I Hope That It's Because It's S***

As you're undeniably aware, this week, Amanda Knox, the wrongly accused murderer of Meredith Kercher by the Italian authorities has finally been acquitted of the charges, and, clearly shaken, disturbed, most certainly fragile, she has bravely returned to face the media circus - which had long settled upon the assumption of her being a crazed killer, her love of 'sex games' causing the tragedy - to speak about her ordeal. Speaking in Seattle on her return, signs point towards Post Traumatic Stress, as she quavered through half sobs and darting eyes:

'I'm really overwhelmed right now... I was looking down from the aeroplane and it seemed like everything wasn't real... thank you to everyone who believed in me... my family is the most important thing to me, and I really just want to go and be with them'

The event has shown up the cruelty and anti-feminist practices in action of many members of the press and their organisations, although, for the usual suspects, this has been approached with severely dubious tact; The Daily Mail took an unusual perspective on the story, distancing themselves whilst not entirely rejecting their earlier vilification of Knox, going with:

'She has matured into a very different young woman from the unappealingly self-absorbed figure we first saw smooching with her boyfriend when Meredith’s body was barely cold.'

Again, kudos to David Jones of the Daily Fail for going with: What now for Foxy? Dreams of being a mother, Hollywood millions and a new life as a professional martyr to injustice. Very observant Jones! More than me I must say, because I could have sworn she said she just wanted to go home, but I must have missed out on the subtle indications of dreams of sex, money, motherhood and sacrifice. Just as well since that's what you originally said she was all about... well, perhaps without the motherhood bit, but you were probably doubting that she could be allowed with children.

It's an unusual way to seem supportive, when all it makes me think of is William Thomas's The Unadjusted Girl (1923) which argued that because of men and women's unavoidably different biological personality traits, (because all women act like ladies... which really even in 1923 is a heap of BS - note the caught on camera Suffragettes of 1912) women are too busy wanting to lie on their backs and think of England to engage in criminal activity. When, however, a woman hasn't had enough attention and love, they use sex to get what they want, recklessly throwing aside dreams of domesticity for thrills, cash, and luxury; so if Jones argues Knox is a 'professional martyr to injustice', she sure still seems like a criminal.

It's long established Criminological fact that in criminal cases, where a woman is believed to have committed a crime which suggests she has stepped outside the roles of femininity, particularly if it represents a significant breach of normalcy for the submissive nature of motherhood and daughteronomy she is hit with the full, furious weight of the law. It is interesting to look at what even high class media publications such as Vanity Fair decided to select for print when the case broke in 2008, for the media's judgement of Knox has been in this case the more belligerent and insidious arbiter of the law, passing their verdict early on non-existent evidence. Painting her portrait from a combination of vague confessionals, Judy Bachrach uses Knox's 'high school drama teacher's confession, 'Let's lay it out: she wasn't a dazzler.', to Diya Patrick Lumumba - the oft described as 'innocent' man Knox would later under pressure implicate in the crime - happily telling Vanity, that in the bar she worked 'she spent most of her time chatting up guys and flirting'. Perhaps her lack of attention and love early in life meant she had to pursue sexual attentions and criminal actions? Gosh that profile seems to fit time and again...

Adding further to the profile of general weirdo, 'one of' Kercher's friends would tell the police to be printed in Vanity 'the first time I met her we were eating in a restaurant, when all of a sudden she began to sing in a loud voice. It was very strange and out of place.' I don't know about you reader, but if spontaneity and liberated expression is a legitimate precursor to 'extreme sex murder' (all VF btw ) then someone ought to either sew me up, or lock me up now.

Unsurprisingly, the ever wonderful Julia Kristeva can express my point more poetically than with my fresh annoyance on the point of this portraiture of a weirdo/criminal/sex fiend for strengthening the patriarchal order in About Chinese Women:

'If a woman cannot be part of the temporal symbolic order except by identifying with her father, it is clear that as soon as she shows any sign of that which, in herself, escapes such identification and acts differently, resembling the dream of the maternal body, she evolves into this 'truth' in question. It is thus that female specificity defines itself in patrilinear society: woman is a specialist in the unconscious, a witch, a bacchanalian, taking her jouissance in an anti-Apollonian, Dionysian orgy.' (154)

As Victor Burgin, less poetically, but perhaps more succinctly summarizes of Kristeva's philosophy of 'psycho-cultural otherness' in a description where Knox's transformation from the 'mousy' brunette scaring girls and luring men like a Siren in the bars of Italy, to 'Foxy Knox' (which will bring me back to my title, honest) is incredibly apt:

'... the woman in society... in the patriarchal, as perpetually at the boundary, the borderline, the edge, the 'outer limit' - the place where order shades into chaos, light into darkness. The peripheral and ambivalent position allocated to woman, says Kristeva, had led to that familiar division of the field of representation in which women are viewed as either saintly or demonic - according to whether they are seen as bringing the darkness or as keeping it out.' Geometry and Abjection 115-6

It seems that Knox has experienced this media transformation from 'bringing the darkness' to 'keeping out', from depraved 'unappealingly self self-absorbed' sex criminal to 'martyr to injustice'. Strangely then, the only figure who has had to make a public apology for his representation of Knox, is the ever enlightened Matthew Wright of The Wright Stuff who ran with Foxy Knoxy: Would Ya? on a recent episode in profoundly bad taste.

Wright's show not only served to play into this dialectic of psycho-cultural otherness, but served to severely attempt to undermine the entire question of double standards for women's position in law and media by reducing her to the level of sexual object, cruelly removed from any of the trials and tribulations which have reduced her to a traumatised and a confused woman, who once worked hard to meet her aspiration of becoming a teacher. It is not what Wright said, or more to the point what my lover Murdoch's Channel 5 sanctioned (indeed, Wright only apologises for 'the on-screen title was wrong, no doubt about it') that worries me, it is that Ofcom only made an investigation upon the basis of 15 complaints, an appallingly low amount of protest. This finally brings me back to my title, why is it so low? The choices surely are that either The Wright Stuff is a terrible programme for which 15 viewers would be an impressive amount, leaving a potential 100% complaint rate; and one could certainly argue this point quite strongly, or that simply his comments were simply out of time.

Considering the remaining memory of the Royal Wedding was Pippa Middleton's posterior, for which I have come across almost no complaint, it is only that Knox is now a recognised victim that the discussion was out of order, not that women should be belittled so much, their private bodies considered so much as publicly owned that there is nothing wrong in this discussion. I fear that this is in fact the culprit for the paltry amount of complaints, that the dialectic which exists of judging whether a woman is seen 'as bringing the darkness or as keeping it out' upon the basis of her looks (do I need to explain how this relates to Susan Boyle's 'transformation'?) is so well subconsciously accepted, that a woman must be a freshly traumatised individual to even elicit 15 complaints. Knox is a particularly vulnerable victim of this dialectic, but it is only her particular vulnerability which suggests that the conversation must be stopped. Women's bodies, lives, wounds are rightly there to be questioned, observed, and abused. Apparently.

News Corp and Marxist Irony

It's pretty old news now that Murdoch et al have finally come under close scrutiny due to the phone hacking allegations and investigations that are taking place; interestingly only considered an issue once a clear 'victim' was involved. By this I mean Milly Dowler's family of course, and as the FBI investigation now begins State-side, that of 9/11 families, who may have also been hacked, for whom I only have the most heartfelt sympathy, as does the entire country. Nevertheless, it must be said that when it was the realm of sleazy politicians phones - the Galloways - the sluts on the podium - the Imogen Thomas' - and indeed their love rat partners, of course the Giggs of the world, the media seemed to decide amongst themselves it was well deserved. In this instance, it seemed to be a result of rather simple Marxist manipulative theory, 'those with the means of material production' also have 'the means of mental production' (Marx & Engels),
the news told us it was shocking, they told us they were ashamed, nobody needed to ask if they needed to be punished. It had already been dealt, then was simply the time for signing the interview exclusive deals, free to eventually complete the full circle, and pose for the 'candid' photographs, showing the spontaneous sexiness the media raised them to have. Just like Miss Thomas' incredulous trip to LA in late June 2011 proved.

This is something which no one seems to have asked, indeed the cultural hegemony which has been cast, which subliminally makes all its members agree that this was the point at which it is okay to vilify Mr Murdoch, in my mind, has come unforgivably late. As Left Foot Forward reported recently, and something which Sociologists and Economists have known as far back as 1995, Murdoch has been paying 1.2% tax, 31.8% less than the rate of Corporate tax. As some right minded people I know have reiterated, it is not tax evasion, it is tax avoidance, but I hardly think it is the point. In the money Murdoch has saved in paying tax, in a country which he has been a silent political kingpin since Thatcher, he has denied the country at least 4 fully staffed and equipped state of the art NHS hospitals, or equally about 65 state schools, well, whatever it could have been spent on, in a time of cuts, redundancies, elderly welfare diminishing, and units specialising in children's heart surgery facing closure (those greedy babies wanting new valves... don't they know there's a deficit?!) 'evasion' or 'avoidance', there's a whole lot of people who are perhaps suffering now because he's not been asked to pay fairly. Certainly, I think I would take a small army of life-long benefit 'scum' to lose the country the amount of money we've lost out from Mr. Murdoch alone. Indeed, in recent weeks, news of the ever worsening cuts have been a mere babbling brook to the tidal waves of emotional sensationalist news depicting a left-wing revolution, which in reality is not much more than a self-governed set of public slaps to the wrists.

I suppose this is my biggest qualm about the whole media circus that has ensued; believe me, I have dreamt of the day Murdoch, in Shelley-esque style gets turned on by the monster he has created, but I also dreamt that it would be for the right reasons. So caught up one becomes in the repetitious damnation of Rebekah Brooks (again, I feel I must reiterate, I am not a fan of the woman, but she does seem to have taken the role of the sacrificial goat for the Aztec Gods of media manipulation somewhat) and the constant breaking news media cycle which endlessly churns out more and more victims until the whole country starts investigating how they may put a pin on their own phone, Murdoch's far reaching economic and political crimes go unpunished, simply because they are not on trial. And I wonder if they ever will be. If News Corp falls, will Murdoch still have punching power in England? Of Course! Where print media may be on a grim death-march facing the ever advancing armies of digital media, Sky is not set on any such grim course. Providing millions of British homes with digital media (not to mention channels and programmes), and interestingly, less than a week ago, Wales receiving £57m from Whitehall for super-fast broadband in times of strict austerity measures, there are just as many opportunities for wealth and power acquisitions in Britain as ever, and in the nature of private Capitalism, it is beyond the influence of any of its citizens.

Indeed, Murdoch's far reaching global empire is a support network to valuable to world economics to ever be allowed to crumble; his mental production vast enough to ever allow the suggestion to go too far. Indeed, if this is a man who hacks into private information of everyone from politicians to grieving families, who knows what information, let alone money he has to barter with? As Berger argues: 'The mass media still perform their job of distracting people from the realities of society and of "clouding their minds" with ideas that the ruling class wishes them to have', often in the NewsCorp scandal, quite violently, as Elisabeth Murdoch went on record in The Telegraph to say Ms Brooks 'fucked' the company, something which the kindly old Rupert denies.

As Rupert's bloody Friday draws to a close, there is real suggestion and hope for change, heads certainly will roll, but I think perhaps, only to keep the King's off the block. The post-modern world has replaced empires of countries replaced with empires of one presided over by their white male Tycoons who make their own rules to the games they play globally. When Capitalism allows for an individual to decide how much wealth they believe it is fair to pay to a country, and with ever mounting wealth, and means, they can become more and more surrounded by soldiers to wage their wars, it is hard to imagine how democracy can fairly prevail in any country. If you think this is going too far, just look into how Murdoch's impacted every political ascension in Britain since the 1980s.

N.B I write this after the event, where Ms Brook's involvement has become clear to say that this article did not suppose that she had no involvement, the level at which she provably has been is as clear now as it is abhorrent, but that it's image of her preceded significantly the evidence of her involvement, and that I only ever argued a case which I hoped would follow an 'innocent until proven guilty' ethic which rarely is in practice in news media.