Thanks are due to the Daily Telegraph which has provided an audio link to what would have been pretty nearly the Argentian footballer Emiliano Sala’s final words before his aircraft disappeared into the English Channel. Ghouls and voyeurs the world over will be thanking the newspaper for joining Sky Sports as the lowest form of life.
Sky Sports, you may recall, broadcast raw footage of Sala’s father back home in Argentina shortly after he heard the news of his son’s disappearance. “Hmm,” thought the programme editor. “This will fit in very nicely between the transfer gossip. Them viewers will love it.” Except that this viewer didn’t.
I fail to see who benefits from what seem to me are gross breaches of privacy in order to attract viewers. We all know that many people – rubber-neckers – love to slow down to look at the wreckage following a car crash, but, as a simple man, I am at a loss to understand quite why.
We do know yet know what happen to Sala’s plane. We are being drip fed speculation and possibilities, but that’s all. The plane itself hasn’t been found yet and maybe it never will be, which means the body of the player and the pilot David Ibbotson might also never be found. Can we not have a little calm, here?
The broadcasting of film of Sala’s grieving father was crass, releasing the audio of some of his final words were crass, too. I suppose you can’t, and shouldn’t, ban this from happening, but can’t folk think before they make public things like this? Probably not.
A society in which a dead girl’s phone was hacked by a national newspaper, where football fans were slandered following a football match in which 96 of them died, where British troops were the victims of a smear campaign by Piers Morgan’s Daily Mirror which made up a story to suggest they had abused Iraqi soldiers – I suppose those parts of the media thought Sala fair game. I’m a bit old fashioned and I was appalled. Am I in a minority?
