Heather Mills: Media ice unlikely to thaw

Heather Mills' appearance on this year's Dancing on Ice has invited a predictable media onslaught that reinforces the subjectivity of reportage. As we've seen before, it seems it's all right for the papers to level abuse at certain people - simply because they don't like them. 

Heather Mills has long been one of those people. Whilst many would skate around the issue of disability (sorry), grasping at euphemisms to describe it, Mills is simply "one-legged Heather" (the Sun) and "a plucky, one-legged contestant" (Jan Moir at the Mail).

I'm all for plain speech and everything - and "one-legged" doesn't particularly offend me - but I've struggled to find other amputees referred to in this way in the national press. This suggests it's another exception made to a general rule: "Of course we wouldn't usually say this about a disabled person... But this is Heather Mills!"

Somewhat pointlessly, one of the Mail's other reports on the show starts: "Heather Mills may have become one of the most hated women in Britain after divorcing a Beatle, but she found plenty of fans on Dancing on Ice last night..." It's not uncommon for a news report to start with such conjecture, and this generalisation is depressing at best.

Whatever we think about people, the media's penchant for 'national hate figures' endangers our sense of perspective. And despite all the columns dedicated to Heather Mills, we have to ask: does it really matter?

Comments

[Jimbo]

Fair point. Disability is fair game, in the media's mind, when it's a hate figure.

Abu Hamza was the classic example, despite the juxtaposition of his liberties and disabilities with the indignities and injuries suffered by British soldiers returning from the the Middle East. Not a nice man, but is playing the disability, rather than the man ever acceptable?

Mills too embodied this trend, with one-legged jokes rife in the tabloids and on television around the time of her divorce. David Blunkett too was 'differently blind' it seemed from all those individuals the media wouldn't dare have mocked.

Interesting to imagine where the media would draw the line. Even mild racism is permitted, 'fattism' positively encouraged and homophobia an apparent guilty pleasure of the likes of the Mail's pincer movement of vile hags - Moir and Platel. The mistake of course is when they pick on somebody who isn't a hate figure, such as Moir's attack on Stephen Gately.

[Debbie]

I feel that Mills has invited this kind of writing as her disability has become her calling card. I don't have a problem with the papers pointing out her disability in the way that they do as she has certainly used it for her own gains as well.

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