Thursday, 8 August 2013

Daily Mail's roving crime reporter/estate agent on top form

Farmhouse with 'tremendous potential' is sold for just £250,000 because it was the scene of brutal torture killing by drugs gang

My latest blogpost: Daily Mail's roving crime reporter/estate agent on top formTweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 13:04

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2 comments:

FrankC said...

"tremendous potential" = "suit enthusiast" = "currently uninhabitable"

8 August 2013 at 20:13
DBC Reed said...

The problem is that for agents of the homeownerist insurgency like the Mail, real estate is sexy and eroticised. When they say 'you'll fall in love with this property' they are beginning to describe the state of mind.
Things take a kinky turn when murders or violent crimes are perpetrated: the houses involved may remain attractive but with a frisson of the illicit if they are deemed worthy by the papers. If the house is expensive the crime is seen as a lurid outrage of respectability but which leaves the charms of the house unaffected to the extent that it might be worth ignoring the bullet holes in the plaster etc, given a discount;if the house is cheap then the crime is treated as squalid on the basis that it shows
what low -rent types get up to when outside the boundaries of respectable society so serving as an awful warning.
This trend in reporting seems to be following Orwell's ideas in his 'Decline of the English Murder' where respectability vs transgression is the focus.

9 August 2013 at 09:02

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