Passing Comment- Vincent Tabak and Jo Yeates

Oh good. So once again, Media on murderer Wham! home some point or other. Altogether now- "Last Christmas a girl was murdered, and the very next day the papers had their say". Remember this real-life audience participation murder mystery? It seems the media aren't finished with it yet.

I thought all of the really morbid "come and watch with us" stuff had finished. Not so. I'm looking at you, BBC.

How sensationalist can you get? With a headline like Vincent Tabak 'viewed violent web porn' it's really going to avoid the whole culture of trial by media, isn't it? That helps, honestly, it really helps.

It's not just the BBC guilty of this either. Here's Yahoo!'s take on it- that he 'should hang'.

Ooh, so he was a bit quiet as a kid, was he? Guess what? So was I. So are loads of kids. Daydreamers, late developers, early developers mature before their years, shy kids, kids from broken families or bad homes who nevertheless go on to be pretty damned normal and successful, they're all quiet and unforthcoming and "introverted". Don't use that as a catch-all for "liable to become murderers" or even as an excuse, a "that explains that". You're doing quiet kids insult, injury and injustice.

This is a bit more acceptable, surely? So it is possible to think up objective headlines.

And how, in God's name, can they find so many pictures of one man looking so thoroughly like a murdering squinting psychopath? Does he look like this all the time? I hope he doesn't, simply because finding the murderer would have been as easy for the local constabulary as it was for audiences to spot the "evil one" in Rohan in The Two Towers- could he be the sallow, raven-haired one in a land of golden- and flaxen-haired beauty?