Opinion

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Milly

Wednesday 17 March 2010

Yesterday journalism got it wrong, writes Jean-Pierre Geelen in Wednesday’s Volkskrant in an editorial.

The abduction and subsequent death of Milly Boele, the twelve-year old who was murdered by a neighbouring policeman, gave rise to a kind of media hysteria. Journalists were so eager to be on top of every development that you felt they would have loved to pull her dead body from the ground themselves.

A child goes missing and desperate parents turn to television. It was Hart van Nederland in this case which immediately started a country wide poster campaign. I understand why Milly Boele’s parents would do anything, no matter what, to find their daughter.

But the case, sad though it is, got caught up by a media train which quickly careened off the rails. Viewers got an almost minute by minute report of the goings-on in Dordrecht. Newswise nothing much was happening on Tuesday and a house was being searched but that can’t have been the only reason for the media hype that was suddenly unleashed.

News programmes everywhere were dedicated to Milly and broadcasters SBS and RTL interrupted their programmes for snippets of news (at the same time, to boost viewing figures ) while crime journalist Peter R. de Vries was invited to Pauw & Witteman.

Jaap Jongbloed, whose missing persons programme Tros Vermist never fails to elicit a few sniffles, must have cursed himself for not having the Tuesday evening slot.

Guesswork

Of course all those journalists who were there, live, at the crime scene did not have anything substantial to tell us. They had to work with guesswork, speculation and meaningless street interviews with neighbours. ‘How do you feel about it all?’ ‘Well, it sort of comes quite close now’.

This case, however sad in itself, illustrates society’s and the media’s obsession with family tragedies and other disasters involving children as Tuesday evening’s news broadcasts clearly showed.

Television journalism in particular seemed to have entered a new phase: I, for on, can’t remember an occasion were tv broadcasters were competing for the latest news on cases involving a missing girl.

American style

Not that every journalist didn’t put on his most compassionate expression while addressing the camera but their motives seemed to become more mercenary by the minute.

Journalism seems to have gone American and the proper distance to news has gone by the board. It looked as if all that was stopping the journalists from bodily getting into that garden and pulling the dead girl from the earth were the white police barriers. In news programme NOVA, journalist Jan Reiff proudly proclaimed that he had been able to sneak a peek into the garden.

Even serious commentator Frits Wester seemed to have in the grip of hyper journalism: on Twitter he declared Milly dead without so much as an official announcement, an announcement which didn’t make it to his RTL news programme either. He will no doubt shrug and say he was right anyway. Journalists don’t like to be done out of a scoop. They will see you dead first.

This is an unofficial translation

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