BIG events have us enthralled, whether in newspapers or on the television or radio. Those of us condemned to being news addicts soak up the details, awaiting each new development with interest.

So here's a strange confession, especially from one who earns his living on a newspaper. I am not following the Soham trial in any detail. Indeed, I am barely following it at all. This is because I cannot. It is because the daily reports are too harrowing, the gruesome repetition too terrible.

Sadly, this is especially so in nearly all newspapers, both big and small, which are dwelling on the trial with an intensity and interest that seems to outdo any other court case in memory.

The avalanche of trial coverage has dominated newspapers since it began. Maybe it is a dereliction of professional duty not to read what one of the national tabloids called "the chilling details". Yet my eyes can only skim the latest accounts before seeking out other news or maybe a cartoon or a crossword. Anything but this.

Papers big and small have scrabbled over every aspect of the prosecution case, pulling up lurid pictures to match the words. The Manchester United replica shirts in which Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman died have been shown repeatedly, alongside headlines that call on the dramatic urgency of American courtroom dramas. Such techniques give the terrible past a false urgency, making the horror seem fresh and in the present tense.

One national tabloid screams about the "trial of the century", calling on the excitable language of entertainment to report something so sombre and upsetting. Somewhere between the courtroom and the newspaper office, this trial too often ends up sounding alarmingly close to the latest "news" from the TV soaps.

If your tastes run uphill to the other end of the street, one of the Sunday broadsheets will oblige with a novelistic account of the trial, written by a hand-wringing reporter turned best-selling thriller writer.

Both types of coverage glory in the horror, while trampling all over the bruised humanity of those involved. Press interest in this case seems uncomfortably close to voyeurism, with the grisly minutiae being forced out of the page, television screen or radio speaker day after relentless day.

This leaves a number of big questions, chief among which is the most obvious one: do people really want to read such prurient coverage that pores over every grain of the legal evidence and blows it up to billboard size?

There is undoubtedly great public interest in this court case, and perhaps our taste for true-life horror really is that inexhaustible. Newspapers have a right, a duty even, to report the Soham trial in whatever way their editors see fit.

Because newspapers exist in a tough, shin-kicking world, sensationalism is a tool, a way of getting the story across. And, more pertinently, a method of selling. For in common with all important stories, this trial is a product, something used to raise circulation or boost the viewing figures.

Yet such methods are not without their cost. People nation-wide felt great horror when the two young friends were found dead. The awful trauma faced by the girls' parents generated much public sympathy. Yet now that sensitivity has been lost in an information crush that seems uncomfortably close to the old days of rolling up for the latest public hanging.

As often happens when one story dominates the national agenda, it is hard to escape the Soham trial, in all its abominable detail. One problem with such saturated coverage is that readers, or viewers, who tire of being faced with a daily dose of horror may cancel their newspapers or switch off their televisions, counting themselves out of current affairs.

This important and shocking court case should certainly be covered, yet somewhere along the way the events it is trying to assess have been turned into a horrid sort of circus.

Updated: 10:56 Thursday, December 11, 2003