Corporate outlet’s alcoholism stigma over man’s death reveals the toxic media culture which kills people

It seems not a day goes by without the gutter corporate media spouting a new tirade of disgusting stigma and punching down on marginalised people. On Monday 12 August, Cornwall Live published an abhorrent headline about a Cornwall man’s tragic, accidental death. With one word, the outlet erased everything else about him as a person and reduced him – and his death – down to his alcoholism.

Cornwall Live:

Let’s start where the gutter press failed to begin its appalling excuse for reporting – his name. David Duffy was a 58-year-old man from Bude. On 1 October 2023, he died after a fall holding a barbell weight, while intoxicated.

The inquest into his death concluded that he died from a hypoxic brain injury and cardiac arrest. In other words, a lack of oxygen reaching his brain and a heart attack. It did not determine the cause of this. Instead, coroner Andrew Cox suggested this could have been from multiple factors. He put forward alcohol consumption, strenuous exercise, or hitting his head on the floor as possible triggers, but none as conclusive.

The Canary didn’t want to dig up the private details of Duffy’s life, but to at least give some tribute to it where other outlets didn’t. On a post by his sister on a local Facebook group notice board, friends of Duffy’s commemorated him. A work colleague described him as “a really good man”, while another poster said that Duffy “was a good soul”.

Because at the heart of it, Duffy was a brother, friend, colleague, and likely much more to many other people. Naturally, the corporate media ignored all this and went straight for the stigmatising language. In an abhorrent headline, Cornwall Live wrote:

‘Bude drunk died after trying to deadlift 45kg barbell’

Similarly, its social media headline carried the title:

‘Drunk died after trying to deadlift 45kg barbell’

Obviously, for one, it’s a viciously disrespectful, disgusting headline. In short, it referred to a deceased man who had experienced alcoholism with the disparaging term ‘drunk’. Feature writer Rebecca Tidy called the news site out on this:

This man died of a cardiac arrest. He experienced alcoholism.

Someone at the local newspaper thought it was a good idea to refer to him as a “drunk” in the headline.

It’s disrespectful + stigmatising.

People are more than the substances they consume.https://t.co/rQsf0cGcNO

— Rebecca Tidy (@DrRebeccaTidy) August 12, 2024

Put simply, it stripped away all else about Duffy’s identity and honed in on his alcoholism. This was also in spite of the fact that the coroner didn’t attribute his death to this. Yet, even if he had, this shouldn’t have been the focus.

Ostensibly, the prejudiced and homogenising label was there to push shame and stigma. Cornwall Live wanted readers to view Duffy’s accidental death as the product of his own bad life decisions – in this instance, his intoxication. It was weaponising his alcoholism against him. One person aptly summed up how this is the right-wing corporate media writ large:

Comes down to dehumanising certain demographics in an attempt to weaken peoples empathy for them.

— Bootlickers_Paradise🥾👅🏝🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇵🇸 (@BootlickersP) August 12, 2024

But its coverage also has much broader ramifications too.

Cornwall Live ‘perpetuating a stigma’

As Tidy highlighted:

They’re perpetuating a stigma that quite literally stops deserving people from attending support groups that can save their lives, especially in rural places like Cornwall where everyone knows one another’s business. It breaks my heart. 💔

— Rebecca Tidy (@DrRebeccaTidy) August 12, 2024

In other words, by further entrenching this social stigma, Cornwall Live was putting people managing alcoholism at risk. Heartbreakingly, Tidy recounted her aunt’s death to alcoholism:

My aunt died of alcoholism this year after being raped. She was too embarrassed to attend the support group in our village.

I told Cornwall Live it’s disrespectful + stigmatising to refer to a deceased man who had alcoholism as a “drunk”.

Here’s their unprofessional reply.👇 https://t.co/RerzBUc0vP

— Rebecca Tidy (@DrRebeccaTidy) August 12, 2024

Tidy also highlighted that the outlet posted this in the context of the high rates of substance-related deaths in Cornwall:

Would be interesting to know who runs the X account.

Cornwall has the second highest death by drug poisoning rate in the entire country. Yet the local media is increasing stigma + barriers to support.

— Rebecca Tidy (@DrRebeccaTidy) August 12, 2024

Of course, never an outlet to miss the chance to compound its abhorrent abuse, it doubled down on its disgraceful vitriol on social media. In particular, it went after Tidy for her comment:

For a regional ‘news brand’ account to make such a juvenile remark – to what is a perfectly fair and legitimate comment from @DrRebeccaTidy – is astonishing, to put it politely. pic.twitter.com/7xfwsvEt4m

— Matt Capon (@MattLCapon) August 12, 2024

Unsurprisingly, it later deleted this. Now, the outlet has also altered its headline on the site. At the time of writing though, the social media title remains.

Tidy kept the receipts however:

pic.twitter.com/QwJfKMsGCt

— Rebecca Tidy (@DrRebeccaTidy) August 12, 2024

The Canary also found that while the title has changed on the website and Google, news aggregator MSN’s search engine link still sports the original headline:

Reach Plc at it as always

One person mused it had Reach Plc all over it:

Without even googling who owns them, so much of this screams “Reach plc”.

— Xander Flatt (@XanderFlatt) August 12, 2024

And that would be because it does. Reach Plc owns Cornwall Live, along with a slew of other local ‘front’ media outlets. It’s why many of these will carry the same headlines about stories of a national interest.

Essentially, these act like Astroturf sites for the large media conglomerate. They purport to represent local communities, but instead toe the rancid editorial lines of its big corporate shareholders.

Largely, those would be a shareholder who’s who of major asset management companies and investment banks. Among these are big players in the financial sector such as Hargreaves Lansdown, BlackRock, and JP Morgan.

Reach also operates a number of national media sites including the Express, the Mirror, the Daily Star, and the Daily Record.

As the Canary has previously pointed out about its sister outlet Birmingham Live, demonising narratives about marginalised communities are their bread and butter. Primarily then, it’s all for clicks and giggles at oppressed, sidelined communities the media can scapegoat for the problems corporate capitalist wankers in the City have manufactured. This Cornwall Live article was no exception.

Toxic culture and rot at the heart of it

What Reach Plc and its publications routinely obfuscate, is that people are not the sum of all their problems. Moreover, they are also NOT the problem in the first instance.

Because at the end of the day, it likely wasn’t Duffy’s alcoholism or even the barbell that really killed him. It was this very toxic media culture that stigmatises, degrades, and shames people battling alcoholism – and an equally toxic, broken, and deeply uncaring system that pushes people into it in the first place. It’s a state-fractured society that leaves people without the care and support they need – and all too often, even the very basics to live.

It was that Cornwall Live piece yesterday, probably another Reach Plc hit-piece tomorrow, that places blame and shame on the shoulders of alcoholics, and not the fucked up, capitalist, patriarchal, and bigoted hell we call society.

I don’t know anything about Duffy’s life – and Cornwall Live wanted it that way. Because to peel back his past, is likely to remove the sticking plaster that conceals the festering rot at the heart of this austerity-addled, spending-cut scarred country, that places private profits above people’s lives at every turn.

Tidy’s hugely personal account of her aunt hinted at the problems rife that mean when people have nowhere else to turn, the numbing, warm solace of alcohol beckons.

In her aunt’s instance, misogyny, male violence, and a criminal justice system that never holds perpetrators to account killed her. For others, it was – and is – entrenched classism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and psychological stigma. Because when it comes down to it, that’s the true face of the right-wing click-bait hellscape we call the UK media.

People are clicks, reads, shares (both kinds) to its corporate benefactors and beneficiaries. They’re ‘drunks’, or ‘benefit fraudsters’, not human beings with lives and loved ones, and stories of their own. It’s gutter outlets with these enormous platforms like Cornwall Live’s very indifference to this fact that means society will continue to let people like Duffy down. If there’s shame anywhere, lets lay it at the feet of these contemptible corporate media shills.

Feature image via the Canary