Several weeks ago sections of the mainstream media over three days or so discussed at length the escalation of local crime, with particular emphasis on the more horrific details, an indication of something gone radically wrong with the essentially non-violent nature of the people of our once Christian country. All of that based on an Internet image of a chopped up naked female body that one advertised holy radio personality claimed was the corpse of a Marchand resident.
He offered no information as to how he had come by the woman’s address, neither her identity. No one called to say the obviously deceased woman was a friend, a declared missing person, a mother, lover or acquaintance. Oh, but there were scores of comments, especially on Facebook, about how egregious was crime in Saint Lucia since 6 June 2016, and that the nation’s only salvation lay in “the embrace of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
It turned out finally that the grotesque image had originated somewhere in Africa, at any rate, so went word on the street. Of course, nothing was offered as validation of that revelation. Nevertheless it brought home to me how incredibly gullible we had become in the so-called information age—not to say the incompetence-laziness of so many of our scoop-hungry, less talented local media practitioners. I mean, how long might it have taken a Castries-based reporter to question Marchand residents about the identity of the portrayed brutalized woman? Evidently it never occurred to the cited news presenter to contact the police for related information. Indeed, it was some time before the cops decided to clear the air by confirming the sickening picture had no relationship whatsoever with Saint Lucia.
I could furnish several other examples of how our mainstream media inadvertently assist the fake-news weirdoes in their calculated dissemination of falsehoods quite often damaging to previously impeccable reputations. But then, dear reader, already you know all about that. Or do you? Last weekend the largely antisocial media featured a story about an attempted rape of a schoolteacher. According to the anonymous account, the woman was driving, slowly enough to permit a pedestrian to reach out and pull open her passenger door, then viciously attempt to rape her in broad daylight.
Our own investigations throughout the weekend and early Monday revealed the story was only part truth, as are most fake-news items. Usually reliable police sources confirmed to us that contrary to the antisocial feuilletons, the miscreant of the day had attempted only to rob the teacher, that there was no evidence indicative of an attempted rape nor for that matter an allegation—even though the woman in question feared she was about to be sexually assaulted, as would any female in similar circumstances. This is still Saint Lucia, after all, where famously “there are three or four serial rapists in our midst,” to quote a former prime minister.
On Monday, we notified online STAR readers that the recalled weekend attack on a teacher behind her moving car’s steering wheel was not quite as reported. Nothing in the information we proffered online suggested there had not been the particular attack, or that the victim had escaped unscathed. We promised more details in the next edition of this newspaper (today’s). We had sought only to warn our online readers not to be affected by the shoddy renderings of minds incapable of metaphor. We also thought it best to allow the police at Tuesday’s press conference to fill in the blanks for the benefit of us all.
Predictably the notoriously bad readers of Facebook, addicted as are so many to salacious unconfirmed and unattributed antisocial media reports, were soon jumping all over us for implying what we never implied. A woman was assaulted, by official confirmation—but an assault on a female does not automatically translate to rape or an attempt made to rape her. In short, we meant to convey that yes, there was an attack, but that attack had been misreported.
I am at this point reminded of a media report about the alleged kidnapping of a Gros Islet resident. The police subsequently let it be known that some sections of the broadcast were as much news to law enforcement (despite that they had recorded the complainant’s statement) as to other listeners. Meanwhile the item, with all its suspect aspects intact, was on Facebook, to be read, misread, reposted, and misconstrued, not to say weaponized with malicious intent!
