The one item in the Creed that The Sun keenly champions is the existence of hell. Like other popular papers it often consigns murderers to “rot in hell”. Last week it was a horrible child-murderer called Robert Black, who had died in prison in Northern Ireland. “Burn in hell,” its headline began. “Child killer cremated. Fiend Black’s ashes will be ditched at sea.”I suppose the paper thinks it reflects its readers’ demands that the terrible injustices wrought by murder should be balanced by harsh justice being done to the perpetrator. There is a simultaneous tendency by such papers to deny murderers the status of human beings, hence “fiend Black”.So it was all the more impressive to find in The Sun, the day after its “Burn i
04 February 2016, The Tablet
There is a tendency by papers to deny murderers the status of human beings
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