Reeva Steenkamp's corpse was in the morgue, her body was on the Sun's front pageThe Oscar Pistorius case has been called a tragedy for South Africa, for sport, for disability rights
but what about the victim and her family? To parts of the media, she is just hot
Years ago I worked at the
Sun, and I remember a man from the circulation department giving a presentation to editorial staff on how to maximise sales. The chastening upshot, for a paper whose employees preferred to think its market dominance was built solely on great stories, thrillingly told, was that birds mean business. Of course, you'd get a big sales spike with some sensational splash about the royal family or a footballer or whatever, but those were effectively few and far between, and if you wanted to ensure the regular, bread-and-butter circulation boosts on which the paper relied, a female celebrity in a bikini was what was needed, under whatever sub-newsy pretext you could devise. A list of names and numbers was passed round. And there it was in black and white. If you put a picture of Caprice on page 1 and any old stock one was fine as long as she had very little on you could guarantee a 30,000 uplift in sales. Nell McAndrew would get you 20,000. Geri Halliwell would do 10,000. They had maths for it and everything.
I wonder if that same circulation department were rubbing their hands, or their trousers, or whatever it is they rub, when they saw that the paper would be splashing on Friday with a huge picture of Reeva Steenkamp pulling down the zip of a bikini top, even as her corpse was lying in a Pretoria morgue awaiting a postmortem. Steenkamp was shot several times on Thursday, allegedly by her boyfriend Oscar Pistorius, with the incident swiftly and widely declared a tragedy for South Africa, for sport, and for disability rights. And presumably to a lesser extent, because it was scarcely suggested in the scramble to get hold of bikini shots for her family and friends.
The killing has yet to be described as a tragedy for women, probably because in the continual cluster-tragedy that constitutes female representation in the media, Steenkamp is just another casualty, who obligingly happened to be hot. That the story leading the news for the entire day of the One Billion Rising global action opposing violence against women concerned a woman being allegedly murdered by her partner was unfortunate. That the death was covered in the way it has been begins to look like something else. But nothing new, obviously.
His attention drawn to articles which appear to eroticise violence against women, Lord Justice Leveson concluded in his report that they "may" infringe the Press Complaints Commission code. Mmm. Perhaps we can stop hearing that women's liberation has Gone Too Far The Other Way when encouraging people to get their rocks off over dead or maimed ladies only "may" be a wrong thing.
On Friday, the Mail and Star were good enough to publish a spread of Reeva Steenkamp's lingerie shots, as befits a family newspaper. If you're asking what sort of family demands the sexy-ing up of stories about murdered women, I'm drawing a blank. (The provisional wing of the Manson family?) Doubtless they'll claim they used these pictures because modelling was one of Steenkamp's jobs and the next time they illustrate a story about a murdered hairdresser with pictures of her cutting hair, or a murdered student working in the college library, we can treat that justification with something other than a tired: "Bull. Shit." In this age, many female victims' social media imprint would yield an image of them at their place of work, and you should totally, totally expect news outlets to use it if the choice comes down to that or a beach snap of them scantily clad.
As for the
Sun, this is a paper which still asterisks the word t*t, even when it appears on the same page as a picture of the genuine body part, as though its readers beholding that central "i" in print might cause some catastrophic debasement of a culture it works so tirelessly to elevate. Meanwhile, Friday's
Sun front page actually had a very strong news line if true on the Pistorius story, but it almost literally paled into insignificance next to that most provocative of bikini shots.
Those with the stomach to turn the page might have noted that paper didn't bother with a Page 3 on Friday, maybe because that particular itch had been scratched by the murder victim. All of which puts one in mind of Murdoch's musing over what to do with Page 3. "Perhaps halfway house with glamorous fashionistas," he tweeted last week. What Rupert is after, this made clear, is a better class of tit not those cheap tits, attached to downmarket scrubbers so guilelessly keen to show you them, but the sort of chic tit you get on the catwalk where it looks like the tit's owner can take or leave you looking at it, or the sort of tit you see if some celebrity has failed to establish exactly what flashbulbs might do to a material that appeared opaque when she left the house.
Yet surely this week's approach presents an elegant solution to Rupert's dilemma. If only a hot woman could get murdered every day, then the
Sun wouldn't need Page 3, because they could dredge up some semi-covered tits in the highfalutin' cause of illustrating a news story about her corpse. Perhaps the number crunchers can work up an action plan I imagine they'd call this killing two birds with one stone.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/reeva-steenkamp-body-on-front-page?CMP=twt_gu
