Some newspapers have an obsession with publishing the supposed value of houses in news stories that don't warrant the inclusion of such "facts."
The Daily Mail did it yesterday when reporting the death of Sarah Crutchley in an accident at a waterfall in Thailand.
It quoted her parents in a sentence that began: "Speaking from the family's £300,000 detached house in Winton, Bournemouth..."
Online readers were quick to seize on its irrelevance. Almost every comment was critical of the utterly inappropriate mention of the house's value. Examples:
Stop doing this. Especially in articles where someone has died. It's irrelevant and borderline disrespectful... This is the second tragedy in two days that the Daily Mail has mentioned the value of a victim's parent's house. Sort of creepy...
Who cares about the price of her parents' house? Grow up DM... OK, I've got the price of the house she lived in - anything else we should know about this young woman who was killed so tragically. Who on earth writes these things?...
What does the value of her parents home have to do with anything? How tasteless... Echo the comments about the pointless noting of the value of the parent's house! Does it make their grief more or less valid I wonder?...Once again DM you have excelled yourself in your snobbery - the price of the parents house has NOTHING to do with this terrible tragedy... you know, even people in rented accommodation love their children and mourn their loss.
Fair play to the Mail's online moderator, who took the comments on board by later amending the copy to read: "Speaking from the family's home in Winton, Bournemouth..."
A lesson learned, one hopes.
