Making jokes about a war criminal

BarcelonaIt has been a while since they became fashionable on television, the cairns creative and humorous in tone, following in the wake of programs like Pieces, but what is not acceptable is to cross the line of lighthearted programs and use the formula for news. Last Thursday on La Sexta, a particularly unfortunate one was seen related to the death in prison of war criminal Ratko Mladic: "The butcher of Bosnia, cold cuts". I always tell my journalism students to avoid wordplay in headlines at all costs, as it is a distortion that distracts from their primary function. In this case, I understand that the writer thought they could afford this presumably ingenious formula to provoke a smile from the viewer. But in this case, the writer must always, and first and foremost, put themselves in the shoes of the victims of a bloodthirsty figure like Mladic, who coldly planned and executed the murder of 8,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica, the largest massacre to occur in Europe since World War II.

Journalists have an obligation to always side with the victims, not to mock them or try to profit from them with yellow headlines. In the case of Mladic, however, many media outlets, due to haste or ignorance, released the news without providing the necessary context. They spoke of the death of a Serbian general, with nothing more. In this case, it was justified to use phrases like "the butcher of Bosnia" or "the executioner of Srebrenica," which is what ARA chose. Incidentally, the ideologue of the massacre, as well as the siege of Sarajevo, was not Mladic but Radovan Karadzic, who is serving a life sentence in The Hague. One of the few examples of how international justice can, precisely, deliver justice.