Clickbait

I wish I didn’t fall into the trap of clickbait. It never works out well. Our local apology for a newspaper, the Bristol Post, has little other than clickbait. ‘Click here if you want free food,’ it might say, and I’ll be on it, sounding like Leslie Phillips. “Ding dong.” But I did it this afternoon and felt quite ashamed. The Daily Mirror, which older people might recall was once a quality tabloid newspaper, ran a ‘story’ about the death of Nicholas Lyndhurst’s 19 year old son, Archie. And I fell for the bait.

‘Nicholas Lyndhurst breaks silence over painful loss of 19-year-old son Archie’. Well, fair play to him, I thought, speaking out so soon after his young son died. That must have taken a lot of guts. Then I saw Lyndhurst’s actually words: ‘Lucy (his wife) and I are utterly grief stricken and respectfully request privacy.’ And that was it. I felt a little bit sick and ashamed of myself for finding the story, if you can call it a story at all.

The headline began to annoy me. Lyndhurst broke his silence? What the hell did that mean? I doubt that, in his devastation, he made any conscious decision to be silent. My guess is that would have been the last thing on his mind. Christ: his son had died.

The Mirror, I suspect, wheeled out a familiar phrase in what I would call cheap, lazy journalism, lacking empathy and basic humanity and then writing a pathetic story about it. And to make matters worse, I clicked on it. Lyndhurst requested privacy, the Mirror probably respected that and instead made something from nothing and I wanted to see more. I was the voyeur, stupidly intruding, from many miles away, on private grief.

If I hear nothing more about this tragic story, it will suit me just fine. Just because Nicholas Lyndhurst is a legendary performer does not mean we have any kind of ownership of his life. People like me constantly complain about media intrusion but then, as I did today, justify what they do.

The death of this young man is none of my business and it is none of yours, either. If the family later want to tell their story, well that’s up to them. Perhaps they might find it cathartic. But how, or even if, they do it, is a matter for them.

Today, I can only offer my condolences. Your children are supposed to outlive you. This really isn’t right and it’s another reminder how life just isn’t fair.