Published: 18 February 2013
Region: Worldwide
There have been some serious concerns about the way media across the globe reported on the murder of Reeva Steenkamp, model from South Africa. Steenkamp’s boyfriend, Olympic medallist Oscar Pistorius has been charged for her murder.
The Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) in South Africa expressed its concerns that some media organisations report “in a way that shifts attention away from the core issue of gender based violence, and seeks to focus attention on Mr Pistorius’s iconic and role model status. The consequence of this style of reporting is to present Ms Steenkamp’s death as an unfortunate aberration rather than part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence in South Africa”, says CGE.
After the murder of South African model Reeva Steenkamp, British tabloid the Sun run the front page showing her in a bikini with the headline “3 shots. Screams. Silence”. As noted by the Guardian’s columnist Marina Hyde, a huge picture of Steenkamp pulling down the zip of a bikini top was splashed over the Sun’s front page even as her corpse was lying in a Pretoria morgue awaiting a postmortem.
That was “a new low” by the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, said John Prescott, the former deputy PM. Other reactions followed.
The incident, writes Marina Hyde in the Guardian, “swiftly and widely declared a tragedy for South Africa, for sport, and for disability rights. And – presumably to a lesser extent, because it was scarcely suggested in the scramble to get hold of bikini shots – for her family and friends”.
“The killing has yet to be described as a tragedy for women, probably because in the continual clustertragedy that constitutes female representation in the media, Steenkamp is just another casualty, who obligingly happened to be hot”, writes the Guardian columnist.
Not many people were surprised by the Sun’s ‘coverage’ of the story. The British tabloid is notorious for sexism as the campaigners against its Page 3 would argue. But what was not expected is that US media would repeat the same offence.
The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch just like The Sun, has run the story with the huge headline “Blade Slays Blonde”. The New York Post, the Guardian columnist Paul Harris writes, “reduced the dead Steenkamp to a woman identified only by the colour of her hair”. In the same manner, under this stomach turning headline, there were the inevitable picture of Steenkamp in a bikini.
But given the reaction to the Steenkamp front cover in the UK, where is the outrage in the US, asks Harris. It seems like the public reaction to the offensive coverage of the Steenkamp’s death was missing in the “country whose journalists usually consider themselves more serious, more moral and more professional than their rambunctious counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic”. That is, writes the Guardian’s columnist Paul Harris, a deeply debatable proposition – especially as, today, they have shown themselves to be every bit as capable of appalling sexism and not even noticing it.
Another Guardian’s columnist, Marina Hyde, though has noticed a coincidence. On a day when the Sun had its go into the waters of sexism again, the media was set to have one of the dominating stories on fighting domestic violence.
“That the story leading the news for the entire day of the One Billion Rising global action opposing violence against women concerned a woman being allegedly murdered by her partner was unfortunate. That the death was covered in the way it has been begins to look like something else. But nothing new, obviously”, writes Hyde.
“Nothing new, indeed. Neither in Britain nor, just as dreadfully, in the United States. And yet, the prize of most egregious insensitivity and sexism goes to Steenkamp’s own country, South Africa”, writes Hyde’s colleague Harris pointing to the decision to broadcast an episode of a reality show featuring Steenkamp”.
British press has been thoroughly analysed by Lord Leveson. And the UK press has received the recommendations by Leveson who, after his attention drawn to articles which appear to eroticise violence against women, concluded that they “may” infringe the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) code. After the Sun’s coverage though, PCC has received the complaints and the Change.org is running a petition calling the Sun’s editors to apologize.
Across the social media platforms and in many blogs, people have reacted to its disgraceful coverage. One of the bloggers from Bristol wrote in the letter to the Sun’s editor: “Her name was Reeva Steenkamp. Her name was not ‘Pistorius’s lover’. She had her own name, her own identity. She was not just defined by her relationship to a man”.
