Ian Blair on racism in crime reporting
Ian Blair the other day found himself in hot water for suggesting that the media display racism in how they report crime. If it’s a white victim, the story gets splashed all over the front pages; if not, it gets “a paragraph on page 97”. He caused quite justified offence by telling the world that nobody could understand why the Soham murders last August (in which two young girls were murdered by the school caretaker) was such a big story. All this, of course, made the media, particularly the Daily Mail which gave Blair’s outburst front page coverage, rather indignant. And for once, I agree with them. (More: Opinionated Voice, Pickled Politics.)
The truth is, I think Blair was talking out of his hat. The Daily Mail is known for its anti-“political correctness” stance and had a reputation in the past for hostility to “race issues”, but displayed pictures of the five men accused of murdering Stephen Lawrence (in a racist attack in the street in south-east London in 1993) on their front page in 1996, declaring that they accuse these men of murder, and if they were wrong, let them sue. (However, there was known to be a personal connection at work there, the nature of which I can’t quite remember.)
The trouble is that “black on black” murders tend to be connected to the drug trade, and murders connected to it tend to become news only when they involve outsiders. Perhaps when the victim is white, their outsider status is obvious; when they are black, it may not be, but even so, the murder in a drive-by shooting of two black teenage girls near Birmingham at New Year 2003 became national news. If a particular type of murder happens every other day, it can’t be front page news every other day. But murders of black people have indeed been front page news: notably that of Anthony Walker, who was murdered last year with an axe when local thugs saw him walking his white girlfriend home.
The Guardian did a comparison of the number of words devoted to coverage of two recent murders: that of the wealthy businessman Tom ap Rhys Price in north-west London a couple of weeks ago, and Balbir Matharu, who “was run over and dragged for 40 yards after he tried to stop robbers breaking into his van, apparently trying to steal his stereo, outside a builders’ merchant’s in Stratford, east London”. Mr Price’s story was covered in 5,525 words in the national press, while Mr Matharu’s murder attracted 4,443 words, which is more than 80%, which hardly qualifies as evidence of racism, although I must admit I had not heard the story myself and had certainly heard of the Price murder, which took place in a part of London where wealth and poverty are quite close together (the Byfield murders in 2003 took place in the same area; again, it was a nationally-known story).
I suspect that part of the reason why some members of ethnic minorities feel that their murders get less coverage is simply that there are fewer of them. Ian Huntley killed two white girls in a middle-England town because he lived in that town; perhaps if he had lived in Brixton, his victims would have been another colour, or perhaps he would not have got the chance as schools are more secure as crime is expected more there. Perhaps the way he was able to gain the confidence of a small town community adds to the shock value of the story, but I fail to see how the story would not have been news if Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman had been black Brixton schoolgirls, particularly given that the incident happened in August when Parliament was closed and therefore there was little of politics to report.
(A separate issue raised in the discussion, by the way, was that if a victim has respectable and articulate parents, their murders are likely to get better coverage, but I would argue that this may be true more in terms of longevity than of volume at the story’s start. Even so, the parents of the mid-1960s Moors murder victims, who were working-class northerners rather than the stereotypical middle-aged respectable black church-goers like the Lawrences, maintained public sympathy decades after the event to the extent that Myra Hindley was treated as if her crimes were days rather than decades old, with vitriolic tabloid articles probably written by people who had yet to be born when they happened, on some occasions calling on her to do the decent thing and commit suicide. They were both effective in doing what they aimed to do: the Lawrence murder can still make news nearly 13 years later although the probable culprits were never convicted, and Myra Hindley remained in jail until her death in 2002.)
