Did the Media cover the London Riots responsibly?

The London Riots occurred in early August 2011 was arguably seen as the most widespread civil unrest in the recent decades, while a lot of accusations were made towards the media reporting on the riots, saying that the media was biased with the police or negative portrayals of the black community.

I attended the “Media and Riots” conference on November 26, organized by the Citizen Journalism Educational Trust, and held at the London College of London. Professor Gus John said in his opening remarks, pointing out the fact that “how encapsulated the journalists, especially broadcast, are within their own narrow, little and incestuous bubbles without any grasp of social realities in the polity”. He added that the journalists had been given “a banal, hysterical and downright reactionary editorial slant in their news package”.

The aim of the conference was to discuss the objectivity of the media coverage on the riots, whether they were being manipulated by the politicians and police.

The conference can be considered as a reflection on the public criticism of bias in the reporting of the riots. Editor of The-latest.com, a website promoting citizen journalism , said that the conference was “about people who are marginalized, stereotyped or ignored by big media”.

Professor Sarah Niblock analyzed a majority of the local newspapers covering the riots, finding that there was significant traffic on the website of Machester Evening News. Niblock cited a conclusion made by Bob Franklin (2006) that “local newspapers should offer independent and critical commentary of local issues.”

Based on her findings, she reported that little representation of the lives of the rioters, one of the reasons was that “journalists are office-based and they are detached from the community”. She observed that most of the reports were “about victimizing and marginalizing for those who don’t have a voice”. Some of the reports were about championing the reopening the business and the clean-up phase of the riots, she commented that the media played a reactive role, “the media should be proactive, in pursuit of truth and knowledge, instead of relying too much on official sources.”

Niblock also made four points for local media practitioners to take note of:

1. Training and education – regular workshops to train and educate journalists in reporting objectively and professionally, particularly on interviewing techniques
2. Diversity – racial diversity in the newsroom, and avoid racism in the newsroom culture.
3. Trauma – prepare journalists to cope with trauma of riots, conflicts and accidents
4. Community awareness – encourage journalists to stay engaged with the community they belong to

Tom Parmenter, a journalist from Sky News, shared his thoughts after conducting interviews with the looters as part of the news feature. He made a brave attempt in getting the voice of the victims being heard in the mainstream media. The four teenagers covered their faces with hoodies, and said they were “shopping for free, and drive their vans to fill all the goods up”.

During the interview, Tom tried not to raise misleading questions, but the way he interviewed could be taken as a future reference, he asked the looters:

• What you are doing can be considered as crime, isn’t punishment worrying you at all?
• Do you have any bad feelings of what you have done?
• A lot of people in our society think what you are doing is outrageously wrong. Do you think there is any reasoning behind it?
• I am suggesting that there is a more respectful way to get the stuff by working harder instead of just stealing, why not choosing the more respectful one?
• What the government can actually do that can keep you off from looting?

Throughout the interview, Tom managed to build mutual trust with the looters, and they are willing to disclose their motives behind the looting. He attempted to package the question from the perspective of the public, that looting is outrageously wrong. However, Tom shared that he read a comment online saying that he should have sent out these details to the police. However, Tom Evans, football editor of The Times, reacted critically, deeming this was not journalism. He said the Sky TV reporters had “behaved like headmasters by asking them ‘ are you proud of yourselves?’.

The conference was then followed by four break-out sessions, to discuss the issues more in-depth:

Role of Social Media

There was widespread speculation that rioters used social media to organize themselves to share “viral” information, sites such as Facebook and Twitter were not used in any significant way. As a result, David Cameron attempted to censor or block the social media to stop rioters from mobilizing. At the same time, there were fears that by so doing, it would constitute a breach of freedom of speech.

One noted that information appeared on social media could operate as an intelligence source for the police in stopping the loots. Apart from Facebook, participants of the conference emphasize the role of citizen journalism in covering the riots, saying that it could provide diversified points of view. Some displayed fears that the news media are dominated by big corporations, since social media or citizen journalism website do not pay to the contributors, as a result, capitalism creates scarcity.

Some complained the media did not investigate the story in depth. This echoed to what Paul Lewis from the Guardian said that journalists failed to get to the roots of what caused such large scale civil unrest, reconfirming Niblock’s prior comment on the reactivity of the media.

I made a tiny contribution almost at the end of the session, by raising the possibility of collaboration between mainstream media and social media, such as social media can provide as a source for the mainstream media, on the other hand, mainstream media shall open up the platform to get more voices of the minorities heard. This can be effectively achieved by creating media partnerships between mainstream media, social media and community media. Similar to a framework of an alliance, they share the contents among each other, though this might affect the plurality of the media landscape, this model acts as a contingency during crisis, in order to enhance the overall credibility and quality of journalism reporting crisis. Whether the model is practical or not, due to private interests or fair competition within the media industry, we shall look upon other alternatives.

Young Voices

The group discussed the voices of young people being heard in the media. Attendants suggested that widespread discussions on the issue of London riots shall be encouraged among the youth, in order to get their feedback and reactions across. After the riots, it is suggested to develop entrepreneurship among the youth, so as to create a sense of social responsibility of the individuals.

Then and Now

Have things been changed since the riots in the 1990s? The group reported that there are structural changes between the past and the recent riots. There has been positive discrimination among the rioters, as the police is increasingly stereotyping them and the legislation gets increasingly more progressive.

Law and Order

The issue of whether the news media sided with the police and politicians was discussed among the group, as the official sources generally peddled an agenda that shed more light on law and order, while less emphasis had been put on social and economic causes.

Aversive opinions speculated in the media

In the conference, a majority of attendants showed dissatisfaction towards the biased reporting of the BBC, they cited an example of David Starkey, a historian and a lecturer at the London School of Economics appeared on BBC Newsnight, due to his controversial comment “the whites have become black”. A Jamaican participant together with a group of Africans agreed to take joint action in asking for BBC a formal apology and justification for the arrangement of the programme. She said with frustration that BBC deliberately picked this controversial figure to be featured in the programme.

Besides David Starkey, two other guest speakers appearing on BBC Newsnight were Owen Jones and Dreda Say Mitchell, who are authors themselves. Starkey started off commenting our society needs a profound cultural change, with the rise of commercialism. He eventually came with a depressing comment “whites become black”, illustrating the fact that the white people had adapted the black culture, in which they operated the language together. He presented the evidence that “the riots started with black people protesting against the police dealing with Mark Duggan”. He kept blaming the rioters that “there is no human rights to riots” and found it ridiculous for them to loot because they felt excluded and being stopped-and-searched by the police.

Jones backfired, questioning whether Starkey had mistakenly equated black cultures to criminality. While Mitchell, as an African author and presenter, defended for the black community, claiming Starkey had wrongly created the “them-and-us culture”. She added that black communities are not homogenous, and suggested us to think of one community as a whole, in order to stop the culture of blaming the others.

On the other hand, we cold take BBC Fiona Armstrong’s interviewing with Dake Howe as a comparison. Thanks to an abstract “Writer to BBC interviewer: ‘Stop accusing me of being a rioter”.

Darcus Howe, a 68-year-old West Indian writer, broadcaster and resident of one of the South London suburbs affected by the riots. He was asked by a BBC host if he condoned the riots–and things turned ugly.

“What I am concerned about … there is a man called Mark Duggan–he has parents, he has brothers, he has sisters,” Howe said. “A few yards away from where he lives, a police officer blew his head off. Blew his face off!”

Fiona Armstrong, the BBC host, immediately cut Howe off.

“Mr. Howe, we have to wait for the official inquiry before we can say things like that,” she said. “We are going to wait for the police report on it.”

Armstrong then steered the discussion away from Duggan and to Howe’s grandson, who he had mentioned earlier in the interview.

“They have been stopping and searching young blacks for no reason at all,” Howe said. “I have a grandson, he is an angel. Police slapped him up against a wall, and searched him. I asked him the other day, having a sense that something seriously wrong is going on in this country, ‘How many times have police searched you?’ He said, ‘Papa I can’t count, there are so many times.'”

Armstrong cut him off again. “Mr. Howe, that may well have happened, and if you say it did, I’m not against you. But that is no excuse to go out rioting and causing the sort of damage we have been seeing over the last few days.”

“Where were you in 1981 in Brixton?” Howe fired back, a reference to the bloody riots between Metropolitan Police and blacks in South London in April of that year. “I don’t call it rioting–I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it’s happening in Liverpool, it’s happening in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment.”

Armstrong then tried to infer that Howe, himself, had a history of participating in riots.

“I have never taken part in a single riot,” Howe snapped. “I’ve been part of demonstrations that have ended up in a conflict. Have some respect for an old West Indian Negro, and stop accusing me of being a rioter.”

As the segment concluded, he added: “You sound like an idiot.”