Taking sides in a riot
I have read a lot of tweets and articles today expressing disgust and surprise at the way in which many TV news channels and radio broadcasters have appeared to take the cops' side in the aftermath of yesterday's student protests. (We expect our printed media to give a skewed version of events and therefore show less disgust or surprise at their taking sides, I suppose.) I think there are a few reasons why this might be.
First, you have to look at the way in which journalists work, and a lot of this isn't their fault so much as a fault of the way in which live news is put together. In a fast-moving situation like a riot, how can you tell what's going on where, if you don't have people right in the thick of it? Sure, there were hardy souls flashing their press cards down there, and wearing their protective hats as if they were about to be shelled in Yugoslavia, bless them; but one person on the ground can't get much a feeling beyond what he or she can see with their own eyes. They're as limited as we are.
Then there's the idea of whom to believe in the midst of all the confusion. Journalists are taught to trust official sources, like cops, and to give more weight to their evidence than to just Joe Public. So if you have a situation where a lot of cops and a lot of plebs are coming into conflict and you didn't see it yourself, how do you know what's happened when you can't be in two places at once? You have to take someone's word for it. Whose word is more trusted? Well an official source like a police spokesman carries more weight than just 'some protester who happened to be there', so that's what you go with. The establishment has the benefit of their sources being more trusted in these situations. Of course, police are just as capable of lying as anyone else, but we journos are trained to be more trusting of them than plebs. That may be right or wrong, but that's how it works.
When a cop comes on the radio, for example, and expresses pleasure that police didn't put some bullets into protesters, and that somehow they should be patted on the head for having not slaughtered a few angry students, that's just another example of the trusted source. Who wants to speak to a protester who was there? We've got a high-ranking somebody here, who wants to put their side of the story - the higher the rank, the more trusted they can be, the more weight their view carries.
Then there's the idea of the helicopter shot. It's pretty deceptive when you look down on a riot situation; it's very different on the ground. Just as you can look at a Formula One car on TV heading straight towards a camera and it looks like it's pootling along at 30mph, an overhead helicopter shot distorts the speed and intensity of what's going on down below. You don't get a good idea of the sheer size of a police horse, for example, compared to a human being; nor the sheer scariness of when such a big animal goes skating down a tarmac road on metal hooves. Once those things get going, it's pretty hard to stop them. And what looks like a slight tap from a helicopter can be a serious deal.
From an overhead camera shot, a few people chucking big-but-lightweight plastic barriers might seem hugely aggressive, while a few seemingly slow-moving police horses doesn't seem that big a deal. It's only if you're down there yourself that you can judge the intensity of these things. Now I'm not saying that the violence is only one-way in these things, and far from it; I'm just trying to point out that the camera doesn't always give the whole picture.
There's also the idea that one act of violence wins TV news. Burning something or smashing something gets you in the papers and on TV; marching up and down for five hours peacefully might get you ten seconds at the end of the bulletin. It's one of many reasons why these things do erupt into violence, because petitions to Downing Street and writing to your MP only achieves so much when the Prime Minister won't listen and your MP is being whipped into line. People don't always go to direct action as a first resort. The simple sadness is that if you want to get noticed, break things, smash things. Worry our future queen. That gives you tons of publicity. Hours of good-natured protesting in which no-one gets rowdy? Not so interesting for TV news, or papers.
What we're beginning to see with these protests is the way in which immediate media like Twitter can convey something other than the official sources - the voice of the people in the thick of it. You don't have journalists worrying about whether a lone protester's eyewitness account is as trustworthy as a top-ranking police officer giving a statement at a news conference; you just get some more accounts from more people who are at the heart of it. We can take it with a pinch of salt, of course, as we might do with any news item, but there are more voices on a medium like that expressing their own views of what's going on. The voices add up. The photos and eyewitness accounts add up. You have to take the TV news in tandem with the accounts you see on Twitter, live tweeters who are there and taking photos, and elsewhere to take a fuller picture.
Eventually, another side of the story approaches. You get details of police injuries first because the police give them out first; eventually, you find out how many protesters get injured, and it's often many more. You start hearing stories about someone being dragged out of a wheelchair; someone else getting hit over the head and ending up in hospital. It starts to trickle out. Reporters give more personal accounts in colour pieces that give more of a flavour of what's going on.
The reason why many people see the coverage from the BBC and others as biased, I think, is because of that demand for immediacy, and the reliance on the trusted sources above all others - which when you've got protesters and police, means the police get the primary focus during all the excitement, and the kettled protesters' stories only seep out much later, once newspapers have gone to bed and contemporaneous news bulletins have been broadcast. I don't think the BBC are biased in their coverage but I can see why it may appear that way. I think all we as punters can do is realise that no news outlet can give the full picture of a fast-moving story, know that information only comes from one side of the riot shields in the first instance, and look for other media including social to fill in the gaps in what we're seeing.
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December 10th, 2010 - 11:40
No. While I think your points are valid I think it’s more than that. The language is carefully chosen and very loaded.
So even before the Prince Charles nonsense the head line on radio 4 was “the *violent* protests” – even in the trails for the news programmes. At that point the violence was the normal – broken windows at worst (although how kettling does not get categorised as violence I am not sure) .
The language is carefully chosen and what is more it is different from the way these things have been spoken about in the past. It is *possible* the BBC are just mirroring police and political language but I have to say it feels like more than that. Someone has thought about it and managed to get people using it (which in itself is quite scary because I know that there is no grand conspiracy and therefore it’s pretty hard to get loaded language changes into use like this) and the upshot is that protesting will increasing be looked down upon.
December 10th, 2010 - 13:48
Plus the BBC is no doubt concerned about getting access to police and other official sources in future. If the BBC pisses them off, this may be more difficult. They don’t have to worry about media access to protesters, usually a relatively disorganised group of people who are desperate for publicity.
December 10th, 2010 - 11:41
Plus the media often ignore the idea that “peaceful protest” is a bullshit term invented by the establishment to neuter criticism of their policies. If protests turn violent the establishment only have themselves to blame because of their track record of ignoring protests that have been peaceful.
Riots cause things to get done because the monopoly of violence is taken away from the state.
December 10th, 2010 - 11:48
Sometimes I would argue there’s something more deliberate going on, based on past experience.
I wasn’t on the demonstration yesterday, but I’ve been to more than my fair share, and I’ve seen TV crews deliberately avoid filming points at which the police have charged on horseback as they did yesterday, then switch their cameras on when protesters retaliate.
Not sure what’s been the cause in those situations, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Most of the time though, I think your summary is about right. We’re taught from a young age to trust authority, and our default position is that what is done in our name is for our own good.
December 10th, 2010 - 11:56
There’s also the fact that the police are organised, they know what is happening in different areas from accounts from their own. They have a command centre, as it were, and are in communication with different sections – they have an overall view which is what the journalists want and need to find out what is going on.
Interesting post, thanks.
December 10th, 2010 - 12:00
I agree up to a point, but in the brief BBC Breakfast news report this morning there were two shots of police officers being treated for injury and none of protesters. There’s no excuse for that, in a clip boradcast hours after the event, when according to the Guardian (http://bit.ly/gaSfre) almost four times as many protesters were injured.
Surely today it’s actually a bigger story that protesters were hurt since they are much more likely to have been injured by direct acts of violence, eg baton blows or horse charges. Putting themselves in harm’s way is part of the police’s job, after all, isn’t it? They get hurt so that innocent bystanders don’t.
December 10th, 2010 - 12:03
Beeb probably sucking up to government (and Murdoch?), to avoid being trashed financially. Inexcusable but understandable.
December 10th, 2010 - 12:15
Got a lot of sympathy for what you say here. On the theme ‘stories from people on the ground’: I was walking down Fleet Street yesterday in a suit at 12.10 when a couple of protestors making their way to the protest walked straight past me, looked me in the eye an soberly said ‘oh yeah, we are all gonna give you a right good kicking later all right’.
I realise a personal anecdote is not a systematic survey, but it does leave me with the impression that some people were planning to break the law right from the start.
December 10th, 2010 - 13:13
You would think the media would have learned from the obscene lies and attempted coverups after the deaths of Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson to step back from what the police say and be properly probing and sceptical, but no, the UK media are lazy supine establishment lickspittles.
December 10th, 2010 - 13:18
Interesting post. Thank you. I am a press photographer but not there last night or indeed haven’t ever covered anything like last night. However, I think it’s a bit rough your comment ‘wearing their protective hats as if they were about to be shelled in Yugoslavia, bless them’
I think a bit of concrete in The Balkans is a similar weight to a bit of concrete in PSquare! So good luck to the ones who brought us the images. I was disappointed that as usual, the ‘on screen talent’ gets the glory and not the camera operator who is often at a much higher risk of assault from both sides as they are much more conspicuous and vulnerable due to the nature of looking through a viewfinder.
December 10th, 2010 - 13:42
It’s six of one half a dozen of the other. The idea that all of the protesters who come a cropper at the hands of the police are just innocently protesting and then randomly attacked by a police officer wielding a baton is a fantasy of the anti-police far-left.
Equally the idea that all the protestors are trouble makers needing a good kicking or locking up is a ridiculous right-wing notion.
I believe those protestors who have been arrested for smashing things and fighting with the police are not working class students or workers but wealthy upper middle class annarchists who pitch up at demos like this with the intention of causing trouble safe in the knowledge that if they get arrested their wealthy parents can hire a swanky lawyer to get them off any charges they may face.
Real working class people, students and workers wouldn’t smash things or fight with the police at protests because they know they wouldn’t get away with it!
December 13th, 2010 - 12:02
”
I believe those protestors who have been arrested for smashing things and fighting with the police are not working class students or workers but wealthy upper middle class annarchists who pitch up at demos like this with the intention of causing trouble safe in the knowledge that if they get arrested their wealthy parents can hire a swanky lawyer to get them off any charges they may face.
Real working class people, students and workers wouldn’t smash things or fight with the police at protests because they know they wouldn’t get away with it!”
what a huge baseless assumption and generalisation
December 10th, 2010 - 15:55
Yeah, I listened to News 24 during several protests and I can say for certain the language was very much angled against protestors without any evidence. Whenever a bang was heard it was that protestors had thrown fireworks at police….no evidence, but that was what the reporters on the ground nowhere near would “assume”.
I very much take and agree with your points, but I hear far too much biased language from a position of ignorance during the course of just reporting events to believe there isn’t at least some bias against protestors.
December 10th, 2010 - 18:22
Good post. I’d add, though, that there’s a leaderless and largely directionless process going on, by which I mean that the press has built up particular approaches towards particular sorts of event over time. After 20 years of infrequent and largely pretty tame post-Poll Tax protests in the UK – that’s the whole career to date of a journalist in their late ’30s, early ’40s – a set of unchallenged stock approaches presumably takes shape, and is wheeled out as necessary. There’s been little violence, for example, in that period, and usually it *has* been expressed by a minority. So now journos ask protesters and others whether they ‘condemn the violence’, and don’t seem to know what to do when people say ‘no, I don’t’.
I’ve noticed this especially when BBC journos talk to protesters in the streets, where their stock questions don’t work to develop a conversation in a way that an ‘objective’ reporter can engage with – their interviewees are too well-informed and too factual to spin out the airtime. A lot of journalists seem to think that the protesters will act like politicians, and stonewall – they often don’t seem to know what to do when people bluntly say ‘we’re here because removal of the EMA is a massive social injustice’ (or what have you).
December 10th, 2010 - 20:28
“Journalists are taught to trust official sources”
If that’s the case, then every school of journalism in the country should be shut down, because they’re not doing their job.
A journalist’s true service to the public is to have hard-coded into them the mantra, “Why are the bastards lying to us, because they *are* lying to us”.
The trouble is – in the broadcast media more even than in print – the ‘journalists’ have become little more than stenographers for press releases and ‘official statements’.
Paul Foot, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
December 10th, 2010 - 21:34
It’s obvious from the first sentence that you are biased, so you aren’t in a position to lecture anyone about objectivity. No serious commentator calls the police cops unless they are strongly against them.
December 11th, 2010 - 10:31
It is obvious from your first word that you’re biased. No-one says ‘it’s’ unless they’re being a fool.
December 12th, 2010 - 10:23
There is bias on both sides. Where’s the truth? Somewhere in between, boringly.
Did some protesters cause damage in an irresponsible and distasteful way? Yes.
Were some of the police over agressive and cause harm on a scale unrelated to the crimes committed? Yes. Are some of the police a bunch of racist thugs who go looking for a fight? Yes
These are all true. You can argue the amounts but it’s only a matter of degree. I don’t agree with Anton but the story is definitely never as black and white and the press or Anton make it appear.
December 12th, 2010 - 15:40
I don’t think I was making it out to be black and white, rather more complicated than that. Sorry it didn’t come across that way.
December 13th, 2010 - 15:44
I don’t know about you guys, but every time I was shown a ‘riot scene’ – e.g. some masked plebs bashing away at reinforced windows with bits of masonry, they are surrounded by press and photographers. Same can also be said of the ‘riot’ at Tory HQ, where there appeared to be at least as many journalists and camera crew as ‘rioters’. Instead of filming it, why not just over power them and make a citizens arrest? At lot of these ‘riot’ scenes do appear to be staged for the cameras and I wouldn’t be surprised if some photo journalists were urging some of the youths on and perhaps asking them to pose, before of course decrying them and the cause they are pretending to represent in the next day’s papers.
The police meanwhile, appear to have behaved appallingly towards the majority of peaceful demonstrators from what I’ve read of independent journalist and protestor feedback. My real fear is that the tactics of indiscrimate beatings and horseback charges will leave someone, probably a child or teen, dead. Then all hell really will break loose.