Emotional vampires on deadline

After tragedies, newspapers mine people's most precious memories for clicks.

Content warning: This edition addresses a story involving the death of a child.

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“The video came to light…” Whenever a news organisation wants to hand-wave about how some footage or images came into its possession, you’ll find that kind of euphemism in the copy, as if a flash drive slowly drifted down from the newsroom ceiling on a parachute. In those cases, you’ll also see photos credited to “Facebook”, “Twitter/X” or just “social media”. Families going through traumatic experiences have their memories mined at the worst possible time.

That process can be aided by ‘friends’ or enabled by loose privacy settings that allow picture desks to scour accounts for pictures and videos. Either way, the result is the same; private moments shared with a limited audience of friends and family become public property to be picked over and analysed with a prurient gaze in the most grim circumstances.

Newspapers know they’re playing fast and loose with copyright when they swipe images from social media but rely on the fact that most people don’t have the time, resources, or money to challenge them. And on the odd occasion that they are pulled up on their dodgy practices, they just have to remove the image or pay a small amount in compensation, the damage already done.

I’m thinking again about this particular emotional vampirism after the horrific story of two-year-old Bronson Battersby who was found dead, presumably of starvation and dehydration, at the knee of his father Kenneth who died of a heart attack, after two attempted social worker visits and subsequent reports to the police went unheeded.

There is no question that newspapers and broadcasters should cover the case; there’s an undeniable public interest issue here — a vulnerable child has been failed and the system has, once again, not functioned as it should. The problem — as it so often does — lies in how the story is reported.

Some of the most precious moments of Bronson Battersby’s painfully short life — when he took his first steps and celebrated his first birthday — have been taken from his family and turned into fodder for clicks by papers including The Sun and The Daily Mail. The images and videos are variously credited to ‘Boom9916’ — I haven’t been able to find an unlocked social media account under that name — and ‘Facebook’. It’s emotional vampirism of the most obvious kind.

The Sun’s headline reads FACE OF INNOCENCE Moment Bronson Battersby learns to walk with dad & celebrates 1st birthday with Teletubbies cake before pair found dead — larded with as many emotional triggers as possible — and is followed by a subhead using that classic of tabloid argot “tot”, unusually not joined by its usual companion “tragic”. A line in the copy serves as the paper’s implicit justification for republishing the video:

Footage shared on social media revealed Bronson holding his dad's hand as he learned to walk at home. 

But that footage was not “shared on social media” for The Sun to exploit. It recorded a joyful moment for friends and family; it was made at a time when the idea of Bronson’s death would have been unimaginable. There are members of the public interested in watching those moments, consuming them with the tear-stained glee of the misery memoir reader, but there is no public interest argument for publishing them.

The Mail’s headline is, if anything, even more grotesque than The Sun’s effort: Heartbreaking moment Bronson Battersby celebrates his birthday with a Teletubbies cake: Tragic toddler's final days before he was found dehydrated, starved and curled up in the dark at his dead father's knees are revealed.

There’s the alliteration — “tragic toddler” — and the MailOnline tactic of stuffing the headline with as many emotive details as possible and the signpost (“heartbreaking”) to tell the reader how to feel. The copy is written in a familiar overwrought tone, the product of having to inject heightened drama into the description of prosaic images:

Emotional footage shows Bronson Battersby being presented with the cake - adorned with a burning candle and a picture of him as the sun from the popular children's TV series - by his loving family.

The two-year-old is serenaded in the clip with the song 'Happy Birthday' before his mother Sarah Piesse blows out the candle for him and leads the family in chanting 'hip hip hooray' on his first birthday in September 2022.  

It wouldn’t do to simply say, “The boy’s family cheer him and sing happy birthday,” he has to be “serenaded” and “presented with [as] cake adorned with a burning candle” because this is writing that exists only to twist emotions and feed SEO demands.

The required euphemism arrives in the fourth paragraph:

The video came to light after it was revealed Bronson was found dead next to his father Kenneth at their home in Skegness on January 9 following a week of frantic attempts to contact them by concerned social services.

It did not “[come] to light”; it was dragged under the klieg lights of publicity with a practised cynicism. ‘Professionals’ dredged social media for the material and framed it up in the most emotionally manipulative way possible. No part of that boy’s short life won’t be taken by the papers and spun up into content.

What makes the Mail’s emotional vampirism even grimmer is that its story includes video and photos captured by a professional photographer who has gone to the home where Bronson and Kenneth Battersby died. With easy and sleazy gratuitousness, the Mail’s caption tells readers that:

A pram and scooter could be seen in the garden outside the house where Bronson and Kenneth were found.

It’s the parasitic poetry of the ‘popular’ press at work. It’s Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” rewritten by an even bigger set of bastards. It is the title of Edward Behr’s memoir “Anyone here been raped and speak English?” — a question shouted at European survivors of the siege at Stanleyville in 1964 — abiding as an attitude in the newsrooms of 2022.

I’ve been sent images before of journalists in private Facebook groups snarking that I just don’t understand how news or newsrooms work. It’s quite the opposite: I know very well how and why they work that way. I just don’t think they should. If you want to bare your fangs and make the argument that if it bleeds it leads without any kind of caveat you can, but I will think less of you for it.

The people at the heart of news stories are not characters. When they pass out of the frame and slip from the minds of reporters and editors, they continue to be there. And when a picture editor mines their good memories for stories about their worst times, without their informed consent, it can destroy those memories forever.

News reporting should be facts but it’s also about choices. Just because material exists doesn’t mean you have to use it nor that you have the right to use it.

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Previously: The truth? Newspaper editors found the Post Office scandal boring

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