The leading article in yesterday’s Independent claimed that the English riots are Britain’s ‘Katrina moment.’ Others have drawn the comparison too. The media’s desperately trying to make sense of these unprecedented events. But having thought about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that the analogy to Katrina is deeply offensive to the people of New Orleans.
While I take the article’s point in terms of the potential impact of the riots, the comparing of the aftermath of a wholly natural disaster that was a life-and-death situation to that of what amounts to no more than common criminality and opportunism is unfortunate.
If there’s any comparison to be made to the aftermath of Katrina, it’s in the way in which the media reported both events.
Just as displaced and marooned New Orleans blacks desperate for food were deemed ‘looters’ while whites were simply ‘foragers’, so too the English Defence League, racist thugs, were referred to as ‘groups protecting their communities’ without any analysis of their motivations.
The BBC interview with Darcus Howe, in which the presenter was hell bent on painting the distinguished, veteran broadcaster as some kind of rude boy apologist for criminal disorder, is also a case in point.BBC Radio 5 Live didn’t cover itself in glory either. The tone of The Victoria Derbyshire Show, which went out live from Tottenham yesterday, was wholly questionable and revealed the presenter’s clear bias about who was to blame and why.
To their credit, those media you would expect to take this kind of line haven’t done as badly in their own reporting.
The Daily Mail and The Sun have sought to highlight the diversity of those involved in the criminality, across race, class and gender. Both papers have focussed on societal moral decay rather than pointing the finger at specific communities.
The McPherson Inquiry following the murder of Stephen Lawrence highlighted the extent of British institutional racism. At the time of its publication, I wrote an article for the British Journalism Review which argued that the media, as much as any other institution, needed to review its employment practices and its lack of diversity.
This week, it’s again been pointed out that the only time we see black people on British TV (such as on Newsnight and other news and current affairs programmes) is when something like this happens. Indeed. The media plays a large role in dictating how we see things. Until they make a concerted effort to balance the scales of representation – behind the scenes and in their overall output – we’ll still be talking about ten years’ from now, just as we are about the missed opportunities of the McPherson report.
Click below to watch the Darcus Howe stitch-up.
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