It's high time the media took the blame

The shameful circus surrounding the coverage of Nicola Bulley's disappearance is fundamentally the fault of our news organisations – but they'll never admit it, apologise... or change

The distress of Nicola Bulley’s family must be unimaginable. Their statement after her body was finally found was heartbreaking, eloquently reminding us all that Nicola was no longer a missing person but was and will always be a mother, daughter, partner. That this is actually, as it always has been, a private, family tragedy.

That her relatives’ distress has been compounded by the million-ring circus around the search is indisputable. Everyone’s voiced an opinion on Nicola, her family, her circumstances, the community, the search, the police, and the social media sleuths and ghouls who have treated the site like a theme park – almost all of them with not a shred of knowledge or evidence to support their always intrusive and often cruel views.

But what frustrated me all week that as the story grew, and grew, and grew, with accusations and finger-pointing that ran so uncaringly over the central human tragedy of two little girls losing their mother, there was one group not being held accountable at all.

Until that family statement – when finally, finally, someone blamed the media.

And their broadside was stingingly vitriolic, laying the responsibility for the entire voyeuristic salivation of the public at the door of national newspapers and TV stations: “They again have taken it upon themselves to run stories about us to sell papers and increase their own profiles. It is shameful they have acted in this way.”

And they’re absolutely correct. All through the three weeks of Nicola’s disappearance, the sense of media glee became palpable as it stoked up the mystery, asking questions in such a way that deliberately encouraged us, its audience, to add two and two and make five. It then just as gleefully criticised social media sleuths for running with the beast it created, and then loved blasting the police for trying to address all the rumours, wilful misinformation and conspiracy theories which it, the media, had set in train.

In the hour after police confirmed the identity of this poor woman’s body, BBC’s Six O’Clock News ran an utterly disingenuous breakout slot marvelling at how social media had run with the story, and the 270million internet searches for Nicola’s name. But it didn’t mention why it was so absorbed in the story to begin with. And ITV and Sky were both named and shamed by the family for contacting them directly after expressly being told to stay away., but not one of the major networks’ news bulletins showed the part of the family’s statement that directly criticised them.

A lack of contrition

The next day’s papers were equally lacking in contrition. Many ran splash headlines with the family’s quote “We can let you rest now”, denying the irony that their journalists almost certainly will not do the same, not with a post mortem, a solution to the mystery and a funeral still to come. The Mail and others continued to add layers to the story, making a celebrity of a “psychic” who claimed to have found the body and delightedly running a quote from a former police officer stating that “these search teams couldn’t find a currant in a rice pudding” – another uninformed, baseless accusation from someone with no inside knowledge of the case. Having attacked the search teams and the police, the article then finished by reminding its readers of the ‘cruel and baseless’ actions of TikTok detectives. The day after that - 36 hours after the family's statement – the Sun was again deflecting its heat onto the police with the front page headline "Nicola cops failed my sis, too", artfully using the words 'suicide mum' in its subdeck to encourage the readers again to add two and two to get five.

Having been in Fleet Street for 20 years, I can confidently say that not only is the Press not contrite, but there will be individuals in newsrooms who are bitterly affronted, actually smarting, that Nicola Bulley's family have had the temerity to attack them, "after everything we did to help them find her". Only the Independent, and hurrah for it, led with the family’s criticism of the media. Every other editor ignored that bit on their front pages. A fair and free press? You decide.

Of course social media, amoral and unregulated, can spread a story and its rumours around the world in seconds and so it did with this one, to an unprecedented level. But the fact is that this would not have caught fire on social media as it did without the initial coverage Nicola Bulley’s disappearance attracted on TV and in the national Press. And here is another fundamental reason the UK mainstream media is to blame: Missing White Woman Syndrome.

Yes, it’s a thing. A raft of academic studies in the UK and the US have all proved that a white, middle-class female’s disappearance will always gain significantly greater traction with the media – an average 10 times more column inches or broadcast minutes – than any other profile. Think of the high profile stories of disappearances in the last few decades and which names come into your head first? Suzy Lamplugh? Claudia Lawrence (above right)? Sarah Everard? Madeleine McCann? I don’t imagine you’ve heard of Tapi Matuwi (above left), a 21-year-old IT graduate who vanished on a busy Swansea street four years ago, or 27-year-old Lola Shenkoya (above centre), last seen outside a Burger King in Ealing 23 years ago. Or almost any of the other 170,000 people, including 70,000 children, who go missing in the UK every year. And why would you?

Lure of the missing white woman

The reason these people don’t get the attention because for the exclusively white, middle-class club that runs Britain’s newspapers and TV networks, they are not “people like us”. I know nothing about Nicola Bulley’s private life and it never was nor ever will be my business, but the fact she was an attractive, blonde, middle-class, middle-aged, mum of young daughters who was walking her dog automatically makes Fleet Street's male editors think “that could have been my wife. My readers will think ‘that could have been me’”. And yes, I did say attractive and blonde. A friend of mine who worked for many years in the Met Police press office recalled that “whenever a woman went missing in London, the papers’ crime reporters would always ask if she was blonde and pretty. If the suggestion was that she was, they’d ask for a picture.”

So in the last three weeks, either through “facts” or calculated suggestion, the Press has perpetuated assumptions, which were then writ large all over social media, about Nicola Bulley’s lifestyle because of how she looked. An event like this is so out of the ordinary for the lives "we", the editors and our readers live. But a 21-year-old single black man goes missing in a city centre and they make completely different assumptions about his lifestyle and what we might assume/expect to have happened, and how regularly that sort of thing occurs – and that that lifestyle does not have the same status, “news value” and therefore equal lure of the mystery around an attractive 45-year-old middle-class white woman. So they don’t run the story.

Ah, but this isn’t about race/gender/social status stereotypes, says the media, it’s about public interest. We run these stories because we want to give our audience what we know will interest them. Yes, that’s a feasible argument, but only up to a point. For one thing, you don't want to give, but sell your audience what you know will interest them. In the clumsy, jarring Channel 5 documentary about Nicola’ s disappearance (a clear case of Missing White Woman Syndrome bias, just two weeks after she vanished and which added nothing new apart from the opinions of “experts” with – you guessed it – no specific involvement in the case), Dan Walker enthused that the interview with Nicola’s partner (I wonder how the benefits of that interview were sold to him?) was so affecting that “we’ve decided to break it up into three parts throughout our programme”. Neglecting to say, of course, that while you wait for these three parts, we’ll show you three lots of adverts.

We all need to define 'public interest'

That show wasn’t Crimewatch, it didn't even attempt to offer anything to help solve the case, and neither did almost all of the press coverage and the social media wildfire. So given this IS a private family tragedy, did the saturation coverage really have the justification of public interest? Or did it just become like a real life TV mystery, with theories and speculation put forward and encouraged for our own entertainment, even enjoyment? If we search our souls and realise that is the case, every single one of us must take responsibility for the distress of Nicola Bulley’s family.

And given how many of us were gripped by events in Lancashire, maybe the media could argue that proves a public interest argument. But it still doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t change the fact that it was the media who brought and escalated this story to begin with.

And their lack of contrition and lack of self-control means that they will keep bringing it. The speculation about what really happened will continue to go on, and there’s a very strong chance that when Nicola’s family are finally able to lay her to rest, journalists will be all over the town again to share that horrible day with the world. They will want us to see their pictures of elderly parents grieving their daughter, a broken man grieving his partner, and a broken six-year-old girl and her broken nine-year-old sister saying a final goodbye to their mummy.

But none of this will bring Nicola back, so there's no justification for it. Don’t watch it. Don’t read it. Don’t buy it. It’s private grief, and it's none of our damn business.

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