Abstract
In the pursuit of viewers, are our news broadcasters forgetting the wider responsibility they owe society?
At 2.20 pm, on May 22, 2013, two Londoners, Michael Adebolajo, 28, and Michael Adebowale, 22, sought our attention – it is alleged – by running a man over in a car and then hacking him to death, in Wilson Street, Woolwich. The police released news of the attack on the victim, a young British off-duty soldier Lee Rigby, at 4.09 pm. At the same time, the BBC notes, accounts of this atrocity started to appear on the social media. Twelve minutes later, the BBC confirmed the incident via a Radio 5 interview with the local MP, Nick Raynsford.
A witness contacted ITN with a video recording of the suspect explaining his action. Taken on a smart-phone immediately after the attack, the footage shows the so-far unidentified Adebolajo holding a bloody butcher's knife and, his gestures echoing those of a rap artist, he talks of “our land,” “our women,” “you people,” “your government” (and, confusingly, “our” troops). ITN ‘obtained’ exclusive use of images which it broadcast at 6.12 pm in a report from Katie Lamborn: “Exclusive ITN footage” – “Woolwich attack: Man with blood on hands holds knife”.
ITN's editorial decision to run with this was properly grounded in centuries of our press culture. A real (albeit alleged) blood-stained killer waving a knife, unexpectedly rational, unremarkable in aspect, palpably not intending to fly the scene – “man-bites-dog” indeed. The pictures were horrific, outrageous and distressing but were not in any way illegal. The footage, and how we came to see it so quickly, gives a veritable definition of what news coverage can mean today. ITN might too be in the game of grabbing attention but this is to positive effect. We need to know and we have a right to know and to know quickly.
Yet the editorial decision can be queried on a variety of grounds. Given the rhetoric heard in the recording, it is hard to avoid concluding that its transmission represented a mission-accomplished victory for the alleged killers, at least in their announced primary aim of gaining our attention. Thanks to the complicity of ITN, the oxygen of publicity was theirs; their case was made, in effect unchallenged by immediate analysis. And, for some, the footage was itself anyway too deeply disturbing and offensive to have been transmitted. Moreover, it was seen early in the evening, well before the 9 pm watershed designed to protect children. The transmission also obviously ran the danger of provoking outrage, fuelling prejudice and bigotry, encouraging civil disorder and violence.
The press has one new defence against these usual complaints about complicity, offence and provocation. Today's technology, it is claimed, renders the old worries pointless, passé. ITN (or somebody) had to run the footage because it would be “out there” in cyberspace whether it did so or not. The bloody-handed-man would inevitably go “viral”. Isn't this our reality? For the macho “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” school of journalism this is a comforting argument; but it cannot stand.
Certainly for the moment, the uploading of images to the net is easy and largely uncontrolled; but, “technicist” hyperbole not withstanding, that need not be our permanent condition. The net can be policed. The same computing power that enables message distribution can be deployed to control it. If the net-lords can track our every cyber-move for profit and governments can eavesdrop all our cyber-talk, they can surely censor what we see and jam our conversations altogether. All it takes is money. Better, then, to fuel talk of uncontrollability than spend the cash on exercising control. It's a “technicist” trick of the light to think web “freedom” is forever. Moreover, viral wonders even now largely become so in the echo chamber of the still dominant mainstream media. The mass audience has a weight; individual hits, in however great a number, do not.
So a debate about the ethics of the bloody-handed-man video is still needed. Complicity, offence and provocation: these, and any other arguments suggested by the Woolwich coverage for constraining the press, do not go away.
It cannot be the case that, in a society with a free press, “complicity” becomes a basis for constraint. The mere fact that the ITN messenger passed on the bloody-handed-man's message is no prima facie basis for impeding image flow. Others also abetted the (alleged) killers. For example, an attention-seeking Nigel Farage, no less, called for “calm”. The COBRA committee convened within hours and the prime minister and the leader of the opposition both cut short continental trips to rush home. The Palace announced that the Queen was concerned. It cannot be that each and any of these stories be censored merely because they could give Adebolajo and Adebowale the satisfaction of knowing everybody is talking about them. Complicity at this level is inevitable, and it is “chilling” for the right of free speech to complain about it. Equally, demanding analysis, however valuable that is, as a balance to complicity also unacceptably chills reporting.
But the story could be covered without the horrific footage. For some, the images were too much, too soon. In a frenzied search for a scoop, they felt editorial judgment was blunted. They were offended by the coverage. Causing offence, however, provides no more compelling a basis for restriction than does complicity.
Following the transmission of the bloody-handed-man video at 12 minutes past 6pm, Ofcom received some 700 complaints. Around half of these attention-grabbing citizens were exercised by the initial screening on ITN largely as contravening the watershed regulation. A further 150 complaints were received about the 10pm bulletins on both ITN and BBC1 on more general grounds of “taste and decency”. The complainant culture is so deeply embedded in our broadcasting environment that much is made of this. Ever since the weeks-old BBC protected itself from criticism of its coverage of the General Strike in 1926 by pitching the 3,696 letters of support it received against the 176 letters of complaint, these – let's face it – ludicrously small numbers of offended viewers and listeners have been given disproportionate attention. Of course, democracies must guard against the tyranny of the majority in all matters but the tyranny of the minority is an equal danger.
This is not to deny, of course, that the images were unsuitable to children – they were. Much of the world is unsuitable for children, after all, and is it not the business of parenting to shield them from it? The curtain-twitchers complain that broadcasting can be an “unexpected guest” in the home but to expect the news – especially with the usual due warnings about the suitability of upcoming material – to be insouciant is unreasonable. Worse: it blunts the majority's right to know. And to know at 6 pm.
Needless to say, equally ill-founded as a justification for restricting reporting is provocation. The attention-seeking English Defence League, ever on the look-out for excuses for fascistic mayhem and bigotry, were quick to strut into the aftermath of the Woolwich killing. Constraining coverage, however, because it might provoke civil disorder is to install what American free expression lawyers have called a ‘hecklers’ Charter’ producing a de facto censoring of expression. That cannot be. Instead, the apparatus of civil control should operate. Ofcom can deal with the curtain-twitchers (if it must) and the law should deal with the EDL (and did in this instance, in fact, by banning their ‘protest’ marches and the like).
Does Woolwich, then, raise no new difficulties?
Two days after the murder of Lee Rigby, a jihab-wearing 22-year-old, known only as Alexandre D, stabbed Cedric Cordier, a 23-year-old French soldier in the neck while he was patrolling La Défence in Paris. This stabbing, if linked to Woolwich, could be seen as a specific further extension of provocation: a copycat outrage. The coverage then does not just inspire counter-action in a different form – calling for calm, contacting Ofcom, marching to Woolwich, burning a mosque. Instead, it lays out a template for an exactly similar atrocity. And there is a precedent for concern that this consequence might have happened; that coverage of a “jehadi” knife attack might be imitated. This seems to be true of suicide coverage and media constraint in reporting such deaths does seem justified.
There are more than 60 studies of the copycat suicide phenomenon which implicate the media. So established is the connection that it is known in the medical literature as the “Werther Effect” following Goethe's romantic classic about unrequited love.
Take the Viennese subway. This was opened in 1978 and immediately became a favoured site for suicides. In response to a pressure group, the Austrian press agreed to a self-denying ordinance. After 1987, splashes and images of the dead were not published. Reports became perfunctory. In fact, suicide was no longer being treated as a story, many incidents being totally ignored. And the suicide rate fell by 84.2per cent. Conversely, the feature documentary The Bridge filmed on long lenses a number of ‘jumpers’ from the world's most popular suicide site, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Included were three shots of actual deaths. In the years following the film's release in 2005, the number of suicides increased 50 per cent, from the historic level of 21 or so a year to 30 plus.
This is not to make the usual point about media effects. Causation is very difficult to demonstrate and is endlessly confused with correlation. It is not, after all, the rustling of the leaves on the trees which causes the wind and evidence of actual causation, for all that it is popularly believed to be more or less automatically within the media's power, is hard to find. Did the serial killer act because he read de Sade? Or did he seek out de Sade because he was a serial killer? Did Melanie Phillips, say, “cause” the mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik to shoot 69 people? Clearly, the Norwegian fascist read and approved of her opinions, but it is absurd to suggest her as a cause of his psychopathy. The connection is a correlation, a coincidence. It offers no grounds to censor Phillips.
Causation needs more and, of all news, only the suicide coverage begins to suggest it might occur directly enough to require restraint. The impressionability of potential suicides renders them vulnerable to being influenced by the media in ways others would not be. In this they do not seem far different from the young men who embrace what they think is Islam and use it as an excuse for terroristic action. If so, are not the media in danger of provoking a direct harm, uncontrollable by society's usual means?
After all, the press, aside from legal constraints, does not have a boundless licence; for one thing, it must obey the law. And the law (ideally) only constrains expression to prevent it doing harm. Censorship of any degree in a democracy can only be justified on the basis of preventing harm. The supposed “harms” of complicity, offence and provocation are too vague. It needs something more direct. Otherwise journalism must still claim its special privilege. It requires a certain distance from the normal duty of care we owe each other. It involves a degree of callousness. As John Addison once explained, the reporter must needs “live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species”. The harm principle cannot be allowed to chill free speech, unless actual harm is clearly demonstrated as a consequence of media coverage.
ITN's broadcasting of the Woolwich footage might show the way to such an instance. Would it not be “harmful” if “jehadi” knife attacks proliferated in the same way as suicide seems to? If this turns out to be the case, and the Paris assault suggests it might be, then an argument for not running so vivid footage as the bloody-handed man could be made after all.
The media can rebut charges of complicity, offence and provocation to insist on their attention-grabbing norms. Copycatting, though, presents another less easily dismissed consequence.