Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Raoul Moat and the race to the bottom

It's hard to have any sympathy at all for dead killer Raoul Moat, beyond the knowledge that he has children and a family. But the playing-out of his run from justice and eventual death was a fairly tawdry spectacle all round. Maybe Moat isn't the kind of human being that really deserves any kind of dignity; even so, I can't think of many media outlets that covered themselves in glory, or even basic respectability, in the way they delved into his life and death.

But then this wasn't about the value of the news, or the importance of informing the public, or anything like that. When Derrick Bird ran amok and killed 12 innocent people, then himself, last month, the papers and rolling news couldn't wait to get into the gory details. Who saw what? Who did what? Why did he do it? They came up with half a dozen theories relating to Bird's private life that may or may not have been the cause - it was tacky speculation while the corpses were still in the morgue. But it was popular. We liked it, in the same way we like glancing over at a blood-soaked body being wheeled into an ambulance when we're driving down the motorway; it taps into some primitive part of us, perhaps.

Bird, a nobody, went out in a blaze of glory, all over every newspaper and every TV screen in the land, displacing the 'Crossbow Cannibal' from the publicity killer top spot. Whether publicity is what he wanted or not, we won't know, but he got it in spades, an immortality eagerly provided in death by the 24-hour news, websites and newspapers. We'll never know if this went unnoticed by Raoul Moat in his jail cell, this launch into the stratosphere of an angry nobody with a gun to the most famous (or infamous) man in Britain.

What we do know is that Moat was on record as having threatened to widen his killings to members of the public from just police officers, after what he perceived as inaccurate articles about him and his private life in the papers while he was on the run. Take nothing away from this deluded, dangerous man as being the one who would have been responsible for those crimes if he had carried out those threats; but this was known about long before he was caught. Did anyone modify their behaviour, knowing their output could potentially be responsible for people being targeted? Or was it just a case of not being able to resist the chance to publish, knowing that a killer like Moat could never sue for a damaged reputation, and that even wildly inaccurate stories would be as safe as houses from a libel action? I guess we won't know that either.

Like I said, it is hard to find sympathy for a killer like Moat. Maybe impossible. But there was something about Friday night's coverage, from Steve "Let me just interrupt you" Nolan on Radio 5 to BBC News and Sky News, that had a whiff of barely contained glee. Maybe the reporters could just sense history in the making, or see their names being etched onto awards somewhere, or maybe the tension of the real-life drama got to everyone. We won't know that either. But I found something intensely sad about it all, something deeply disturbing about reporters almost queueing up to harangue the same members of the public who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There was the rush to the riverbank by photographers keen to get a key photo of Moat - maybe the deadly money shot, who knows? And those pictures of cops with guns, almost certainly telling the army of snappers to get away, for their own safety, and maybe so they didn't by their presence provoke him into shooting anyone, even himself. If Moat had done something because he'd seen the advancing photographers, what then? Anything for a picture? Would it not matter? But what if a police officer had been shot dead because a photographer in the bush had looked like a sniper? Who knows. Luckily it didn't happen. But that doesn't mean it couldn't have happened.

And then there was Gazza. Now here is someone who's vulnerable, genuinely so, and who should have sympathy perhaps, despite his problems often having been self-inflicted. But he was just another bit of meat for the grinder - a celebrity twist to make a disturbing enough evening's news truly bizarre. Maybe here was the figure people could find sympathy for, even if the life of Moat was something that seemed hard to hope would be spared. A sliver of humanity. But still just another twist while the reporters earnestly gazed down the lens, waiting for a gunshot in the background that would mean what we knew it would mean.

Then the body wheeled into hospital, cameras whizzing and flashing. Like a celebrity entering a film premiere, except it was a dead, faceless man being brought into a place where he could be certified dead.

And now... now what? The papers have fought for 'exclusive' grainy photos of Moat holding the gun to his face. Yeah, way to go. Pat yourselves on the back for that, Sunday Telegraph and News of the World. Really doing your bit for quality journalism. Well done for outbidding your rivals and getting a picture of a man with a gun to his head. If he'd shot himself in daylight, would there have been an auction for the Budd Dwyer money shot, the splash of claret spraying up into the air - or more likely the split-second beforehand?

Now there will be more absent-minded guesswork over the whys and wherefores; the victims quietly receding into the distance, the killer getting all the headlines and attention. Almost advertising for another candidate, another nobody with a gun to come and make himself a somebody, to come and be milked by the eager news media for all they're worth, until that final frame, the final gunshot. And then, it's all forgotten about, and we'll get an article or two about Rothbury is 'coming to terms' with the awfulness and 'getting back to normal' in a life without Kay Burley gossiping steely-eyed away into a lens all day, without dozens of hacks sent up from London to experience the fear for themselves.

And the slideshows of fuzzy images of Moat with the gun will get loads of ghoulish clicks, and the articles will be read, and people will conclude that this kind of story sells. And no-one will think they did anything wrong, and they'll be waiting to do it again next time. And it will happen again.