Tia Sharp: Is the media monstering Stuart Hazell?
TIA Sharp: News round-up: Is the media monstering Stuart Hazell?
Hundreds of “missing” posters have been distributed around New Addington and Tia’s face looks out from most local shops and noticeboards. At a bus stop close to her grandmother’s house in The Lindens, well-wishers have left dozens of burning candles and tea lights with hand-written signs asking for Tia to be brought home.
Community group New Addington Pathfinders (NAP) have printed over 70,000 posters, that have been distributed across Croydon and surrounding areas. Kirsty Pearce of NAP said: “We have been co-ordinating searches with the police who have told us where to search, how to search and what to so with anything we find.”
Missing Tia Sharp left in care of ex–prisoner – The step–grandfather of a missing schoolgirl served time in jail after being caught with a machete.
That looks like a highly selective headline, no?
The Evening Standard said the man has a “drugs” past in its headline. In the same headline, the paper said he used to date Tia’s mother, Natalie. The headline changed to read:
Tia Sharp: Family are still trying to establish if missing girl left grandmother’s home alone on August 4
Why did the Standard alter its headline? Is it because it focused not on Tia, rather on Mr Hazell?
The story, however, is unaltered:
The family of missing Tia Sharp has been targeted by internet trolls after it emerged the partner of the schoolgirl’s grandmother is a convicted drug dealer. The 12-year-old’s uncle has made an appeal on the family’s Facebook site asking people to stop “posting negative and nasty comments”.
David Sharp wrote: “Can everyone please stop posting negative and nasty comments you are all entitled to have your own opinions we know! But please for Tia’s sake please, please, please do not air them on her page which is only to help find Tia.
“Once again thank you to all those kind hearted people that are out there searching day and night posting fliers and putting them in every place they can to find her!”
The comments came after it emerged that Tia’s step-grandfather Stuart Hazell was one of an eight man gang convicted for drug dealing in 2003. Painter and decorator Hazell, then 27, of Dale Court, was sentenced to two years and 10 months for one count of supplying crack cocaine. He also has a 2010 conviction for possessing a machete.
A child is missing. The papers are painting a picture…
Image: BEST QUALITY AVAILABLE Metropolitan Police handout CCTV image of Tia Sharp on August 2, wearing a yellow vest top with an image of an animal on the front, from the Co-op in Featherbed Lane, Addington, at around 1615. The 12 year old girl has been missing from her home for three days.
Posted: 8th, August 2012 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
