Week11 blog2

Tabloid is a documentary by Errol Morris in 2015. The documentary tells the story of Joyce McKinney, who was accused of kidnapping and raping Kirk Anderson in 1977. besides, the incident, known as the Mormon chain became a major British tabloid story. The incidents have caused two newspapers Daily Mirror and the Daily Express to report it widely. The film is based on interview with three people, which include Mckinney, journalist Peter Tory and photographer  Kent Gavin. Each people shared their views and attitude to the incident. The film is mainly told by Mckinney herself. Besides, interviews with other figures and experts are added as the way to show the whole picture of the incident.

However, some scholar believed it might be a harmful documentary for a victim in the real life. J Sparks & Tulloch said it would be a bad example in media standards and hurt the feeling of Mckinney (Sparks & Tulloch 2000). In fact, I did not like the scenes in the documentary. It might be a little strange to treat the victim in this way. Mckinney claimed the lawsuit for two times, but both of the claims are failed. Inen said, the documentary Tabloid may hurt the feeling of women in the common life, because in most cases women are often the inferior part in incidents (Inen 2016).

Reference

Inen, S. V. L. 2016. “she must be an odd kind of woman”: gendered categorizations in accounts of lethal intimate partner violence in finnish tabloid news. Feminism & Psychology, 26(4).

Sparks, C., & Tulloch, J. 2000. Tabloid tales : global debates over media standards. Rowman & Littlefield.

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