|
As The enemies of reason has pointed out, The Daily Mail have covered this story in an interesting way, in particular the use of the word 'vigilante':
What I'm interested in is the word 'vigilante' because this crime appears not to have been committed on the basis of killing a drug dealer, but rather stealing his money and killing all the witnesses.
The word 'vigilante' has normally quasi-positive connotations. A vigilante is someone who acts outside of the law, which is to be condemned, but ordinarily the acts are undertaken with a noble or at least popular motive. For example, if a man on a rundown housing estate is fed up with drug dealers and decides to start attacking them, thus stopping drug dealing, he is engaged in violence and acting illegally, but he would be described as a vigilante because most people would agree that drug dealers are bad and stopping them is good. We therefore condone the action to a large extent because the motives and results are good.
Batman is a vigilante, Robin Hood was a vigilante and yet this 'female' shot and killed a father and a 9 year-old girl for the possible motive:
The husband who was murdered has a history of being involved in narcotics and there was an anticipation that there would be a considerable amount of cash at this location as well as the possibility of drugs.
As The enemies of reason points out:
So that's not vigilantism, that's pure and simple cold-blooded crime, if true. So this woman may or may not have had links to a so-called vigilante group, but it emerges she was kicked out at some stage anyway and went to plough her own furrow. Now she's accused of this crime, is it anti-immigration motivation? Or is it just greed?
The use of the word 'vigilante' seems to me to calculated to imply that the actions of this women were not entirely without merit, that somehow the killing of illegal immigrants can be condoned. This may sound a little far-fetched but you must remember that language is carefully constructed and words are carefully chosen. Vigilante wasn't chosen on a whim, and serves no alliterative purposes that often dictate word choices in headlines.
It seems, worryingly, to be chosen for it's quasi-positive connotations, and the article, strangely, sits on top of the 'Editor's six of the best'. It seems to me that Paul Dacre is celebrating (or at least partially condoning) the murder of two illegal immigrants. |
Pretty much sums up the Mail, methinks.