Fast forward to 2010, and imagine the tragic and untimely death of a civil servant. For all intents and purposes the civil servant is a talented and diligent individual, and he dies in slightly odd circumstances. It would merit at best a short column on page 8.
But this story has the word ‘spy’ in it, and so the British press has gone loopy. Journalists have had a go at long-range, blind CSI; former-intelligence officers have been consulted about the empirically light imponderables; and academics have been dragged out of their murky towers, dusted off and made to say something interesting.. (to this end and as an irrelevant aside, I have the funniest answerphone message I’ve ever received, from one of the administrators in my department passing on a message from a journalist; I wish I knew how to share it with you all. The journalist’s message wasn’t funny, just the way it was passed on..)
But, let’s be clear. No-one bar the police and those who are investigating the scene and the circumstances knows anything about this case. No-one. Not the journalists trying to scratch out copy, not the ex-intelligence officers acting as talking heads, and not the academics trying to come up with best-sense for the media.
There probably was no need for a cycling website to report that the unfortunate Dr Williams was a keen cyclist , nor for the North Wales website to get terribly excited that he was probably welsh, welsh people die too… shocking, but true. There have been all sorts of other lurid claims and Janet and John extrapolations – he kept himself, to himself ergo he was a loner. If he’d have gone out drinking the headlines would have been ‘did party lifestyle lead to his death’. Some question-marks were raised about lovers (of all different types), but without a shred of evidence. His death signalled a catastrophic failure of security for some, but a ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ for others. Living in a street where some luminaries have lived was apparently very significant. Nonsense, he might just have wanted to live near to work. Even better, they might have paid for it. Bonus.
The reality check is this. A young and gifted civil servant died. His loss is tragic for his family, his friends and work colleagues. If his death was related to his work, that will be concerning and steps will be taken, but we – the general public – need not fret about this, others much better qualified than us will take care of it. Be sure of that.
End the hysteria, stop flapping your arms around like an Italian taxi driver carved up by a lorry, report the facts (of which there are essentially none) and chill out. Leave the Williams family, his friends and his work colleagues to the mourn the loss
When on earth did Britain become so excitable…..
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with everyting you said apart from one: I’m convinced you didn’t have a summer job in 1997. I had two that year and I’m sure you mocked me for it.
But it’s the middle of August, Parliament is on holiday, the Prime Minister is on holiday and paternity leave…what else is there was write about?
The media can’t help itself, unfortunately. I think Steven Johnson’s take on this from his book Emergence is very interesting. Basically the media is a complex network, like the brain; however, unlike the brain it doesn’t possess the necessary synaptic ‘buffers’ (there’s a technical term for it, but I forget) to slow down impulses. As a result it exists all the time in a state rather like an epileptic fit. I blogged about it a year or so ago:
http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2009/01/scraps-of-consciousness-volume-something-or-other/
My own experience of the media-academia mobius loop happened with the 7/7 bombings. I was on the Tube. The train was halted for 25 minutes or so in the tunnel. I didn’t learn why until I arrived at the Department and sat down at my computer to check out the BBC website what was going on. I then got a call from a BBC journo asking what was going on. Malkovich. Malkovich! Malkovich?
This really isn’t excited in Britain, excited is invading Iraq or the police-sponsored assassination of Brazilian electricians, its just a wryly amused silly season story – and a very unsentimental one at that.
This story started as a straight out of James Bond moment, the deceased spies dead body was found in a bag, in the bath. Like most newspapers it was assumed, unless his sex life was even more impressive than most, that he didn’t get in the bag on his own.
So the initial question was what uber-secret did he know that caused his death? There was an element of confusion that our spooks know anything worth a skinned knee over – doesn’t most British intelligence comes from google or via Pakistani torture chambers these days? (Fortunately it turned out he worked for the Americans too, and they know real secrets).
Second, its also – in part – a story about how easy it is to fall through the cracks in Britain. Granted its not ancient Japanese people, but its still impressive that a security-cleared spook can vanish for weeks and apparently no one gives much of a monkeys.
Then there is the sex angle which has just popped up… so to speak: the story now includes dead bodies in bags, male escorts, fetish/bondage gear, and – of course – cycling. Cycling in the UK is normally presented as something that manages to be both a sport and a fetish-gear carnival at the same time. Who knows, maybe he did get into the bag himself.
Now if only he’d been a hot female Russian agent – and, of course, alive – then there would be a modelling contract for him too.
Face it, the media is simply like that these days. Not having been alive in the ’60s I can’t say if things were really better back then but I can certainly say that the news has poor judgement* on what should and shouldn’t be focused on. Just the other day one of the BBC’s top stories on the main webpage was that Paris Hilton had been arrested for drug possession**. Several stories below it was one on a Taliban attack on a U.S base, which was far less likely to be seen by the casual reader.
Given that the alternative to media sensationalism is articles written online by anonymous individuals with unknown interests I’m really at a loss for where to go for information***.
* Or perhaps very good judgement on what the average reader/viewer/listener actually cares about.
** On principle I refused to click on the story. If she actually did something worthy of news (improbable as that seems) I apologize.
*** Writers for this site not intended of course.
Agreed, the speculation about his sex life shouldn’t be near the press. However I think it’s great that Jane and Joe Public are wondering what happened to a sweet (according to one news rag) genius (according to another) mathematician who might have been murdered or killed himself because of what he discovered at SIS or GCHQ.
I also agree that “others much better qualified than us will take care of it.” But I doubt they will tell us if, e.g., this young man became so disillusioned with the hypocrisy of the British government that he took his own life.