The increasingly hysterical mass media in English speaking countries has become a dangerous lynch mob, baying for blood like the crowds at Roman circuses, demanding no mercy for whoever be the unpopular figure in their quest for an inflammatory headline.
Today’s example is a particularly savage story in the once paper-of-reasonable-record The New Zealand Herald, winding the rest of the media, talkback and the blogosphere into a rage over murderer Mark Burton “getting ACC” to buy him a prosthetic leg to replace the one he lost when police shot him soon after he killed innocent bystander Karl Kuchenbecker and shot four others on a rampage in Wellington in January 2007.
“Double-murderer Graeme Burton received a free titanium artificial leg worth $10,000 from ACC to replace the right leg lost when he went on a lethal shooting rampage two years ago,” says this incitement to outrage by reporter Jared Savage.
Well, no. Burton did not get ACC to to buy him an artificial leg, and as a convicted criminal he is not entitled to accident compensation for his injuries.
Anyone who loses a leg in New Zealand, whether by accident, illness, or by having the police justifiably blast it off to protect innocent lives, is entitled to the same and the best medical and prosthetic treatment available.
The most appalling feature of this lazy piece of “journalism” is Savage going to Karl Kuchenbecker’s father, Paul, for comment. It is a credit to Mr Kuchenbecker that his moderate condemnation did not provide the outraged response being the Herald would have been seeking.
“We’ve helped him to hurt someone else,” Mr Kuchenbecker understandably and calmly said. “The taxpayers helped him to continue his rampage while inside. We’ve given him the mobility to do this.”
Thank god the Herald was unable to contact the Senseless Sentencing Trust before its deadline last night.
Ultimately, a society is judged by the way it treats its most unpopular members, be they the welfare recipients so despised by the Right, or unrepentant murderers like Burton, despised by many and feared by most.
It might enrage the Herald that Burton was fitted with an artificial leg that enabled him to chase gang member and fellow inmate Dwayne Marsh through Paremoremo prison to stab him in the heart, but what is their alternative? That Burton remain legless and hop about?
David Farrar wants that, of course, as does his hate brigade. What a frightening bunch.
Nobody, anywhere, could have sympathy for Burton. He is one of the most dangerous inmates in New Zealand, an inmate at huge risk to other prisoners, prison guards, and anyone who might come near him – witness the many prison officers needed to surround him in court to prevent him wreaking havoc there on his too frequent appearances.
He will never, ever, be released from prison, except in a coffin, and he is now rightly in solitary confinement where he should stay until he is too old and frail to do harm to another person. Let us all hope he does not manage to kill anyone else during the many years he will remain inside until his death.
But he should still not be denied the medical care available to everyone else. To deny him that would be a stain on our civilised society, however much that would reap cheers from the news media, the Insensible Sentencing Trust, talkbackland and the wastes of the blogosphere.
As media outlets continue their dive to the sewers in their quest to deliver audiences even more facile and inflammatory trash-pieces, this abandonment of any attempt at presenting serious news presented seriously will just keep getting worse.
By villifying everything and everyone who can be scapegoated, and by promoting hysteria and lynch mobs, the media is tearing down the very foundations of civil society. It is a disturbing trend and a challenge to civil society that will not be easy to overcome.
4 Comments
November 14, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Just so, Poneke. His punishment is the loss of freedom (imprisonment), not being denied medical care.
November 14, 2009 at 5:35 pm
The only silver lining is that as their readership declines, the emotional pornographers will reach fewer and fewer people.
Do newspapers still think of themselves as having any role in society beyond return to shareholders? I wonder.
November 14, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Stephen Judd – watching the decay of considerable newspapers- The Press, Christchurch; The Herald, Auckland, and the Dominion, Wellington- I think you’ve answered your question.
They have been taken over by international corporates who *only* care about $$$, and have no committments beyond $$$ to this country.
Long live the southern papers! (E.g. The Greymouth Star & The Otago Daily Times) And the Northern ones that still hang on to their independence & local committments…
November 16, 2009 at 1:37 am
I would have thought the Sensible Sentencing Trusts position would be that he should be provided with more sharpened rods, didn’t they put out a press release a few weeks ago saying they have no problem with inmates killing other inmates, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0908/S00377.htm