“Knife one, lads” joked the Sun today, as police yesterday arrested a potentially armed terrorist approaching Downing Street. Get it? Knife one, nice one? You are meant to laugh at that. It’s a joke.
Quite how amusing our brave police officers, not to mention the family of the late PC Keith Palmer, found the Sun’s pun following the recent terror attacks in Westminster, I don’t know, but not, I suspect, very amusing.
How do you think it works at the Sun? I am imagining a group of sweaty hacks with their shirts hanging out and their ties at odd angles trying to come up with puns. “Now look lads,” says the editor. “This beardie weirdie – hey, we could use that one, too, ha ha ha – has turned up near Downing Street with a bag of knives. The police and M5 know all about him and indeed have had him under surveillance until they nicked him yesterday. He went there to kill someone, probably a cop (police officers are always called cops in the Sun) but our lads stopped him. Anyone got a good joke for the headline?”
Now I am nowhere near as clever and sophisticated as a Sun journalist so I can’t come up with puns, but I would like to think I am not so heartless or uncaring. Put yourself in the shoes of PC Palmer’s family when reading the headline. Do you think you would give a wry smile?
I hope you don’t think I am being a killjoy here – actually I couldn’t care less if you do – but I find the whole thing quite sick. Here we have what could have been a repetition of the murder of a police officer who died carrying out his duty protecting the people and the country’s most popular newspaper is making a joke of it.
Should we be surprised by this? Not really. We know that Rupert Murdoch’s squalid little newspaper has history and plenty of it. Whether it’s the Falklands, Hillsborough or now the death or threats to police officers have exposed the ugly side of journalism. As an insignificant blogger who does not command millions of readers, I would not sell out my principles to gain a wider audience by sinking to the sewers where Sun journalists seem to live.
“Knife one, lads”, honestly. The sniggering, snorting hacks must have thought they had come up with comedy gold when they came up with that one. If you bought the paper and you think it was funny, you are no better than they are.
