Raol Moat’s final weeks have been played out on a public stage and now, with its morbid conclusion, it has to be said that the support he has been shown is mind boggling.
Facebook pages entitled ‘RIP Raoul Moat You Legend’, thousands of followers branding him a hero and shrines flooded with sympathetic messages of support for his ‘plight’ suggest something just isn’t right with the public’s perception. It simply must be a case of misinformation.
For a man with a colourful criminal record and whose final actions included killing a person and leaving two others with serious gunshot wounds, this show of support seems inappropriate, surely?
That information, straight from the mouths of the media – who were pushed to provide a new angle every day to satisfy the public interest it created – covered Moat until he became a caricature. Branding him ‘Rambo-like’, publicising sensationalist interviews with friends and family and inadvertently drumming up support from others just like him. People who saw Moat as some sort of crusader and ignored the facts of his actions.
You may remember the police enforced media blackout after Moat announced he would kill a member of the public for every inaccurate piece of information reported, what a powerful man he became!
So what did the public then have to go on? Scores of features on possible motivations – justifications, if you will. Seeing somebody’s human side is eternally appealing to us. We read how the police ‘took everything from him’ and it resonated with others who felt they had been cheated in the same way Moat supposedly had. And this is where it all becomes a bit odd, he gained sympathy and became a source of jokes, all of which softened our perception of him – the lovable gunman, quite. It’s easy to see how such opinions were formed because once the blackout was lifted and we had hindsight on our side, readers had reached conclusions already and it was too late to alter them.
The power of the media to shape opinion is not a new concept, but we have to ask in a situation like Moat’s, which is more important: freedom of information or an agreement not to cover this kind of crime? Yes, there is an obligation to inform the public, but should it be splashed across the front pages everyday to create such celebrity?
photograph by Tony Webster
July 31st, 2010 at 1:37 pm
[...] the media (literally so as blogged about by myself during an internship at Axis Media Group at http://www.media-mentor.co.uk/news/media-training-news/raoul-moat-and-the-media-blackout/). And now the incident has been reduced to a 3 paragraph news article considered of less [...]