Who killed Raoul Moat? He pulled the trigger, yes, but was he actually killed by the media? Did Sky News contribute to his death?
Raoul Moat’s death is a satisfactory outcome as far as I’m concerned. Regardless of whatever the mitigating circumstances might be that the chattering classes will dine out on forever, he was a man who took a cool and calculated decision to hunt down and kill in cold blood his ex-girlfriend’s new partner. He made the choice to attempt to murder his ex-girlfriend, fate leaving her alive but severely wounded. He later decided to try to kill a random policeman. Fate again just about kept him alive, despite Moat wanting him dead. If Moat had had his way three people would now be dead, maybe even more.
Yet, suddenly we are supposed to feel sorry for him because he then committed suicide? Give me a break. We should rejoice in the £35,000 a year plus that we’ll be saving for the next how ever many years he would have been in prison until he was let out yet again (To do it all over again?)!
Prison obviously doesn’t work as a deterrent or a punishment – Jaime Bulger’s smiling murderer is testament to that – and its only purpose seems now to be to slightly slow down the number of victims those inside are able to create during the woefully short period they are there. It temporarily reduces the victim count, that’s all it does.
Anyway, that aside, it is apparently humane to try to bring such a stand-off situation to an end without the loss of life of the murderer.
When finally he was cornered and playing the stand-off game with the police, instead of being allowed to be ‘talked down’ or allowed to feel safe in order to become confident with the negotiator, he was spooked by noises behind him. Constantly asking who was behind him and constantly being reassured that nobody was behind him, the whole game of gaining his trust and confidence was compromised by members of the media.
Desperate for pictures of what they hoped would be the shoot-out with lots and lots of graphic blood scenes that they could carefully pixelate out and broadcast on a loop for the next few days, Sky News sent in one of their reporters. Ignoring police pleas to keep behind an exclusion zone to allow them to do their job with Moat, they clumsily and noisily crept over gardens and undergrowth complete with camera and microphone, clicking away on their Blackberrys, all of which spooked the madman and made a lie of reassurances that nobody was behind him and that he was safe.
Eventually the police had to go scrambling in to tell the Sky News crew to “Fuck right off”, which reluctantly they did. They later reported what terrible injustice had befallen them as if they had been grossly wronged, and made no attempts at apologising for putting at risk the lives of the negotiating officers, or Moat himself.
It wasn’t just Sky News of course, there were other ‘media’ types stumbling about in the dark behind Moat. All were contributing to spooking Moat and not allowing him to calm down.
At no time did they consider that they may have contributed to his death. The media never admits to such an involvement, never takes responsibility, never apologises.
Instead, having heard that Moat was now dead and realising they hadn’t had the glorious trophy of being able to play the moment of death over and over again, they stamped their feet and blamed the nasty policemen who had been distracted from their job of dealing with Moat and forced to find and move the intrusive media away from the scene. The media hated this exclusion and needed to kick back and punish somebody.
What could they do to punish these nasty police? They immediately hounded blood relatives – Moat’s brother and uncle – looking for outrage. Yes, they got their outrage. And the relatives’ outrage was against the police, exactly who the media wanted to punish through other people’s outrage for denying them their ‘money shot’.
Suddenly, according to the media, the dead Moat was now the victim and the police had done something wrong, and the relatives were outraged for not being allowed to do the police’s job of ‘talking down’ Moat, and it was everybody’s fault except the media’s who were now giving Moat’s relatives their 15 minutes of fame. Disgusting.
The media is no stranger to causing death – look at what they did to Princess Diana – but you’d think that they’d maybe spend a few moments of reflection on how they helped kill Moat. As usual, they won’t, and we’ll get no apology and no lessons learned.
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