I swear I’m not targeting the Courier Mail. I get the headlines from Google alerts and I have no hesitation in fixing headlines by the ABC, the Guardian, The Age or anywhere else they come up. I check the alerts every few days and lately, it seems all the worst ones are coming out of Murdoch’s QLD outlet.
This one is a sensationalised litany of horrifically violent crimes. A 23 year old man who beat an elderly woman to death, a 30 year old man who stalked and threatened to kill a young woman and her children, a 32 year old serial rapist who drugged, choked and filmed his victims, a 19 year old man who violently assaulted his neighbours, and just over half a dozen drug dealers.
This is not going “rogue”. Murdering, raping, assaulting, and threatening to kill women is not just erratic behaviour or a larrikin disregard for the rules. It is a deliberate decision to enact horrific violence upon women’s lives and bodies. This is a pointless and abhorrent erasure of those decisions and a contemptuous trivialisation of the effect they had on the women who survived – and the one who didn’t.
I have no doubt the CM is fed up with me fixing their headlines. I do, however, doubt they are as fed up with it as I am.
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FixedIt is an ongoing project to push back against the media’s constant erasure of violent men and blaming of innocent victims. If you would like to help fund it – even $5 a month makes a big difference – please consider becoming a Patron
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