Wednesday, March 5, 2008

A Toffee's Sticky Situation

Today I will be taking a slightly different approach to the story that I have done in previous posts. Instead of simply writing the story, I will be comparing how other news outlets have reported the same story.

As you may have guessed, from the title, the story in question is the 'Tim Cahill celebration'.

First of all, a bit of background. After Cahill scored, against Portsmouth, on Sunday, he proceeded to cross his wrists, as if they were handcuffed together. This was done as a show of support for his recently imprisoned brother.


While the BBC and Sky gave a reasonably straight forward account of the incident, giving the bare facts and not showing any obvious views against or in support of Cahill, The Daily Mail, on the other hand, took a far more obvious stance.

Starting off with the headline; "Fury over Everton footballer Tim Cahill's on-pitch gesture of solidarity with thug brother who left a man blinded" it was obvious that the Mail was firmly against the Australian's celebration.

The paper goes on to give a detailed account of crime his brother was found guilty of committing and is littered with adjectives such as 'vicious' and 'cowardly'. This seems to be done in order to make the reader take the same stance of the Mail and gives the impression that what Cahill has done was way out of line.

In a continuation of the seemingly one sided reporting, the paper includes quotes from the victim's mother and the policeman investigating Cahill's brothers case. However there is no quote in defence of Cahill, only a short press release at the end, which is given very little importance. There are also no quotes from people involved with football in order to give an extra dimension to the article, something that was done on the Guardian website.

One blog that I found gave a very interesting, and satirical, insight on the Mail's use of the word 'fury' in the headline, despite nobody, apart fro the Mail themselves, expressing any emotion close to fury in the article. To read this blog, and I recommend it, click here.

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