23 May Woolwich murderer becomes radical Islam’s PR hero
Holding a meat cleaver in one of his blood soaked hands, Michael Adeloboja set a media precedent yesterday afternoon.
He officially became the UK’s first celebrity murderer.
Never before in our culture had a killer fresh from slaying a victim used the media to publicise his agenda, and when we separate this from the revulsion and horror of the savage death of a soldier on a London street, we are left with an equally disturbing spectre of the future.
To all but a disenfranchised element on the edge of society, this mad man deserves at the minimum a life of torture for such barbarism, but instantly he became radical Islam’s PR guru.
With him spouting off his twisted ideology on every prime time news channel, and having had hundreds of thousands of hits on social media, he was able to convey a message in an instant that any top London PR agency would have charged a six figure sum for.
I’m not belittling what has happened, but Woolwich’s bloodiest day happens also to be one where we as a broader society have to really wake up as to how to tame the unwieldy beast that is social media?
Only a few years ago, a news story like that would have been edited extremely carefully so as to not upset some of the more sensitive members of our society. However, I was doing all I could to avoid my two primary aged children from witnessing this Technicolor act of depravity.
When a murderer can stand there with his hands drenched in the blood of a man trained to protect our country, it sure is some way of getting noticed.
However, should it have been given the oxygen of publicity in the way it did?
Some will say yes and that censorship is futile, and the nanny state should be consigned to history.
However, my concern is images such as this gives a distorted view of society, and with rolling news cementing stories in our sub-conscious minds, is this really something we should be all be distracted with so intensely?
My fears are in the scramble for viewing figures broadcasters will crank up the gore as far as possible, and the flip side is there will be more Michael Adeboloja’s looking for their 15 minutes of fame.
Welcome to the media 2013.
