A FEW items in the news recently involving middle-to-upper-class folk reveals a disturbing trend of ‘better treatment’ by our nation’s press.
About a month ago, The Spectator bravely published the shocking story of ‘respected’ art historian and curator Roger Took. The title of the feature was ‘The Establishment paedophile: how a monster hid in high society’.
Boast
Took was sentenced in February for four and a half years in prison, after he was found guilty of 17 counts of child abuse.
A tiny snap-shot of the horrors of his crimes were high lighted when he boasted to other paedophiles in internet chat rooms of how he took part in a gang-rape of a five-year-old Cambodian girl.
An important point of the article was that child abuse can happen everywhere from rough council estates to university lecture halls, art galleries, boardrooms and private jets.
But we only hear it when there’s a media frenzy like the one that occurred during the Shannon Matthews case, earlier this year.
Lawyer
Then Caroline Law’s recent editorial in The Week remarked on the odd sympathy the press seemed to display over the Mark Saunders case, the middle-class London lawyer who shot depravedly from his £2.2m Chelsea home, before police stopped him by shooting.
His family won a judicial review in the high court last week because they say he posed no ‘imminent’ threat.
One journalist even likened it to Jean Charles de Menezes ~ who didn’t even possess a gun when he was attacked by police and also sadly died.
Similar background
Ms Law concludes, that it seems difficult for the journalists writing-up these stories to accept that a professional, just like themselves could be suffering anything more than ‘a moment of madness’!
Posted in Observations, Today's News |