Mythology of Media - reforming news and intelligence

BBC Reportage from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

By the evening the level of unprecedented violence using knives and baseball bats had yielded a level of shock that was unfathomable to Television viewers and the police and the people of Brighton.

Geoffrey Cox, the News editor of one of the UK's foremost news outlets received information from the authorities that challenged the very ethos of his ambitions of getting stuck in there and showing the viewers what's going on.

This is what defined his approach to news: "Just remember, its better to be rocketed for something you've done than something you haven't done."

But Cox had now been made aware of something strange, that his broadcasts were being used by warring factions to determine their next strategy, where they would all gather and  fight.

The police asked whether Cox could suppress his coverage of these violent clashes, which might help restore calm. It must not have been an easy decision, but Cox writing in his semi-autobiography: Pioneering Television News considered it and did what he could and indeed the violence subsided.

Of course you might argue there must have been other reasons, but this is how Cox more or less relays it in his book.

Media Replay
That was the 1960s. Fast forward to the events of a couple of days ago - the riots in the England cities - and a seemingly causal link seems obvious.

There was a peaceful demonstration in Tottenham for the shooting of Mark Duggan [ a full enquiry has yet to ascertain the full facts].  It was followed later by anger against the police. On TV the police looked either powerless or out of sorts. The next day through copy cat or an escalation, matters took a turn into  the darkest side of human behaviour.

Twitter, Facebook - all manner of Social Networks have garnered their attributional share to how the rioters functioned, but now what about television?

As a hypothesis, no more powerful an image of the police seemingly looking on idly can act as window of opportunity for impressionable misguided minds of the young or disaffected. Seemingly, because perceptions, rather than what actually happens, is a powerful message.

Or consider the point where news reported London was drafting in extra police from other forces. It did not say where they were from. But that night when riots happened in Manchester there were reports Manchester indeed was one of the forces that had gone to the aid of London - and perhaps now caught short.

So, just as the rockers had used television, Britain's unruly mob had found television's alterity.  To paraphrase the Sun newspapers headline - it was television wot won helped it. You might even look back to the cause-effect of the Rodney King beating - LA Police acquittal - riots. This from the BBC's website:

 In March 1991, the beating of black motorist Rodney King caused outrage around the world and set off a chain of events which culminated in LA riots ...

This raises an important spectre and a qualification I believe in as much as anyone interested in news, but it deserves to be talked about nonetheless.

The spectre that television news played a role, in merely doing what it does. The qualification that  in today's liberalised, capitalist  society, no one would dare ask any network editor to tone down their coverage or would they? Not unless it constitituted a matter of national security (needs defining). And just how can you blame television? I'm not I'm drawing threads between what mobs do watching television, as they television people go about doing their jobs with the highest of integrity.

I believe I'm not being naive, neither should you hopefully think I'm trying to intellectualise this, but a couple of things become evident.

The Rhetoric of the video image ( courtesy Roland Barthe)
It's highly unlikely with any scenes of last week a news editor would relent from showing pictures when their neighbour and competitor and the thousand of social networkers or citizen journalist will search for the dramatic, sometimes with little thought to the consequences.

So there has to be fresh thinking into media-affectivity. How what you're seeing can be used as intelligence, not just news ( an impartial semi-scientific recording of events).   This entails the need to:

a) Understand the power of "video journalism" - the image's message, both obvious and hidden. If the police or politicians hadn't seen it, thousands of media professionals did. Like many I said as much last Saturday when news broadcast showed the peaceful march of  Mark Dugan, fatally shot by police. The family standing outside the station being ignored said something. The clash with the police later communicated something else - as the police looked on seemingly helpless. Semiotics!

b) Authorities need to sufficiently boost their inhouse levels of knowledge to include methodologies and social behaviour (the code) to the dissemination of information, both in a classical and modern sense. This is not about knowing how to set up twitter, but to understand from people on the ground and those in the know how mobs behave with these tools. It's akin to how militarists study wars. It's simply not enough- even after their non-apology for the executive branch of the police to say we did not expect what happened.

c) How coincidental was it that mobs attacked brands. Is there a new social governance and visibility that such brands should be expending to the social provenance and not just balance the sheets of their share holders. And if believe they are doing that already, then something, somewhere is wrong.

d) Greater use of media as social understanding. I know this isn't news remit, but this happens to be one of the failings of a new post modernism media. That it still reacts, as you might claim it should, to events, before it falls of the screen without trace and something else occupies it.

e) An understanding that they haven't solved the problem. It's just gone underground and could manifest itself in other ways, where vunerabilities are shown.

 The video showing above is from 1992 - one of the BBC's seminal youth programmes that I worked on called Reportage. Then as now, youth were running amok. Perhaps, one of the failings of "videojournalism" as a new model has been its inability at a network level to redefine how TV traditionally addresses issues, as news.

The above can either be construed as impracticable based on semiotics of what we expect, or a chance as so many other innovators are looking for, enact Thomas Kuhn moments to reshape news ways of understanding and contextualising media.

Knife Crime UK - Reportage

...And another teenager is murdered in London...".

The news alone is enough to make you feel physically ill, and somehow the reporting of it, perhaps, the wording also instills a sense of unease.

Is there any other way this can be reported sans dramatic voice?

Meanwhile politicians, idiotically play the crassest of "pass the problem". They clearly have no idea.

In South Africa, while reporting there in 92, a good friend of mine who lived to tell the tale - he's now at MSF - got stabbed near the heart.

He says he saw it coming, walking down an alley in the early morning in downtown joburg as two men closed in on him either side

There was a time, I can't speak for now (limited knowledge) when South African friends would lament the value of life.

There were, still are, car jackings, muggings, gun crimes.

Crime South Africa
On one occasion listening to 702 - a popular radio station - jackers had made off with a mini bus with a baby inside.

While driving around with a radio exec in Soweto, he showed me his hand piece which a couple of days earlier he'd shot and fatally wounded a car jacker after his car.

At the police station, the duty Sergeant dismissed him saying the day he empties two whole clips he'd have something to answer for. The exec let off 6 rounds.

What happens when young people have little regard for their own lives, let alone those they resent or have no relationship with.

Well-off South Africans took to erecting fortresses e.g. Four ways; whole streets have become small self contained towns cordoned off by security check points determining who enters.



Controversially will anyone of note in the UK say the knife/gun culture has no solution?

That a generation 'Don't ****ing cares" has taken root. And that the best MPs and others can do is to follow South Africa's example.

Otherwise make a lot of huffaw, hoping the following day, bad news of a kind they have an inkling to talk about will arrive e.g. stamp duty.

Course not, but some solutions seem blindingly obvious at least in addressing a symptom that leads to some youngsters losing their way.


Youth Crime Action Plan

In 1992 under a tory government the perception of crime appears to have as much resonance then as it does now.

A friend's son fell by the side, despite being a model student. Stacey worked two jobs to get her son into a good school.

In part she has to from a government that taxes through the nose.

She gets home at 6.30. Her son finishes school at 3.30. There's no such thing as a latch key kid anymore because after school he doesn't come home, he's on the streets with new friends in the rough and tumble of youth culture developing his badness.

He gets home around 7pm.

Couple of months back I visited him at Feltham's Young Offenders prison. He was in good spirit and this time had picked up new fashion statements - a full fro with a three combs in his hair.

Bravado continues inside and as many of the youngsters will tell you prison holds no fear for them.

What's it like here, I asked
Ol right- food sucks though, he answered.

So what if the government underwent a real paradigm and shifted the closing of schools to a later time.

What if 3.30 became 5.30 where youngsters could do post curricula things. Football - now there's an idea!

Yes yes it's not going to reform those who just don't want to be in school in the first place, but it might do something to stem the feral nature of learning how to be "bad".

Don't be silly, do you know how much that would cost?

Not half as much rhetorically as paying for young people who stray into lawlessness, ending up in prison and costing the government a fair whack each week.

Or otherwise what about making it possible for parents to be at home around 3.30 when their young uns leave school.

Yep you're saying that's barking as well. Just think of the productivity we lose in economic value.

But why do we have to work till 5.30? What's the lesser of the trade offs? That's the whole idea around paradigms.

So at some point this week, sadly, as night follows day, the news will report another fatality, and another. And the best solution, one that dare not speak its name will be for those that can to move, yes move away from trouble spots.

Deja Vu. In Britain 2030, Children of Men really does exist.

Incidentally whilst writing this BBC Radio 4 is reporting a youth crime project in Nottingham. While you can't deny the social worth of these schemes, oh how the media loves them as the panacea for youngsters at risk.



In 1992 while reporting for the BBC youth show and BBC Radio 5 I reported on a UK-wide scheme of crime gone rampant

Back then it was cars and joy riding (TWOKING - Taking without consent) which became a media obsession; though there were young teenagers with guns in Manchester we interviewed.

That was 1992, today politicans still haven't found a solution other than: "lets bang em up".

And that's a shame, a real let down to a generation of youngsters who start off their journey growing up just like you and me.

* David Cameron, Tory leader, comments on Radio 4 Today that violent crime has doubled in last ten years

Letter from South Africa

"I don't want affirmative action to continue", says one of South Africa's talented youth, in this doc by Viewmagazine's David

It's always going to be incendiary reporting South Africa with race centre stage, particularly in the context of employment and affirmative action .

The BBC's report this morning had some choice moments, taking a town to serve as a microcosm of South Africa and seeking to find out what each side, black and white, felt about the impact of this policy.

One woman suggested with indignity and pejudicial slant "We have helped them" or thereabouts, and these emerging blacks are now buying swanky cars, while another suggested "affirmative action hasn't gone far enough", and one of the last clips that these blacks are being given jobs with little qualifications.

On the Successor Generation, a doc, radio, net piece, first made for BBC Radio such views were not uncommon, as were those who advocated that they would have to be a time limit on affirmitive action.

We don't want it going on like it does in the states, says an interview. See the doc here.

360 Degree Reporting
My bone, was not the report but the manner in which we so try to simplify complex debates, not a problem in itself, but that they should be given a forum to allow for greater expression.

Yes you could argue where does that stop then?

Shall all reports have a circular 360 degree dimension?

Perhaps, as much as possible to allow listeners a chance to engage and expand on the debate to get a wider understanding.

The BBC's report sets an agenda because it's the BBC, but there's nothing to stop the corporation from linking to say SABC radio who might debate this issue in greater detail, in the manner of "Any Answers".

Or providing its own forum to Q and A.

Yes, yes, yes blogs is one avenue, but with the amount of broadcast web technology and propensity for peopple to want to engage, at the very least, deploy skype as a conference set up for us to q the reporter.

The days of linking radio or podcasts in the same way we do text will one day, one day, be upon us, when it allows for a much better rigorous understanding of issues which sometimes eschew such deconstructions.

The BBC's mistake over 'The Trouble with Black Men" is an example of this. The programme may have been provocative, not giving anyone the forum to debate your findings does not reach the evolving and sandshifting threshold of future journalism

BBC Reportage - How to make ground breaking youth current affairs

Each generation has its muse. Each generation either produces a legacy in programming for others to study or talks of one that stood above the crowd. Current.TV and Youtube are today's de rigeur. Look back in time and this is one reccommendation.

When the very idea of treating young people as adults, giving them a huge responsibilty to produce their own programmes in current affairs would have been considered ill-thought out, the BBC came up with Reportage.

In fact it followed on the back end of Network 7, Janet Street Porters creation. In this report on viewmagazine.tv, firstly a snap shot of the programme and one of its typical features as I cover juvenile crime.

And then on viewmagazine's menu a more indepth look at its contribution.

In case you're not convinced here's 5 reason why the programme had that little bit of something else and why if you're considering a current affairs prog, you could do yourself some good by studying it at making your own contemporary brand.

1. It was made by young people in their 20s, so they knew what was happening on the ground which they fed into the prog

2. It had an attitude. Everyone there would have been considered as top of their game. So rather than process stories the unit actively broke many stories that would have taken ages to develop elsewhere in the schedules

3. It had a decent budget.

4. It spoke to its constituents rather than patronise them and was allowed to experiment and in some cases fail. Programmes were pulled if not considered worthy

5. It operated almost like an agency. Everyone contributed. It was almost like BBC Training on the job as many of its staffers who left would go on to bigger programmes and have since become key players in British broadcasting

Watch it and make your own mind up. Video Journalism? Nothing is what it seems. Reportage was shooting with hi8s in 1992