Arboga’s media spectacle

Swedish media continues to hunt the killer of two children in Arboga last Thursday. The main suspect at this moment, a German woman who has had a relationship with the children’s stepfather, asserts she didn’t kill them. But in the hand of the children’s badly injured mother, the police investigators discovered hair stained with blood and that evidence will get the murderer behind bars.

This story is about to come to an end. It will finally be replaced by a new one, as it always does in the infotainment era. The colonized populace and its vicious hunger for spectacle must be satisfied – and Aftonbladet, Expressen and their copycats in the industry will do their very best to give us that.

Because they know “crime journalism” can provide a show which embodies many of the elements in our social contract: hopes, fears, anxieties, ambiguities… By mobilizing our fantasy and desires every day the press shapes our identity and helps us to perform in the globalized world as reliable, starving consumers.

In the mean time the children’s relatives will try to get themselves all the way through the darkest tunnel of pain. I hope all of them make it. I certainly hope God gives the children’s father, who initially was wrongly accused by some Swedish newspapers of being the killer, enough strength to carry on and to fight back the abhorrent beasts of the media industry.