It feels odd to start a column having failed to persuade oneself that what one proposes is sensible. My problem is this: whenever I put the thoughts that follow to friends whose judgment I respect, they talk me out of my conclusion. Convinced by their counter-arguments, I banish the idea.
Then I wake up in the small hours — and the idea’s back.
It is this: that should the civil disorder we saw a week ago turn into something more chronic than the chip-pan fire we’ve just experienced, then those who shape Britain’s newspapers, television and radio ought to try — at least to try — to reach some sort of informal sector-wide consensus on a set of voluntary guidelines, necessarily imprecise, on how to report events honestly, factually and comprehensively, in ways less likely to sensationalise or amplify the drama.
On the night of Monday 8 August, with the rioting at its worst, all the rolling TV news channels backed their reports, which they kept repeating, with what appeared to be looped videotape of burning buildings. So many sirens were coming out of people’s TV and radio sets that it was hard to know whether the emergency was on the airwaves or in the street outside one’s flat. After that, billowing smoke and orange flames became the media wallpaper of our week; and wailing police sirens the backing track.
Afterwards, the newspapers went wild — led, curiously, by the highbrow press, not the red-tops and not the Daily Mail. My own paper, the Times, reported the first night when it seemed that order had been restored in London with a headline beginning ‘London simmers’. The Guardian that Saturday, in an edition that struck me as little short of demented, appeared to devote almost the whole paper to riot coverage. It had been, it’s true, a wild situation they were reporting. But when all’s said and done the tally cannot have been a fraction of what France suffered six years ago, when on one night 1,400 cars were burned.
Anyone who works in journalism knows there are ways of ramping up or calming down a story without inventing or suppressing facts. Tone, prominence, vocabulary, sheer repetition are tools in any reporter’s toolbox which, used skilfully, give shape and mood to a report without misrepresenting or even, strictly speaking, ‘distorting’ the truth. It’s disingenuous for us to claim that all we’re doing is holding a mirror up to events: there’s often a mood we aim for. I simply ask whether there might be national threats where it might be right for editors to talk to each other about what this mood might responsibly be.
Well, now to the objections. They are formidable. I concede that they may be overwhelming. This is how my friends respond: 1. Admit you’re proposing a kind of censorship. 2. Assuming you don’t want government-dictated manipulation of the news, you must be asking media outlets in vigorous competition to dull down their own news reports. This would be an impossible demand. People would break ranks. It wouldn’t work. 3. It isn’t true that the media have dramatised the riots or inflamed public anxieties. They have simply reported the drama and the anxiety. 4. Hoodies and looters don’t read the Times, the Telegraph or the Guardian. Most of them don’t read at all. They weren’t watching Sky News or BBC News Channel on 8 August: they were rioting! They communicate by mobile phone, Facebook and Twitter, and it was these informal media that fanned the flames and brought new recruits to the disturbances. You cannot block these media, whatever David Cameron might wish. 5. If your calming regime did help in this case, couldn’t it prove the thin end of a censorship wedge? Why wouldn’t people extend the logic to other stories whose sensationalisation might be deemed contrary to the public interest? Where would it end?
Let me attempt what response I can to each. First, that I’m proposing censorship, however subtle. Yes I am. We all censor ourselves, and are in turn censored, wittingly and unwittingly, by prevailing attitudes and our own sense of the public interest. We even accept that there are circumstances — war’s an example — when the public interest may require systematised and codified forms of censorship. So this cannot be an argument about censorship in principle, but about where to draw the line.
Second, that it wouldn’t work. Maybe, maybe not. Many years ago a senior British politician suffered a serious family upset which would have been big news had his office not requested the media to observe a complete ban on mentioning it. The ban held. The public-interest argument for a voluntarily modified approach to riot coverage would be stronger than in that case; the interference with reporting less stark; so can we really assume that any attempt to coordinate editorial policy would be hopeless?
Third, that all the media are doing, anyway, is making a dispassionate report. I simply don’t accept that.
Fourth, that the traditional (and influenceable) organs of the media would be without impact on lawless youth. Not directly, I agree, but there is such a thing as a national state of excitement; it influences even those who do not see or hear the national media. Things permeate. A mood settles on everyone.
Finally, that this sort of unofficial censorship could be the thin end of the wedge, and it would be impossible to draw the line. But we just do, don’t we? We just do agree that you don’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, and agreeing that does not make incipient state censors of us.
By none of the objections, and by none of my replies, am I entirely convinced. So couch it like this: would it be obviously futile for editors in due course to convene, informally and voluntarily, to explore at least the possibility that the broad outlines of agreement might be reached on how to report, without inflaming, any future crisis of civil disorder? I only ask.
Comments