“Left to pick up the pieces”

This week’s Media Guardian on the invasion of Beeston, the home town of three out of the four people who bombed London last July, by reporters who had no idea of what sensitivity means:

Time magazine was interviewing a friend of Shehzad Tanweer, the Aldgate tube bomber, outside King Kebab in the centre of what it described as “the rundown Beeston area of Leeds”. Nearby, the Washington Post (its verdict: “a hard-luck neighbourhood”) had found a local shopkeeper who knew the Tanweer family well. Meanwhile, the Boston Globe was a few minutes away in Holbeck, hearing about the Tavistock Square bus bomber Halib Hussain’s startling change from beer-drinking girl-chaser to bearded, devout Muslim. Along each terrace of red-brick houses in south Leeds, reporters moved door-to-door. TV satellite trucks and a spaghetti of cables seemed to be around every corner. This was in the days following the 7/7 attacks in London, but by the end of the month CNN’s senior London bureau correspondent, Nic Robertson - questioned by a studio audience in Washington for the network’s On The Story slot - said that the people of Leeds did not know how to talk about what had happened. “They didn’t want to implicate themselves and their community by explaining things. They were quite withdrawn.” Their sudden withdrawal was more a reaction to a couple of weeks of relentless onslaught. A similar backlash was reported in Dunblane, and also in Liverpool after Hillsborough. In Yorkshire, when the world’s print and broadcast media finally moved on, the local Asian newspapers were left trying to combat interview fatigue and - worryingly - a sudden distrust of journalists. … [One local reporter] found a “crazed media cavalry” elbowing each other outside one house, “trying to get old photographs, trying to get things out of people they didn’t want to give”. After a while, she says, many locals were not coming out of their houses. They were frightened a reporter would grab them on the way to the corner shop. In nearby Dewsbury and its sister town, Batley, Awaaz (printed in English, Urdu and Gujarati) reported that the international media was “ransacking” the community for information. And many of the big names - the New York Times, CNN, Fox News - were asking Awaaz for help in obtaining that information.

Free registration required, but a highly interesting article.

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