Firas Durri

Wow, such an honest looking name, but you're right, the front screams "tabloid".

she's not even that pretty

I've never actually bothered ever reading the Herald… but whoever decided that the front cover of every Boston Hearld ought to look similiar to the cover of the National Inquirer is probably a very shady person…

"Headless body found in topless bar". The Herald is definite rag.

Heh, I actually like clever headlines like that famous one. My disgust is more at the way these guys throw around words like 'evil', 'monster', etc. Like, get a sense of perspective! Admitting that they're only paying attention because she was a pretty young woman is icing the phrase 'look at us; we suck!' onto the 'read us, please, we're desperate here' cake.

Maybe the Herald is terrible. So what? If it is, as you say, wasting away, why worry?

You are right, at least, to point out that clever headlines have merit. Surely you must agree that the New York Post's headlines cannot be written by an idiot, but by someone rather, well, scholarly?

Which offends you more: that the Herald has a bad headline about a murdered woman, or that a (another) woman has been raped and murdered? I shall not apologize for thinking that, in this case, the Boston Herald headline is exactly right on all counts: She was a lovely woman; her killer is a monster; his deed is sheer evil. If that is not nuanced enough (should murder be treated with subtlety, creativity, artifice?), then there are far more news outlets who will speak to you about the horrific with more refinement. But I have no problem with the Herald pulling no punches, or for even sensationalizing the story: we have become so inured to the problems of women (and men) in this country, and to the problems of crime and broken justice, that we really do need to have someone scream out at us that this "culture" is not working in so many, many ways. (Of course, it is working wonderfully in many, many ways as well.)

There is a time to be fastidious. Dealing with hard news is not one of those times. (I am no Herald fan either, by the way.)

Peace.

BG

Bill, good questions.

To start with, I'll mention that I'm an open-minded sort of person when it comes to judgements of worth—any cog that fits into the machine of existence definitely serves some purpose, after all. When it comes to human creations, I can easily be pursuaded to see the expressive or stimulative value in things that I've classified as pedestrian, plain or even abject rubbish. There is beauty in any stirring of the soul, however primal the reaction; "your favourite band sucks" or "your favourite newspaper sucks" is not the sort of claim I'd defend in a contemplative mode.

This post is a rant, so the claims are accordingly frivolous—I think we may take the license from time to time (or almost perpetually, depending how we like to write) to make statements without wondering whether they approach the quality of absolute, defensible truth for all peoples and for all time.

In a less 'rantsy' mode, I would suggest that I don't really want to see the Herald die—the more media institutions we have, the better—and that in fact, the Herald's contents are not at all of the low quality one would induce from its covers and attack-mode gossip columns: most of the Herald is pretty competent journalism.

Regarding the meat of my complaint, let's firstly take the specific pattern of demonizing attackers, and then the general tendency for the Herald to sensationalize stories.

I realize that I'm on shaky ground regarding my dismay at their (frequent) usage of demonizing terms to describe perpetrators. One may well ask, as you do, whether my objection to the prejudice they display towards the perpetrator is not eclipsed by my objection to the actual violation he committed. It will probably become clear that I'm somewhat of a 'bleeding-heart liberal'; I tend to think of crimes as instances of larger systematic problems than instances of individuals displaying innate corruption.

To take it away from the extreme issue of a rapist/murderer, think of someone like a father stealing food to feed his kids, or stealing diapers for the baby—there are those who draw a moral line at the very action of stealing and decide that the infraction is the father's loss of self-discipline, that the fault lies with him wholly. This is not how I think of the matter. God knows, the thief needed the items more than the supermarket chain needed them. From my perspective, the infraction that actually occurred was the fact that a man could be driven to the desperate state in which he has nothing to nourish or clothe his kid with; the actual act of theft is just a consequence. Most of the moral burden lies on the unsupportive economic system that made the stealing necessary (ie. citizens not being able to get basic infant nutrition for free), not the thief, who was just reacting to his situation. (This is not to say that stealing is ok, of course: after all, you just need 100 people stealing a can of soup each and suddenly the store owner gets into significant financial trouble.)

What does this have to do with pedophiles and rapists? Not much. Obviously the blame for sexually molesting another person lies with the molester: you can't reason your way out of the guilt of rape (e.g., 'but she was dressed seductively' is not an excuse.) Nevertheless, the imperative for empathy remains; the person is a product of our societies, one of us, and the more we try to disclaim him, the more we commit both the ethical crime of dehumanization and mob judgement (check out The Stranger by Albert Camus to see what I'm getting at) and the intellectual failure to recognize that we are just as capable of 'evillness' as 'The Other', that from within every one of our frail and egoistic psyches a monster can be birthed with only ordinary incitement.

I hadn't actually read the article; I wasn't aware until I was halfway through writing the post that she had been raped (I actually wrote the post in a computer lab at college and a lady sitting to my left filled me in on the story.) The knowledge of the sort of torment the woman was subjected to before her death did nullify my negative reaction at the headline, but I posted anyway because this particular headlien was just a convenient illustration of the Herald's usual way of doing things.

As for my general objection to lurid covers and sensationalized headlines, it requires much less philosophical contortion. It is basically an objection to the publisher's pretending that what is being headlined is indeed the most important thing for the paper to report. This is the basic objection to sensationalism, right? That the framing of issues is all out of proportion, but the publisher is choosing to excite our base feelings despite full knowledge of the misframing. Like when TV newscasters start talking about shark attacks and suddenly everyone starts wringing their hands about the ridiculously miniscule risk of being chomped down by a shark.

In summation, this post was a rant, not a considered opinion; I'll concede that this particular cover may have been the wrong one to make my point with; my main complaint with the Herald is the general way it approaches its cover headlining, not this cover in specific.

Nice blog you've got, by the way.

You guys are nasty peeps….
I love the Herald
I think they did a fine job showing what happened to that woman.
And to the idiot that said that “she is not that nice looking anyway”…
You, my friend, are an evil monster…
MG

Dear Firas,

Your basic point is well taken, but I must take issue with the claim that the Boston Herald is worse than the New York Post. They seem quite the same to me. At least the Post can trace its birth to Alexander Hamilton, whose soul never stops throwing up at what he has

spawned.

[...] Previously: The Boston Herald Sucks [...]

the boston herald sucks……….sorry just the herald part