Happy slapping blame not laid on TV shows

ACCORDING to the Irish Examiner, “Dr Graham Barnfield, a media lecturer at the University of East London, has blamed MTV stunt shows such as Jackass and Dirty Sanchez for the rise of ‘happy slapping.’”(Gardaí investigate ‘happy slapping’ attack, August 3).

For the record, I have never blamed these shows for happy slapping or anything else (with the possible exception of wasting viewers’ time). After contributing a chapter to Dolan Cummings’ collection of essays, Reality TV: How Real is Real? (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002), I was asked by the British TV programme Tonight with Trevor McDonald to comment on a possible link between stunt shows and happy slaps. I said that the footage looked similar, but the difference was that the people in Jackass are consenting adults.

I also asserted that Dirty Sanchez and happy slapping were both symptomatic of an increasingly voyeuristic media culture. This was interpreted as “blaming” MTV reality shows in the Tonight programme’s May 2005 press release, which no doubt your reporter found on the internet. Further searching would reveal numerous articles where I explain how I was misrepresented.