If the truth be told, if you lived in Whitechapel or Spitalfields in 1888, you were probably more in danger of dying from cholera, typhoid, measles, smallpox, being trampled by a horse, falling into the River Thames in a fog, or even being poisoned by some of the horrific additives that were put into the food in order to bulk out the ordinary ingredients than of being murdered by Jack the Ripper.
If you lived outside London, your chances of encountering and being murdered by Jack the Ripper were even less, to the point of actually being zero.
PUBLIC FRENZY OVER JACK THE RIPPER
Yet, when the public frenzy over the Whitechapel murders hit a zenith in October 1888, people, not just in the East End of London, but all over the country, became terrified of the unknown miscreant who was prowling the streets of a very small corner of the Victorian metropolis.
The danger of a woman in Elgin in Scotland being murdered by Jack the Ripper, for example, was non-existent, and yet women in Elgin were as terrified of the murderer as the women of the East End of London were.
NEWS COVERAGE OF THE CASE
Why should this be?
Quite simply, it was down to the news coverage of the case.
Jack the Ripper was not, as is often stated, the first serial killer.
But he was the world’s first media murderer.
MORE PEOPLE ABLE TO READ
In 1888, the year of the crimes, people were becoming better educated, and more of them were reading newspapers than ever before.
In consequence, more and more newspapers were being published to cater for the demands of an increasingly literate population.
The problem is that a literate population is not necessarily an informed and discerning one when it comes to the type of news that they consume and how they react to it.
SENSATIONALISM HAS A BIGGER IMPACT
Sensationalist stories about daring robberies and horrible murders will always trump mundane stories about political or social matters.
It’s ingrained in human nature.
TWO HEADLINES
Take these two headlines, both of which appeared on the same day in the same newspaper, The Elgin Advertiser, on Tuesday, 11th September, 1888:-
“INCREASING PROSPERITY IN THE COUNTY”
“THE MOST GHASTLY MURDER OF ALL THE WHITCHAPEL MURDERS”
Which of the two do you think attracted the most attention?
GOOD NEWS DOESN’T SELL PAPERS
Let’s be honest, increasing prosperity in the country is a much better story from a personal perspective, after all it is a feel-good concept.
And yet good news doesn’t sell newspapers.
I can guarantee that the article that people would have gravitated towards and taken most notice of would have been the ghastly murder in Whitechapel one.
NEGATIVITY BIAS
Instinctively, we as a species are more attracted to negative news than to positive news.
It is what is known as “negativity bias” or the “negativity effect.”
The theory behind this phenomena is that our brains are wired to react speedily to potential threats or dangers, and that bad news feeds into this evolutionary trait by signalling that we may need to change what we are doing in order to keep us out of harm’s way.
Psychological experiments have demonstrated that we respond much slower to pleasant words, such as “baby”, “smile” or “fun” than we do to unpleasant ones such s “war” “plague” or “murder.”
It’s just part of our nature.
ROLLING NEWS COVERAGE
When news coverage is constant, and we read more and more of it, our brains have to filter out much of the information we absorb, otherwise we would go into informational overload.
But the problem with heavy news consumption is that, thanks to the negative bias, we, both consciously and subconsciously, overestimate, or even over-obsess over, the threat implied in negative stories.
WHY PEOPLE REACTED AS THEY DID
And this, in a nutshell, is why people all over the country reacted in the way they did to the news coverage of the Jack the Ripper atrocities.
Most people were not in danger from him.
Yet, thanks to their built in negativity bias, the endless stream of newspaper coverage created a reaction that far outweighed the actual danger that the unknown miscreant in Whitechapel was posing.