is evidence there was a problem between those girls and the girl who died – which may or may not have been the direct cause of the death. So yes, the DM has exaggerated, but it is hardly the worst case of tabloid exaggeration I have seen.
A comprehensive in Kent? That would be a Secondary Modern. The Tory press loves to do this associate Comprehensives with Secondary Moderns in peoples minds. The two things aren’t the same. A comprehensive has a comprehensive intake that mirrors the local population, a Secondary Modern has a intake of children who’s parents where to poor to buy the tuition needed to get them into a grammar school.
Oliver.
I would point out that the majority of tabloid papers made very clear links in the headline between the dead girl and the two girls who sought a confrontation, implying that they were the direct cause.
What is wrong with this is that these sorts of confrontations and arguments happen all the time, and do not automatically lead to suicide, otherwise ninety per-cent of the population would have killed themselves during their teenage years.
Tabloid papers reported this very irresponsibly, their headlines were screaming ‘bullying was the cause, and we know who bullied her’ when in fact the confrontation that happened could have been completely insignificant, it is only deemed to be significant now because the girl died, however, this does not in anyway suggest a causal link.
I do take on board your comment, but if the local press could report it in a responsible and non-dramatic way, then why do the national tabloids have to seek out folk devils to blame?
It may not be the worst case of tabloid lies (see Sun and Hillsborough for that) but nonetheless it needs to be highlighted and put out there – even if you just consider how the Mail treated class in this instance as a factor.
Why do we need to know the value of the parents’ house? It doesn’t add anything to the story at all. I guess in Mailworld we’re meant to care more cos they were quite well off?
Do any of you know this girl? Do you have any idea how her family and friends are feeling about these lies about her. Do you really think it makes her death any easier for them?