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Mad and Bad Media: Populism and Pathology in the British Tabloids
Introductioni On 15 May 1800 James Hadfield narrowly missed killing George III. Hadfield’s God- given plan to kill the king and save the world by certainty of his own death did not include being defended by the brilliant advocate Thomas Erskine, who pleaded his clients’ religious delusions cancelled his criminal intent. The court accepted that Hadfield’s lunacy did not compound but exonerated the deed. According to the law Hadfield would be set free once he had recovered his wits, so within days the government passed The Criminal Lunatics Act of 1800. Under its retrospective powers Hadfield was sent to London’s Bethlem Hospital. The new designation of ‘criminal lunatic’ created by the Hadfield case captures the coming together of law and psychiatry in adjudicating on those deemed insane or responsible (Smith, 1981).
Two centuries on from the Hadfield case, the wheels of law and psychiatry continue to turn on courtroom judgements of insanity and responsibility. In contemporary British tabloids, where emotions expressed in the court of public opinion are at their rawest, the finer points of law and psychiatry hardly matter when apportioning moral responsibility to mad and bad offenders. This is because, in tabloid terms, the madder the offender the better for headline writers because no matter how mad one may be there is no escaping normative judgement. The problem however is that tabloid discourse on ‘mad and bad’ is irrational, which is not to say we can dismiss it as meaningless because tabloid editors certainly do not.
The problem that tabloid editors are unable, perhaps unwilling, to grasp is that mentally disordered offenders cannot be mad and bad. This is not news as the Hadfield case shows. In legal and psychiatric terms, offenders who come before the courts can only be considered by juries to be mad or bad; they are mutually exclusive (Prins, 1995). In Britain, where tabloid logic rides roughshod over this distinction, ‘mad and bad’ has logical dexterity. Simply put, the idea of mad or bad equates to psychiatric and legal adjudications too complex for tabloid logic; mad and bad is easier to grasp, catchy in rhythm and valuable for popular mediation.
In this article I want to pursue popular mediation of mentally disordered offenders to counter media analysis of mental distress that criticizes stereotypical tabloid discourse, but fails to recognize ideologically charged populism at work. By doing so, I do not present empirical data but draw instead on emblematic tabloid discourse on the ‘mad and bad’, though future empirical work will be needed to sustain the integrity of the argument that I am promoting here. This is not because I prefer to work with anecdotal evidence but because conceptual work is necessary to move beyond a heuristic dictated by tabloid logic on the ‘mad and bad’.
Diagnosing populism: tabloid logic on the ‘mad and bad’ The key to unlocking tabloid logic on the ‘mad and bad’ is the shifting context of Britain’s mental health care in the 1990s. Following on from Margaret Thatcher’s priority of controlling public expenditure including on crumbling Victorian-built asylums, John Major’s Conservative government in 1993 brought to an end decades of glacial-like movement toward psychiatric care in the community by shifting the locus of expensive institutional care to less costly community settings (Jones, 1993).
In the 1990s, British newspapers witnessed a populist shift as tabloids dealigned from the two major British political parties (Deacon and Wring, 2002). At the same time, market-leading tabloids including the Sun and Daily Mail mobilised a motley assortment of scary ‘Others’ including asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, and ‘mad and bad’ offenders against which they protected ‘us’ from ‘them’ (Stanyer, 2006). Thus, the ‘mad and bad’ folk devil reflects a culture of political populism in the UK newspaper market, not a culture of misinformed tabloid journalism cited by anti-stigma campaigners (e.g. Thornicroft, 2006; British Journal of Psychiatry, 2013). Not only does this misdiagnose the problem of ‘mad and bad’, anti-stigma campaigners also reckon the remedy is to educate tabloid editors in error of their ways.
A case in point concerns Rebekah Wade (now Brookes) when, in 2003, as editor of the Sun she maligned ex-world champion boxer Frank Bruno as ‘Bonkers Bruno’, after he was detained in a psychiatric hospital. Readers and mental health campaigners reacted with anger at the intrusion into Bruno’s privacy. Having misjudged the public mood, Wade/Brookes accepted an invitation to be ‘educated’ on mental distress by Marjorie Wallace, an ex-journalist herself once accused of stigmatizing schizophrenics as dangerous (see Cross, 2010). We can only speculate on the quality of this education, which presumably did not include education on privacy issues. I make this point because in the same year Wade/Brookes told a House of Commons enquiry into press invasions of privacy that her newspaper paid police officers for information, an illegal act conveniently ignored by politicians faced with the prospect of Sun journalists digging into their private life (Watson and Hickman, 2012).
Read all about it! Political hypocrisy and tabloid news agendas In Britain, political hypocrisy is a chronic condition. Indeed, the recent Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press showed that Westminster politicians largely accepted this blemish on our body-politic. The point, however, is that populist news agendas are taken seriously by Britain’s political class. As Murdock (2004) shows in his work on British press coverage of genetically modified (GM) food, political reaction moved against the GM food lobby only when tabloid antipathy became apparent. For instance, a memorable Daily Mirror front page photomontage of Tony Blair as Frankenstein’s monster cut across arguments of the biotechnology lobby focusing political attention on appeasing public concerns.
Tabloid agendas in the UK have political impact in ways that broadsheets only rarely match and the current study reflects their influential presence. In saying this, I do not ally myself to arguments made by cultural populists (e.g. Fiske, 1992) that taking tabloids seriously means recognising only their anti-elitist popular appeal. This is misleading because the true political importance of tabloids lies in their populist agendas. Thus, politicians like Tony Blair used tabloids for policy announcements, while at other times tabloid editors took the initiative such as Rebekah Wade/Brookes ‘Sarah’s Law’ campaign, named after a murdered child, which saw the News of the World use ‘name and shame’ tactics to demand from politicians a law identifying sexual offenders in neighbourhoods (see Silverman and Wilson, 2002).
Dean’s (2012) recent expose of how UK politicians adjusted their public policies to suit tabloid editors and agendas underlines how the vociferous ‘attack dog’
as: ‘ZITO’S CRAZED 18ST KILLER TO GO FREE’ (24 March 2009, p. 15). The perception that care in the community is dangerous was forged in this tragic event.
The language of psychiatric otherness provides shorthand for scary media stories on mentally disordered offenders. A seminal influence has been Philo (1996) whose work on British media and mental distress identified stigmatizing words (‘crazed’, ‘mad’, ‘nutter’, and so on) associated with misrepresentation of mental illness in the media. However, the linguistic domination of anti-stigma campaigns in the British media (Harper, 2005) and other English-speaking countries such as Australia (Holland, 2012) bypasses the question: what is going on discursively? A fixation on stigma misses how mentally disordered offenders can be made to appear morally irresponsible, for instance when they commit murder. This moral tension is embedded in historical and contemporary reporting on insanity and responsibility.
Mad, bad – or sick? In 1843 the trial of Daniel McNaghten for the murder of Edward Drummond was controversially stopped on grounds of insanity. The trial was news because the intended victim was Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel and led to new rules clarifying the legal basis for criminal insanity. The verdict was also controversial because McNaghten was put under psychiatric lock and key in Bethlem Hospital. Concern was voiced in the press that if McNaughton ‘was allowed to get off scot-free - as perpetual confinement in a lunatic asylum came to be regarded – the streets would soon be seething with madmen rushing hither and thither killing prime ministers in all directions (Allderidge, 1974: 53). In fact, McNaghten’s confinement can hardly be
described as getting off ‘scot-free’ since he endured Bethlem’s prison block for two decades before being transferred in 1863 to the new Broadmoor Criminal Asylum.
By coincidence, another more recent failed prime ministerial assassination attempt began a chain of mass murder that has given insanity and responsibility contemporary worldwide focus. On 22 July 2011 Anders Behring Breivik exploded a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister’s office that killed eight and injuring scores. A few hours later Breivik arrived at Utoya Island, the site of a Labour party youth camp where he systematically shot and killed 69 people, mainly teenagers. The shock was compounded by Breivik’s reported statement that his actions were ‘necessary’ to awaken Norway to the threat posed by Islam. Breivik’s appointed lawyer responded by telling journalists that his client was obviously insane.
Four months after the attacks psychiatric thinking caught up with the lawyer’s reasoning. Psychiatrists diagnosed Breivik to be a paranoid schizophrenic not responsible for his actions. In an unusual twist, Breivik’s trial hinged on prosecution attempts to declare him insane while his defence argued his actions were politically repulsive, though entirely sane. In the end the Norwegian court declared Breivik’s views on multiculturalism, immigration and Islam absurd not delusional, and his claim to be part of a modern-day Knights Templar movement judged nonsense rather than paranoid deluded ramblings. However, I do not want to lose sight of lay reasoning that the massacre was a ‘mad’ thing to do since underlying this view are two popular misconceptions about mental disorder and crime. Firstly, that outrageous crimes must entail mental illness, and secondly, that the purpose of psychiatry in the courtroom is to ‘get people off’. Such reactions are common (Wessely, 2012).
clinical and popular senses. Leader discusses the disturbing case of Harold Shipman, the British doctor who quietly went about murdering at least 250 of his patients, probably many more. In Shipman’s case there was no violent outburst, no socially inappropriate behaviour, or any noisily delusional system that he felt compelled to broadcast. Leader suggests these are significant absences because Shipman was found not have any mental illness, yet by any normal standards his actions were ‘mad’.
Britain’s tabloids have responded to madness and murder by focusing on the ‘medicalization of evil’ (Mason, 2006), which hardly explains horrific crime, but since the 1863 opening of Broadmoor Criminal Asylum has given us a popular image of homicidal insanity (Winchester, 1999). This is why Sander Gilman (1988) has noted that when it comes to seeing the reality of mental disordered offenders in the courtroom, we are surprised to see not ‘mad-dog’ looking criminals of popular representation but ordinary-looking folk whose appearance conflicts with stereotypical perceptions of the aggressive ‘mad’. Gilman asks:
What happens when it is not the identifiable ‘mad person’ who turns out to be aggressive, but the ‘normal, nice kid next door?’ We have a pattern … of evident public surprise when the ‘mad bomber’ turns out to be a retired, meek little man living on a pension, or the ‘son of Sam’ [US serial killer in the 1970s] turns out to work for the post office and live in a high-rise apartment. Such a context is not appropriate for the ‘mad-dog killer’ (Gilman, 1988: 13).
Gilman’s point has especial resonance if we consider hundreds of elderly people who no doubt smiled and thanked Dr Shipman as he administered drugs that murdered
them. How ‘mad-dog’ criminals are supposed to look – maniacal, out of control, running amok, and so on – underpins what Gilman says is ‘the paradox inherent in understanding the popular notion of the mad as criminal’ (Gilman, 1988: 11).
When a mad-dog killer turns out disappointingly ordinary the popular image of homicidal insanity helps manage this paradox. An illuminating case in point concerns the Australian Martin Bryant who in April 1996 massacred 35 people in Tasmania. The mass killing was headline news around the world including in the British tabloid Daily Mirror, where Bryant’s courtroom admission of guilt was headlined: ‘I’m guilty … ha ha ha’ (12 November 1996, p. 4). The story describes Bryant as a ‘psycho who never stopped smiling’, the significance of which is shown in family photos of Bryant from baby to adult ‘still smiling’. Bryan’s smile conveys sinister meaning because the focal image is of adult Bryant looking unmistakably ‘mad’. Readers still uncertain as to what the image means relied on the caption: ‘The mad staring eyes of Martin Bryant who finally confessed yesterday’.
In their analysis of Australian broadsheet reporting on Bryant, McCarthy and Rapley (2000) discuss how in answering the question, ‘why did he do it’, eye-witness testimony confirms Bryant’s appearance as a ‘nut’ long before he carried out the massacre. However, their analysis of the ‘psychiatric case’ made against Bryant using lay terminology such as ‘crazy’ and ‘nut’, as well as medico-legal terminology such as ‘insane’ and ‘schizophrenic’, does not consider how Bryant’s insanity was visually mediated, which is surprising given that the photograph showing Bryant’s ‘mad staring eyes’ was later found to have been ‘manipulated to lighten the eye area [and]
The absurdity of Peter Sutcliffe on day-release from Broadmoor obfuscates British tabloid’s past and current hypocrisy on sexual violence against women. For instance, press reporting during Sutcliffe’s 1981 trial voiced sentiments equivalent to Sutcliffe’s view that women walking out alone at night were not ‘innocent’ (Hollway, 1981). Smith (1990) also observes how Sutcliffe boasted of ‘prostitute bashing’ without fear of criticism, which widens the lens of culpability. Indeed, Smith notes how police hunting for the Yorkshire Ripper spoke of hating prostitutes while at the same time were using their services. However, more than thirty years on from these events we still find UK tabloids like Murdoch’s Sun peddling semi-naked images of young women while boasting they are a ‘family’ paper. Such are continuities of hypocrisy that British tabloid and police ‘watchdogs’ failed women then and now.
Smith (1990) also reveals how Sutcliffe remained undetected because incompetent policing missed clues to his appearance including photo-fit pictures from surviving victims that bear remarkable resemblance to Sutcliffe’s mug shot taken when he was arrested in 1969 for going equipped to steal (though it now seems certain he was attacking women). When police disastrously narrowed their hunt to only consider suspects with a north-east English accent following a hoax tape, surviving victims were ignored when they insisted their attacker spoke in a local Yorkshire accent. Smith notes that the detective leading the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper told reporters he would know the killer when he saw him. Such fictional detection is hard to reconcile with the reality that Sutcliffe was interviewed by police on nine occasions during which time he continued to kill; appearances can be tragically deceptive.
Broadmoor patients and tabloid offenders It transpires that Peter Sutcliffe was not the only Yorkshire man able to hide in plain sight while serially offending. In Britain, recent revelations about the broadcaster and celebrity Jimmy Savile has revealed that beginning in the 1950s he carried out hundreds of sexual assaults on mainly young children and teenagers over five decades spent as a high profile volunteer in hospitals including Broadmoor. This accounts for a photograph, taken in Broadmoor around 1991, showing Sutcliffe meeting boxer Frank Bruno, while Savile looks on. Until recently the photograph’s main significance was in terms of breached hospital privacy/security giving us a rare sighting of Sutcliffe inside Broadmoor. It has since assumed other sinister meanings in its conflation of Sutcliffe’s psychiatric otherness with Savile’s criminal otherness.
The photograph also has other meanings because in a genuinely bizarre turn of events it transpires the photograph was taken when Savile was running Broadmoor, having been appointed to this role in 1988 by Edwina Currie, then Secretary of State for Health. Savile’s 1980s BBC TV children show Jim’ll Fix It underpinned his persona as able to ‘fix’ what politicians could not, i.e. Broadmoor’s image. Savile reportedly could access all areas of Broadmoor, a sign of his celebrity power, but also a symptom of what happens when societies’ most feared are out of sight, out of mind.
In the 2012 TV documentary that finally revealed him to be a predatory sexual offender, ex-Broadmoor patients and nurses told how they had joked that Savile was a psychopath who ought to be a patient in the hospital, not running it. A variant on the comedy song about lunatics taking over the asylum, it now has an ironic ring of truth about it since paedophilia is also a psychiatric disorder. Taking the humour seriously
(Prins, 2007). This not surprising however because when UK tabloids question the meaning of psychiatric treatment their logic is to be querulous not questioning.
I want to develop this point by considering two cases of Broadmoor patients emerging into the full glare of tabloid publicity. Firstly, the case of violent rapist Lee Porritt was front-page news in The Sun in June 2008 shortly after he was released from Broadmoor into a sheltered hostel. Porritt was secretly filmed in the hostel apparently confirming that he still felt he was a danger to women (readers were also invited to watch a taped interview in the paper’s online version). The front-page headline, ‘I’m a psycho rapist … Why did Broadmoor free me?’ ( The Sun 26 June 2008, p.1) confirms that the paper’s wider target was the hospital’s efforts to rehabilitate mentally disordered offenders like Porritt back into the community.
The next day’s headline in The Sun entitled ‘Lifer Luxury’ (27 June 2008, p.1) was accompanied a photograph showing Porritt literally ‘held by cops’ apparently on his way back to Broadmoor. The report details Porritt’s claim that he and other patients in Broadmoor’s Paddock Unit, which specializes in treating psychopaths, were allowed to purchase Yves St Laurent fashion wear stocked by the Broadmoor shop, had nurses buy them sexually violent DVDs, buy flat screen TV’s for their rooms, and so on. The paper’s editorial, ‘A question of public safety’ demanded Government investigation into Porritt’s claims about Broadmoor’s regime stating, ‘It would mean there has been a serious failure of responsibility in the hospital holding lethal and evil maniacs … For the sake of public safety, the Government must ask urgent questions today ’ ( The Sun 27 June 2008, p.8 emphasis in the original).
It is rare that a tabloid with the Sun’s reputation for sensationalism reports a legitimate investigation on a dangerous mentally disordered offender in the community. This is so despite the paper’s editorial being a model of scandalized rhetoric fused with conciliatory language occupying the moral high ground: ‘The Sun accepts that Broadmoor’s special circumstances mean some of its procedures will not be the same as a conventional prison’ before going on to criticize ‘monsters who enjoy luxury’ while ‘British troops are living in rat-infested barracks’. However, in the wake of the Murdoch press’ phone hacking of relatives of dead British soldiers, rat-like imagery can backfire on tabloid journalism’s self-interested claim to employ rat-like cunning when advocating on behalf of ordinary people’s interests.
For instance, the idea that tabloid journalists are simply rat-like was wittily promoted by the acerbic British novelist Will Self during his terse exchange with ex- News of the World reporter Paul McMullan on the BBC’s Newsnight programme ( November 2012), when the latter attempted to justify dubious tabloid practices such as bypassing privacy rules. As the Leveson inquiry showed time and again, tabloid editors and reporters displayed breath-taking contempt for privacy laws with McMullan (in)famously stating in classic tabloid-speak, that ‘privacy is for paedo’s [paedophiles] … no-one else needs it. Privacy is evil’ (quoted in Sabbagh, 2011).
With McMullan’s perverse line of thinking in mind, overcoming privacy rules is all in a day’s work for British tabloids. In their submission to the Leveson Inquiry, the Royal College of Psychiatrists highlighted numerous breaches of privacy rules pertaining to Broadmoor’s security and therapeutic work including payment for letters sent to/by patients. Their submission also notes how a Sun reporter falsely applied to
downmarket end. We do it for the money. And if that serves the public at the end of the day – well, that’s a bonus (cited in Golding 2005: 167).
Normally, absence of conscience is a feature of the psychopathic personality and we must hope that Moncrieff’s missing conscience is journalistic hyperbole. However, his point about the business of writing entertaining stories is telling for the murky line separating public interest from prurient interest. Consider Ruth Runciman’s account of visiting Broadmoor in her mental health charity work:
I am increasingly aware of the gap between what I have seen and the picture painted for the public by the tabloid press. For them, the story of Broadmoor is the story of a few notorious killers, told in the most lurid language. Their information is often obtained by an invasion of privacy and trade in breaches of confidentiality, in an area where, by common agreement, adherence to the press’s code of practice is particularly relevant in view of the powerlessness and vulnerability of the subjects (Runciman, 1996: 12)
Long before the News of the World phone hacking scandal rendered privacy and prurient interest a matter of public concern, lone voices like Runciman were at work holding tabloids to account. Here, Runciman highlights trade in breaches of privacy that underpin reporting on notorious killers. While she bemoans UK tabloid practices, she also rightly notes there is a legitimate public interest in work being done with Broadmoor patients, some of whom have committed very serious index offences.
Thus, my second example of a Broadmoor patient emerging into glare of media publicity concerns the high profile case of Robert Napper, convicted in 2008 for the 1994 killing of Rachel Nickel on Wimbledon Common. When Napper confessed to Nickel’s murder he was already in Broadmoor having been convicted in 2003 for other sex crimes including rape-murder. The day following his admission of guilt for Nickel’s murder, Napper featured in every UK broadsheet and tabloid. The Sun again is especially interesting for its use of a long-lens photograph taken of Napper apparently walking in the grounds of Broadmoor having just fed hens. An adjacent editorial entitled, ‘Cosy life of a twisted killer’, puts the issue thus:
Hens clucking at his heels, a balding man enjoys a stroll in the fresh air through a vegetable garden. But this is no gardener pottering on his allotment. This is butcher and rapist Robert Napper, a monster whose crimes stand comparison with Jack the Ripper. And the question The Sun asks today is this: Can it be right that a man who has so savagely taken the life of others is allowed to live such a cosy life himself? … The Sun accepts that Napper is severely mentally ill. But he has done terrible things. Common decency demands that the way our justice system treats him reflects his crimes. Yet he passes his days pleasantly in an institution that seems to have become a cross between a country club and a variety theatre ( December 2008, p.8, emphasis in the original).
This editorial exemplifies what I suggest is a twofold tabloid interest in reporting on offender-patients. On the one hand, tabloid interest in the offender resides in their human interest and sensationalist news values; but their interest in the patient is an
