Controversial, excitedly, confessed, high-flying, begged
More tabloid hyperbole? No. Quite the reverse. These are the only five words from a thousand or so from Gemma Aldridge that could be said to have even the slightest tinge of journalese about them.
Her splash and spread in today's Sunday Mirror about Josie Cunningham is a text-book example of how to let a story tell itself.
Cunningham wants to be on Big Brother. Negotiations have broken down and she thinks that's because she's 18 weeks pregnant. To her the solution seems simple: have an abortion.
Cunningham says that the baby was fathered either by an escort service "client" or by a Premiership footballer. She was pleased at first:
More tabloid hyperbole? No. Quite the reverse. These are the only five words from a thousand or so from Gemma Aldridge that could be said to have even the slightest tinge of journalese about them.
Her splash and spread in today's Sunday Mirror about Josie Cunningham is a text-book example of how to let a story tell itself.
Cunningham wants to be on Big Brother. Negotiations have broken down and she thinks that's because she's 18 weeks pregnant. To her the solution seems simple: have an abortion.
Cunningham says that the baby was fathered either by an escort service "client" or by a Premiership footballer. She was pleased at first:
"I could get free dental work on the NHS, so I got a tooth straightened for cosmetic reasons and it all seemed great.
But then I started to think. I didn't want to be famous for having a footballer's baby or for being the girl who had a kid by someone who paid for sex.
I want to be famous for being me - Josie Cunningham, a glamour model and celebrity in my own right. If I want to do that I need to put my career first.
I want the attention to be on me, not on who fathered my child."
The woman is so delusional and wrong-headed that you just can't stop reading. And Aldridge has pitched it exactly right, allowing Cunningham to condemn herself out of her own mouth (you can hear her on the iPad version pictured above), interrupting the quotes only to point out the law on abortion or to fill in a little background - the main element being that Cunningham apparently had a breast enhancement operation on the NHS. There isn't a "shocking" or "shameless" in sight.
The spread is completed with sidebars from a psychologist, who shows a degree of sympathy, and the columnist Carole Malone, who shows none. She describes Cunningham as "a poster girl for all that's dirty, immoral and sick in our society". The two writers were obviously commissioned to produce 250 words putting a particular side of the argument, but the fact that the Mirror even attempted to find someone to speak up for Cunningham is a breath of fresh air. There are papers that would have given Malone the whole outside column to rant (although I wouldn't bet on her not returning to the subject on her own page in the week).
Many will argue that this is not news. It probably isn't, in that most of us don't know who she is or care what she does. But it is an enlightening - if depressing - snapshot of our society, and SubScribe finds it thoroughly uplifting for the trade of journalism to see it presented so dispassionately.
The spread is completed with sidebars from a psychologist, who shows a degree of sympathy, and the columnist Carole Malone, who shows none. She describes Cunningham as "a poster girl for all that's dirty, immoral and sick in our society". The two writers were obviously commissioned to produce 250 words putting a particular side of the argument, but the fact that the Mirror even attempted to find someone to speak up for Cunningham is a breath of fresh air. There are papers that would have given Malone the whole outside column to rant (although I wouldn't bet on her not returning to the subject on her own page in the week).
Many will argue that this is not news. It probably isn't, in that most of us don't know who she is or care what she does. But it is an enlightening - if depressing - snapshot of our society, and SubScribe finds it thoroughly uplifting for the trade of journalism to see it presented so dispassionately.
RSS Feed
