What’s the best thing a newspaper can do when a well known footballer is found guilty of sexually abusing a child? I know. Make a joke about it. Well, it’s a very funny story, isn’t it? Man grooms child for sexual activity, owns up to some charges, denies others, one of which he is later found to be guilty, and then puts the young girl through the turmoil of a lengthy Crown Court trial. And the Sun today? Its front page shows the footballer Adam Johnson wearing nothing more than swimming trunks with the headline, “Paedo in his speedos”.
Imagine you are in the newsroom at Rupert Murdoch’s flagship scandal sheet, with a group of sniggering and chortling middle aged male journalists. “We’ve found this old photograph of Adam Johnson. And he’s wearing speedos,” says one hack. “I’ve got it,” splutters the headline writer. “Paedo in his speedos!” Sound of hysterical laughter booming round the building. “Hold the front page!”
I am no prude, far from it, and I appreciate a bad joke as much as the next person, but is this really a joke? Well, it’s supposed to be. The whole point of certain headlines is to attract the attention of a potential customer. The Sun’s headline is clearly not meant to make you angry about the perverted activities of a millionaire low life: it is to make you laugh.
The Sun has made its name through exploiting women. That was the very basis of the newspaper. Tits, bums and far right politics, although no longer in this order. They pride themselves in knowing their readers, which if true puts their readers in a very low place. I do hope that people are not showing the front cover to their workmates, having a good laugh about a story in which a young girl was seriously abused and even worse has seen her life completely and utterly ruined. She is supposed to be anonymous – and I certainly don’t know her identity and don’t want to – but she was slaughtered on social media by many of Johnson’s supporters. In the digital age, anonymity is almost impossible to preserve.
Whatever sentence is imposed on Johnson – and I hope it is a very long sentence – he will return to Civvy Street still a millionaire who will never again have to work. Such are the rewards for a Premier League footballer, for whom if he has been well advised, the interest alone on his earnings will see him survive more than comfortably into old age.
None of this is of concern to the Sun who tried to make a joke out of paedophilia.
