Written by Elliot Carpenter; edited by Madison Challis
The rise in popularity of true crime entertainment in the last 10 years has been immense. In 2018, Netflix’s ‘Making a Murderer’ topped its list of the most binged shows, and since the TikTok-viral ‘Tiger King’ of the first lockdown, our fascination with true crime has only increased. It’s a cognitive thing. We can’t understand death - none of us have experienced it - and we are desperate to recognise the motives for a person, often of our own culture, to commit such a crime. Understandable, but, this moulding of real life murder cases into forms of entertainment is ruining our sensitivity to cases occurring in real time. Nicola Bulley is a real human, with a real family. And yet, the British public is treating her story like another podcast, another Netflix series, another documentary.
Nicola went missing on 27 January, in Lancashire, whilst walking near a riverside in the early daytime. The media has picked this case up and absolutely torn it to shreds. I’ve lost count of how many BBC notifications I’ve had about it. According to charity ‘Missing People’, someone goes missing every 90 seconds in the UK. And yet, news outlets have selected this story and flagged it as being the most important matter in the country right now. The BBC has 39 different articles on Bulley. It’s constant. It essentially forces her to become a talking point, online and in daily conversation - because it’s her story you see when you turn the news on. It’s bizarre.
Why thrust her into the spotlight, above stories about a deadly earthquake taking over 40,000 lives? A strange decision, but maybe one that represents the interests of the public. Maybe Britain doesn’t care about other countries’ tragedies. Maybe they’re more bothered about one missing person from their own country. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think that this constant promotion of true crime entertainment has conditioned us to want to consume cases about missing people more and more - almost an addiction. It’s unhealthy, and with real news cases it forms an inescapable cycle; the addicted brain clicks the missing person story. the outlet notes it receives significant levels of interaction with this story, and so it pushes it to the top of the page and creates further articles on the topic. More and more people read and become hooked, as if the case is fiction. It’s a hard system to escape.
Speculation has never been so rife. Online, we have endless Facebook posts, theorising what could have happened to Nicola, tagging police, giving them suggestions. Who are these people? Why do they think that they know better than the police, than the detectives? It’s absurd. People genuinely think that after watching dozens of true crime series’ and podcasts, they are equipped to assist professionals. They aren’t tagging them with real witness information, or anything of use - just utterly useless theories about her location, with absolutely no thought towards her family and friends, who will then likely see these posts online.
These theories aren’t exclusive to the internet. At work, chatting with friends, having conversations with family - her story’s constant promotion by the media has elevated her case to become a strong talking point. ‘What do you think happened to Nicola Bulley?’ What do you think is happening to her family? Don’t you think they are sick of this constant discussion as if she is just another character in a show? In fact, we know they are. In their most recent statement, they’ve labelled it ‘appalling’, stating it ‘needs to stop’. But it won’t. The empathy of the general public has been crushed by the representation of actual people as mere characters for the consumer’s entertainment.
We’re all hoping Nicola gets home safe, and this isn’t made any more likely by the public creating strange suppositions. No case should get to the point where the family is forced to ask the public to stop speculating about a member’s whereabouts. But this one has. The public have become desensitised to the struggles that Nicola Bulley’s family and friends are currently going through: it’s just another form of entertainment for them. Crime shows, when consumed in excess, are poisoning our brains, and Nicola’s story has only proved this.
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