What Leveson Didn't Address Properly: On Male Violence, Media Ethics and Personal Responsibility

Today, 27 families are grieving.  A community has been broken. They deserve a chance to grieve. There are numerous debates that we need to have tomorrow. Today, we need to let them grieve in peace; without an audience. 

Tomorrow, we need to restart the obvious debate on gun control. But, this debate will be meaningless unless we all start to discuss the issue of hyper-masculinity and male violence within the Patriarchy. We can't simply talk in general terms about who owns guns. We need to talk about who owns guns and who uses them to hurt and kill other people. We need to talk about male violence because it is mostly men who use guns to kill other people. It is mostly men who kill other men and women and children. We need to stop talking in gender neutral terms and start talking properly about male violence.

We need to talk about the military-industrial complex's financial interest in perpetrating our culture of hyper-masculinity.

We also need to restart the debate on media accountability and ethics. Because, today, instead of giving a community a chance to grieve, the media has swooped in and is, at least according to twitter, interviewing children from the school in Newton, Connecticut. They are printing images of terrified families looking for their children. They are printing images of terrified children being taken to safety by police officers. They are showing images of families being ripped apart. Now, we can blame the media for doing this. We can blame individual journalists and evil media empires for their intrusion. But, we won't look at our own behaviour.

Without an audience of people consuming these images, the media would have no financial incentive to doorstop grieving families. We need to stop blaming others for the failures within our culture and start looking at our own behaviour. If you are complaining about journalists interviewing children, ask yourself why you are watching it. Don't just complain. Turn it off. Stop being part of the problem.

Tomorrow, we need to have some serious debates about male violence and gun control. Today, we need to stop intruding in a grieving community.

There is no point in the Leveson Inquiry holding the media accountable for some truly despicable behaviour if we do not hold ourselves accountable too. After all, the media would not exist without an audience of consumers