Top news in Canada is the murder of a family (parents and 10-year-old son) in Medicine Hat, Alberta and the arrest of the couple's 12-year-old daughter and her 23-year-old boyfriend, Jeremy Allen Steinke, for the murders. The names of the family have not been released, nor have the results of the autopsies.
The tender age of the girl and the apparent pedophilia of her "boyfriend", combined with the barbarity of the crime, should be enough to shock and titillate the public, but 940AM in Montreal isn't content with that. Under the headline, "Accused Goth killers make first appearance in Medicine Hat court", they also had to point out that the pair allegedly met on a Goth/vampire chatroom, and that the girl had taken to wearing "heavy eyeliner and makeup".
Is this important? Do child exploitation, alleged mass murder by a pubescent girl, and flights from justice actually merit less attention than the fact that a young teenager might have been experimenting with a Goth lifestyle? Does the media need to sieze on this (irrelevant) aspect of the case just to keep the story fresh while they're awaiting more details?
More importantly - do we, the media consumers, need to buy into this B.S.?
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This reminded me of George's guest tonight on The Hour who criticized the media's reporting what the police give them to report without doing any other research. Perhaps this is the angle the police gave them, perhaps not. Whatever the case, they're clearly off the mark.
It makes sense for the police, at the beginning of an investigation, to focus on minute details that might turn out to be inconsequential, but isn't the media supposed to tease the real story out of those details and tell us what we actually want/need to know?
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