Stigma

Photo sourced from Facebook/Credit Paris Visone

In the wake of another sad suicide, again, the stigma attached to rock and metal music rears its ugly head because of bad journalism. It’s time for this to STOP!

By Scott Edwards

In April of this year, 15 year-old James Lock was found dead in a woodland near his school in Swansea, South Wales.

This is the line that newspapers covering the sad death of the student should have read.

However, this isn’t the case. One British tabloid has decided to directly single out the teen’s recent love with a specific genre of music, yes, metal music.

As a budding journalist, I’ve had to learn the ins and outs of writing an article without a bias. This is was taught to me in the first year of my degree, the fundamentals of journalism.

We know that politically, this isn't possible. There are the obvious tabloid, national and even regional newspapers in this country with a political bias. That’s become the norm and impossible to argue against. What is possible to argue against however, is a paper/article breaking ‘journalism 101’ under the UK Defamation Act.

‘’Defamation is when someone says, writes, broadcasts or communicates in another way, something that makes people think badly of you or your business; damaging your reputation and feelings.’’ – Slater and Gordon Solicitors.

If me or you, a budding journalist or someone at street level, was to write an article like this one British tabloid did, the defamed party, in this case Slipknot, could legally sue you for ‘’damaging your reputation’’ under the Defamation Act 2013.

Now, this tabloid could have happily published this article the way they did, if they had hard evidence that the blamed party (Slipknot) was directly responsible for influencing the sad suicide of this teenager. But they don’t.

They have blasted Slipknot and even included a segment of previous instances where people who have committed suicide or even crime, have been a fan of the band. Since when was listening to a band, unless proved, classed as viable evidence to be the blame for an instance such as death or crime. The answer is never, they’re simply using stigma.

It’s pretty clear that the said article has been published on the sole basis of the stigma that surrounds the band and the genre of music. But that stigma has been applied via media and poor excuses. It’s easy to say that if the victims or persons who committed a crime had been listening to chart music for example at the time that took their own life or took someone else’s, their taste in music would never have been taken into account in the article, because there isn’t a stigma attached to it. A stigma too that is untrue. If this was the case, every Slipknot/metal music fan would seemingly be a mentally unstable human being. I know that’s definitely not the case.

It’s time for journalists to realise that they aren’t invincible. It’s time for them to remember the fundamentals of journalism that enables us to have such a right in this country for us to have a voice. If you put the journalists in University today, in the places of those, so called ‘’professionals’’ in charge today, this country’s media would be 10x better and 10x more efficient on bringing the truth.

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