Reeva Steenkamp From the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/reeva-steenkamp-body-on-front-page


Reeva Steenkamp's corpse was in the morgue, her body was on the Sun's front page

The Oscar Pistorius case has been called a tragedy for South Africa, for sport, for disability rights … but what about the victim and her family? To parts of the media, she is just hot.

On Friday,, the Daily Mail and Daily Star were good enough to publish a spread of Reeva Steenkamp's lingerie shots, as befits a family newspaper. If you're asking what sort of family demands the sexy-ing up of stories about murdered women, I'm drawing a blank. (The provisional wing of the Manson family?) Doubtless they'll claim they used these pictures because modelling was one of Steenkamp's jobs – and the next time they illustrate a story about a murdered hairdresser with pictures of her cutting hair, or a murdered student in the college library, we can treat that justification with something other than a tired: "Bull. Shit." In this age, many female victims' social media imprint would yield an image of them at their place of work, and you should totally, totally expect news outlets to use it if the choice comes down to that or a beach snap of them scantily clad.

As for the Sun, this is a paper that still asterisks the word t*t, even when it appears on the same page as a picture of the genuine body part, as though its readers beholding that central "i" in print might cause some catastrophic debasement of a culture it works so tirelessly to elevate. Meanwhile, Friday's Sun front page actually had a very strong news line – if true – on the Pistorius story, but it almost literally paled into insignificance next to that most provocative of bikini shots.

Those with the stomach to turn the page might have noted that the paper didn't bother with a Page 3 on Friday, maybe because that particular itch had been scratched by the murder victim. All of which puts one in mind of Murdoch's musing over what to do with Page 3. "Perhaps halfway house with glamorous fashionistas," he tweeted last week. What Rupert is after, this made clear, is a better class of tit – not those cheap tits, attached to downmarket scrubbers so guilelessly keen to show you them, but the sort of chic tit you get on the catwalk where it looks like the tit's owner can take or leave you looking at it, or the sort of tit you see if some celebrity has failed to establish exactly what flashbulbs might do to a material that appeared opaque when she left the house.

Yet surely this week's approach presents an elegant solution to Rupert's dilemma. If only a hot woman could get murdered every day, then the Sun wouldn't need Page 3, because they could dredge up some semi-covered tits in the highfalutin' cause of illustrating a news story about her corpse. Perhaps the number crunchers can work up an action plan – I imagine they'd call this killing two birds with one stone.


It amazes me that for such a horrible crime, that the focus seems to be on everything but the fact that a woman is dead. Western culture is sickening.