On August 9, a YouTube user named mYcHeMiCaLrOmAnCeGaL (why do they do that?) posted a video she’d taped that day from the BBC, an interview of Darcus Howe by anchor Fiona Armstrong on the subject of the riots in the streets of London.
Some journalists can handle emergent events and live interviews, and others cannot. It’s a special skill, one it appears Armstrong does not possess. And she made two mistakes (three if you count her getting her interview subject’s name wrong) in this five-minute chat.
One of these mistakes has gotten a good deal of attention in the days since, and even elicited an apology from the BBC and Armstrong, for the fact that she called Howe a rioter. A broadcaster and columnist himself, this one-time member of the British Black Panther movement does have a past, including one acquittal and one conviction for run-ins with the police in the 1970s. Frankly, I don’t think her calling him a rioter was all that out of line. But it is a sensitive time, and everyone in the UK was still hoping in those early hours that these weren’t race riots. So, umbrage and apology understood.
But it’s the other one that concerns me.
“Mr. Howe, are you shocked by what you’ve seen there last night?” Armstrong asked to open the interview.
“No, not at all,” Howe replied, and went on for 40 seconds or so to explain why.
Then Armstrong interrupted. “Mr. Howe, if I can just if I can just stop you for a moment, Mr. Howe. You’re not, you say you’re not shocked. Does this mean that you condone what happened in your community last night?”
It being her first question, it’s the one we know was scripted, so her use of the word “shocked” was intentional and considered. It would have been unlikely that he’d say he was shocked, because it would have undermined the very reason he was brought on as a guest in the first place, which was as an expert in the sorts of neighbourhoods rioting, and in the reasons one rises up against the police.
So, in a way, his answer was scripted, too, forced by the wording of the question, a classic “Have you stopped beating your wife?” question. Not, in my possibly colonial naivet, what I would have expected from the BBC.
But it was a sign, nonetheless, of the extent to which sensationalism has pervaded the media.
Despite the drubbing it’s taken over the past few weeks, sensationalism is not necessarily bad thing.
It may in fact be a necessary thing.
With the apparently infinite number things to read, see and listen to, being quiet is not usually the answer these days, nor will it likely be at any point in the near to middling future. Things like this morning’s Toronto Sun cover (“SEX SICKO ON LOOSE”) are only the most obtuse version of something we should expect to see a lot more of. In fact, the very shrillness of the reaction to the News of the World revelations might be seen as a form of protesting too much, the result of media that know they’re generally culpable, if not always quite so crude.
Crude, like Ms Armstrong and her set-up. She – we’ll assume she wrote her own questions – was looking for a headline, a sound bite, an admission from a redoubtable old black revolutionary that he thought these riots were just fine. It might have added more of a racial tinge to the whole thing, or at least a more political one, and she, and her employers would have had the satisfaction of having generated some of the buzz that, until then, they’d just been reflecting.
It’s an easy thing to do, getting someone to say something that may be technically true in context, but which sounds outrageous when quoted. I remember an interview I did in third-year university, when I was working for the campus newspapers and taking my view of myself as a journalist out for its first spins. It wasn’t even for a story, as I recall. I was just talking to the leaders of some self-professed right-wing student group-pro-life, fiscally conservative sorts. We were in the dining hall, and I was quizzing two of them on their thoughts on various issues like capitalism and vegetarianism. They declared themselves to be wholeheartedly in favour of one and against the other. I pointed out that Hitler was anti-capitalist and pro-vegetarian and asked whether, therefore, they would consider themselves to be philosophically to the right of Hitler. One of them said “yes” before the other, who’s surely now joined the communications industry, interrupted with some pacifying and wholly unquotable blather.
We see this all the time, often either initiated or picked up by perfectly respectable media. Sometimes they’re concocted, like my Hitler ploy, and sometimes they’re gifts, like Michele Bachmann’s John Wayne Gacey gaffe. More truthy than true, they’re repeated for effect, for sensation, rather than because there are useful representations of anything.
Like Armstrong’s question and her later interjection when it seemed Howe wasn’t going to be controversial or quotable enough on his own, this kind of sensationalism can be irresponsible.
But it can also be responsibly useful. Like opening a story about a burgeoning famine with a description of the most pathetic, squalid thing the reporter has seen through the three villages she’s visited. She’s being honest in her description, but sensationalistic in her deployment of the facts. The effect is to give some immediacy to what would otherwise be a slow-burning and not very exciting story, one that’s more effectively told is retrospect – one million people died in the Sudanese famine last year – than as it happens.
Famines, like climate change, are slow stories that don’t lend themselves well to any news cycle. Boosting them, giving them a narrative, focusing on the most sensational and immediate aspects of them, is nothing less than responsible journalism. But the riots in the UK are pretty sensational on their own. News organizations covering them could just station their reporters, point their cameras and let it play out. So sensationalism, like graffiti, vandalism, and riotous violence itself, should be judged by the circumstances under which it’s used.
And the BBC should issue another apology.
