Rebuttals, causal uncertainty and alternative frames

The extensive criticism of potentially harmful online material and the Internet medium in general did not go unrebutted. Rebutting articles either merely denied any Internet involvement in the Bridgend case or occasionally went as far as to stress the positive aspects of the medium. Such articles, which appeared primarily in broadsheets (especially The Guardian/Observer and The Times/Sunday Times; see Table 5.F), are reminiscent of the arguments made by a number of theorists (Turkle, 1997, 1999; Hardey, 2002a, 2002b;

Baron, 2008; Ito et al., 2008; Seymour and Lupton, 2004) regarding the personal and social benefits one can achieve by establishing a digital identity. The articles in question constitute an exception to the openly negative or ambivalently neutral tone permeating the entire Bridgend coverage vis-à-vis youngsters’ use of the Web. They can only be seen as a response to the original Mail-initiated ‘Internet suicide cult’ claims, considered to be offering a flawed understanding of technology’s involvement in young people’s lives.

Sabbagh (2008) of The Times argues that social networking sites like Bebo serve as a remedy to the loneliness of adolescence, bringing together like-minded young people and, therefore, being much more likely to reduce, rather than increase, suicide rates. At the same time, Brooks’ (2008) comment in The Guardian portrays any attempt to demonise the Internet for Bridgend-like phenomena as reflecting adults’ failure to understand that, in the eyes of the new generation, the distinction between the physical

and the virtual world no longer applies. From this perspective, it is natural for youngsters of the 21^st century to create and maintain an online personalised space, away from adult surveillance, where ‘privacy’ consists in having absolute control over the amount of private information being accessible to other users (Livingstone, cited in Brooks, 2008;

for more details on this transforming definition of ‘privacy’ in the Internet age, see the original source, that is, Livingstone, 2006).

In order to put the largely negative portrayal of the Web in the Bridgend coverage into perspective, it is important to consider the wider impact of new technologies on journalism. Curran et al. (2012) describe how the rise of the Internet was expected to democratise journalism by empowering consumers against top-down media corporations.

‘Armed with cellphones, BlackBerries or iPhones’, Peat (2010) writes, ‘the average Joe is now a walking eye on the world, a citizen journalist, able to take a photo, add a caption or a short story and upload it to the Internet for all their friends, and usually everyone else, to see.’ Nevertheless, Curran et al. (2012) suggest that the preceding expectation did not fully materialise since the Internet quickly came to reflect the inequalities, conflicting interests and values of the physical world: leading news brands have been successful in extending their hegemony online, while the autonomy and self-expression provided by social media have primarily served entertainment and leisure purposes rather than social transformation.

With regard to traditional media’s hostility against the Internet and the level to which this influenced the Bridgend coverage, journalist Zack Newmark notes that this was not strictly targeted at the Internet per se, but reflects a general distrust of anything new:

‘[T]his [the Bridgend case] wasn’t an ‘Internet suicide cult’. […] It just became this

‘dirty’ way of reporting a story and it happened to be the three words that got picked up by global media. […] This is not the first time that a relatively new technology or a new entertainment medium has been attacked for causing suicides. This goes back over a hundred years that people have attacked heavy metal, punk rock, jazz music and blues music and some classical pieces as inciting suicidal behaviour just like the radio or comic books have been attacked or various movies have been accused of inciting suicidal behaviour. So, this is nothing new. It’s not new. It’s just new that it’s attacking social networking websites.’

(Journalist Zach Newmark, interviewed on June 18, 2010)

A similar point is made by Ellen (2008: 13) in her article for The Observer, in which she criticises this view of the Internet and especially of social networking sites as the

‘all-purpose bogeyman’. At the same time, author Loren Coleman (cited in Brewis, The Sunday Times, 2008: 10) also maintains that, as a new medium, the Internet constitutes an easy target in delicate situations like Bridgend. He draws parallels between the demonisation of the Intenet in the Bridgend case and that of comic books blamed for causing suicides in the American depression of the 1930s. This process of demonisation, he argues, is counterproductive since it draws attention away from the numerous and complex social factors actually contributing to one’s decision to take his/her own life.

The issue will be further discussed in Chapter Seven.

Contrary to the Mail or the Telegraph, not all newspapers and not all authors take an early stance on the Bridgend issue. In an attempt to maintain accuracy and objectivity in their reporting, media professionals often present arguments both for and against a particular view of the problem, while making sure to back them up, wherever possible, with quoted statements from apparently credible sources (Chibnall, 1977). As far as the IS frame is concerned, the initial concerns about the Internet’s potential involvement in the suicides are frequently reported alongside the South Wales police statement denying any online connection between the victims, thereby leaving the final judgement as to whether the Web is to blame or not upon the reader. However, as more and more youngsters take their own lives in the Bridgend area, the validity of this official point of view is questioned. Though it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that these suicides are not without a cause, there is a general uncertainty amongst the authorities and journalists as to what this cause could be. Consequently, in terms of the press coverage of the suicides, although the Internet is not always openly blamed, the possibility of an Internet involvement is rarely off the table: it is present in the majority of the sample articles (Figure 5.2 in Appendix V), even if just briefly mentioned to be dismissed right after. In fact, the rejection of the IS frame itself, either by the police or by friends and relatives of the victims, is occasionally deemed more important and given more emphasis than the discovery of the actual cause of the problem (see Gordon, The Daily Telegraph, 2008;

Yeoman and de Bruxelles, The Times, 2008a).

This uncertainty as to what is happening in Bridgend leaves room for further speculation and the construction of alternative frames to explain the local suicide problem. Their proponents often attempt to draw attention to their claims by invoking and indicating the weaknesses of the original IS model. They, thus, put into words the question floating in everyone’s mind in the wake of the Bridgend tragedy: is the Internet really the cause of it? If not, then what is? The doubts around the IS frame and their

function as the basis for the investigation of other possible causes are reflected in the following Times headline: ‘Internet death cults? Or is it a humdrum cause closer to home?’ (Marsh, 2008: 24; see Figure 5.7). The additional frames developed through this investigation encourage different interpretations of the Bridgend phenomenon, which focus on the effect of other (offline) factors such as insensitive reporting, social breakdown or mental health issues. These will be examined in detail in the chapters that follow.

Conclusion

This chapter has looked at the national press construction of the Bridgend deaths as

‘Internet suicides’ and situated it in the context of a pre-existing anxiety over online social interaction and the ‘dark side’ of the ‘virtual’ in general. The appeal of the IS frame has been pointed out and the level to which the Mail’s original ‘Internet suicide cult’ story encouraged other newspapers to adopt a similar angle in their subsequent reports on the matter has been assessed. The prominence of this frame in the entire Bridgend coverage and its role in bringing attention to the potential links between suicide and the Internet has been discussed. Particularly, it has been argued that journalists saw the Bridgend events as an opportunity to portray a largely negative image of the Web and underline its supposedly detrimental influence on vulnerable youngsters. The emphasis placed on the latter influence stressed adults’, especially parents’, moral responsibility to protect young users from the risks of cyberspace, increasing the calls for better Internet education and tighter control over potentially harmful online content.

The lack of conclusive evidence that the Internet had actually played any part in the Bridgend case allowed the rebuttal of the originally potent IS frame. Within the general uncertainty around the cause(s) of the local suicides, rebutting claims encouraged further speculation, resulting in the development of alternative frames [‘Suicide Contagion’ (SC), ‘Breakdown Britain’ (BB) and ‘Mental Health’ (MH)] that searched for answers beyond any Internet responsibility. Due to its overlap with the ‘Internet Suicide’

(IS) frame at the point where this involves the risk of an online Werther effect [‘Virtual Immortality’ (VI) and ‘Suicide Websites’ (SW) sub-frames], SC will be the first of these alternative frames to be studied. Its contribution to the construction of the Bridgend problem will be the subject of Chapter Six.

CHAPTER SIX A suicide epidemic?

‘I went to my friend’s funeral and it gave me the confidence to do it myself. I thought that if she has done it, then so could I. I wouldn’t be alone in doing it.’

(Rosanna Lewis on how Natasha Randall’s death gave her the ‘courage’ to attempt suicide herself, quoted in Herbert, News of the World, February 17, 2008a: 11)

‘Suicides spread like a contagion…If one death happens in a community, it’s as if permission has been granted’

(Darren Matthews, former director of the Bridgend branch of the Samaritans, cited in Rayner and Savill, The Daily Telegraph, February 23, 2008: 23)

‘I have noticed an increase in sensationalist reporting and the fact that Bridgend is becoming stigmatised. The link between the deaths isn’t the internet – it is the way the media is reporting the news.’

(South Wales Assistant Chief Constable Dave Morris, quoted in Laurance, The Independent, February 22, 2008: 39)

Introduction

In their attempt to construct engaging narratives, media professionals have the tendency to emphasise the notion of risk, presenting particular, usually shocking, incidents as part of a spreading epidemic (Hall et al., 1978; Jewkes, 2011). It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that some of the phenomena of which they warn the public are, in fact, exaggerated, what Best (2002) calls a ‘phantom epidemic’, since they are not supported by evidence and are neither as sudden, nor as widespread as the media portray them to be (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2009). But what happens when the risk of such an epidemic is scientifically acknowledged as an actual possibility, let alone one which the media themselves are likely to aggravate?

A number of researchers like Phillips (1974), Sonneck et al. (1994), Etzersdorfer et al. (2001) and Pirkis et al. (2006) regard the so-called ‘Werther effect’ as an actual risk.

They stress that suicide news stories and ultimately any positive image of the act or the victim may encourage other vulnerable individuals to also kill themselves. As the line between objective and media-constructed reality becomes thinner and thinner in the era of 24/7 news, the level of media exaggeration and responsibility for inciting imitative incidents is difficult to assess when the subject matter is suicide. That is another issue which comes to the fore through the Bridgend paradigm.

Journalists’ endeavour to discover a ‘suicide pattern’ across all the individual suicide cases in the area can easily be viewed as an attempt to boost the newsworthiness of the story. But how exactly is this alleged suicide epidemic, centred around Bridgend, made sense of in the national press? Inversely, how do the latter perceive the possibility of causing a Werther effect? Susceptible and immature individuals such as adolescents are nowadays likely to come across an abundance of suicide-related information, both online and offline. But to what extent can the inevitable exposure to such information be blamed for putting the idea of suicide in their heads? Are the media capable of actively causing suicide or do they just trigger it in people already predisposed to it? Finally, how are seemingly ‘dark’ youth subcultures like goth and emo and self-destructive celebrities portrayed in the Bridgend coverage and what does their portrayal reveal of the meaning attached to suicide in our culture? All these questions will be addressed in the current chapter.