10

How the media report race

PETER BRAHAM

INTRODUCTION

Since 1948 when the first post-war West Indian immigrants arrived on the Empire Windrush, the number of black people resident in Britain has risen to more than one million. Though there has in this period been substantial white immigration, the word ‘immigrant’ has come to be generally employed as a synonym for ‘black’, thereby excluding the large number of immigrants to Britain who are white and including the large number of black people who were born here. Thus most people would assume that a headline which read ‘IMMIGRANT BIRTHS UP’ would be about an increase in the black population. Many of the connotations of the word ‘black’ are to be found in Britain's colonial past. According to Dilip Hiro for example, in most white people's minds dark pigmentation is associated with ‘dirt, poverty, low social status, low intelligence, animal sexuality, primitiveness, violence and a general inferiority’ (1973, p. 280). If black people arrived in Britain with the stigma of slavery and subordinate colonial status attached to them, as immigrants they came to be associated with undesirable behaviour such as mugging, and with social problems such as urban decay, poor housing and overcrowding. The ease with which negative symbols can be culled from their colonial history and their present status are perfectly encapsulated in the Daily Express headline, ‘POLICE FIND 40 INDIANS IN BLACK HOLE’ (cited in Hartmann et al, 1974, p. 275).

The growth in Britain's black population has given rise to much private and public debate, to a number of Acts of Parliament—some designed to control further immigration and others to counter discrimination, to a great deal of research into race relations, as well as to a great deal of conflict and hostility. It is against this background that the way the media report race must be considered. Race and immigration are very controversial issues, arousing strong emotions. It is therefore to be expected that media coverage will itself be controversial, that what is reported and the way it is reported will be very sensitive matters. This will be so whether race is approached with caution on the grounds that it is potentially explosive, whether it is felt best that all the tensions and hostility which surround race relations are fully aired, or whether those within the media maintain there is no argument as to what constitutes news and that their duty is simply to publish it. Critics of media coverage within academic circles and among the various race relations bodies in Britain say that the media should acknowledge special responsibilities in reporting race and ought to handle racerelated stories with kid gloves. In their view to adhere to normal news values will exaggerate the extent of racial conflict and this will inevitably make race relations worse. Most journalists would probably consider these criticisms to be misplaced, mainly because this would be to demand ‘news as we would like it to be’ rather than ‘news as it is’.

Of course, this implies that news is somehow immutable, unchanging and obvious: that it ‘reports itself’, whereas critics of media coverage would say that news is variously manipulated, manufactured, shaped and suppressed. It is to throw light on what constitutes news in our society that the media coverage of race will be examined.

NEWS AS WE WOULD LIKE IT TO BE OR NEWS AS IT IS

The claimed difference between ‘news as we would like it to be’ and ‘news as it is’ is best exemplified by the contrast between editorials and news columns. While the news pages seem to be full of conflict and tension, editorials are likely to emphasize harmony and the need for good race relations. For example, referring to the arrival of the Malawi Asians the Daily Express editorialized:

There is bound to be some dismay at the news that a further 25,000 Asian immigrants will be heading for Britain in the next few years…. Yet in a very real sense Africa's loss is our gain. For in the main, these people are not layabouts looking for a cushy billet, but hard-working, ambitious and efficient traders. (10 May 1976)

On the same day, the front page headline in the Express ran, ‘£1,000 PROBLEM OF A REFUGEE—REFUSED WELFARE—BUT I'LL SETTLE FOR A COUNCIL HOUSE’, and the story underneath ran:

at Gatwick Airport yesterday Mr. Maroli knew the question to ask. ‘How do I get in touch with the British Welfare? I have been told that they can help me?’ But Mr. Maroli will have to fend for himself—the Officials at Gatwick knew about his £1,000 nest-egg.

Butterworth's analysis of the reporting of an outbreak of smallpox in Bradford in 1962 is a valuable study of the contrast between what is written in the editorial columns and what appears on the news pages. The Yorkshire Post reported under the headline ‘ANGER IN BRADFORD’ that though there had as yet been no physical violence between blacks and whites, ‘there was open evidence that the public as a whole was blaming the Pakistani population…[and]…conversation was mainly centred on the lines of “send them home”’. However, in an editorial published four days later the Post said that the Pakistani population as a whole cannot be blamed for the outbreak and castigated the ‘few hooligans’ who had been smashing windows and otherwise threatening innocent Pakistanis and ‘who must be given to understand that they have not even the tacit support of the decent majority’ (Butterworth, 1966, p. 352 and p. 356). Butterworth concludes that the Post often spoke with two voices: ‘in its news reporting and presentation it appeared to give circulation to the kind of happenings and opinions which were likely to raise tension and were being condemned in its editorials’ (ibid., p. 360), whereas the Post defended its news coverage by saying that in the news columns it ‘gives the news as it is, not as we should like it to be’ (ibid., p. 358).

In contrast, editorial comment often seems to veer towards news as we would like it to be’. For example, when Colour and Citizenship (Rose et al., 1969) was published most editorial attention was devoted to the survey finding (since challenged) that only 10 per cent of the population was racially prejudiced, which was regarded by the leader writers as evidence in support of the British reputation for tolerance. On the other hand, they paid little attention to the extensive documentation of racial disadvantage contained elsewhere in the book. If we agree that a leader writer may wish to argue one case rather than another—for example, to establish the existence of racial harmony rather than racial conflict—and may even emphasize those facts which lend weight to his argument and play down those facts which would run counter to his argument, it seems strange that such selection or weighting is regarded as out of the question on the news pages. ‘News values’ it would seem are sacrosanct or somehow beyond the editor's control. As the Press Council put it in response to the evidence submitted by the Community Relations Council to the Royal Commission on the Press: ‘It is a complete misconception of the function of the Press to imagine that it can or does control what is news’ (Guardian, 9 May 1977).

To say as did the Yorkshire Post that they print the ‘news as it is’, or as did the Press Council that news is inviolable, is in effect to say that if the contents of news pages are ugly this is because the press acts as a mirror faithfully reflecting the ugliness of society. Even if this analogy is appropriate it should be remembered that a mirror does not only reflect what is ugly. But it would be much more appropriate to visualize the media acting as a searchlight, illuminating some areas while leaving others in shadow. What appears in the pages of a newspaper is obviously a very small proportion of what happens in the world outside. But it does not follow that the few ‘stories’ that are printed are representative of the many stories that reach the newspaper office, let alone of those that do not even get that far. A newspaper must have some general criteria to determine which stories are reported and which discarded, though such rules may change dramatically. For example, according to Breichner, news coverage of American blacks by all news media ‘constituted almost a boycott or censorship of positive, favourable news—not always by intent, but certainly by habitual neglect’ (Breichner, 1967, p. 98). In the South there was at one time an unwritten rule that photographs of blacks should never appear in print (Myrdal, 1944, p. 37), a practice which sometimes had absurd consequences, for example, as late as the 1950s, one Southern newspaper, the Times-Picayune, scrupulously scanned photos of street scenes and edited out offending blacks with scissors and airbrush (Harkey quoted in Harland, 1971).

In this case the prevailing attitude to blacks was that they did not form part of the audience—or at least not a part worth catering for. The point was that publishers thought that whites who would form the vast majority of the readership had little or no interest in news about blacks. Where there were particular commercial reasons for seeking a black audience, some newspapers produced a special edition (indicated by one or more stars) in the black community, though apparently most whites were unaware of its existence while many blacks thought they were buying the regular edition (Myrdal, 1944, p. 915). Matters changed with the civil rights movement of the early 1960s in the South and with the civil disorders of the late 1960s in the North. But the change in reporting was more one of quantity than quality. The black struggle for civil rights became almost routine front-page news, but the Kerner Commission observed that the media, ‘have not communicated to the majority of their audience—which is white—a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of living in the ghetto. They have not communicated to whites a feeling for the difficulties and frustrations of being a Negro in the United States’, and the Commission repeated the criticism that news about blacks continued to be written as if they did not form part of the audience (Kerner Report, 1968, pp. 210–11). But the living conditions enjoyed by blacks in Northern cities were of little interest to whites; they did not constitute a ‘problem’. The problem appeared to arise for the white audience only when blacks embarked on actions such as boycotts, violence, demonstrations or disorders which could be seen as a threat to the white majority. Indeed, it might be pointed out that the Kerner Commission itself exemplifies this: it was set up not because of the degradation of living in the ghetto but because this degradation had finally led to disorder. Tunstall (1972) quotes the comment of a British journalist on the vast amount of media coverage of the 1965 riot in Watts (Los Angeles): That was a story which commanded attention. Blood on the streets. You can't do better than that’. And Tunstall adds (p. 20): ‘Riots in which many people are killed (in a place with whose white inhabitants the intended audience can be expected to identify) fulfil all the requirements of a big news story’.

THE MEDIA DEFINITION OF RACE

To gain a rather more systematic idea of which aspects of race in Britain make news, Hartmann et al. (1974) examined every thirteenth copy of the Guardian, The Times, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror between 1963 and 1970. They concluded that there was a quantitative similarity in the handling of race by the four newspapers and that a number of themes emerged as the most salient. These were: immigration (in particular control of coloured immigration); relations between black and white (in particular intergroup hostility and discrimination); legislation to control immigration and counter discrimination; and the politician Enoch Powell.

In their content analysis they eschewed as unreliable any attempt to classify press coverage according to whether a particular attitude is conveyed. Thus an article about, say, immigration control will be placed in the same category whether it takes a restrictionist or an anti-restrictionist position. But they go further than this: in their view to measure the extent to which the various newspapers adopt different positions and display various attitudes is not merely likely to be unreliable, it is also seen as much less important than establishing that otherwise divergent newspapers agree on what the issues are. In other words the role of the media is to be sought in the way that they create awareness of issues and establish what is on the agenda for public discussion rather than in what they say about these issues or in the degree to which what is said may change opinions.

For example, of ‘immigration’, the topic to which the press devoted most attention, Hartmann et al. write:

It did not greatly matter that the material classified under this heading was a mixture of news reports about control measures instituted, or politicians urging stricter control or defending the right of Kenyan Asians to enter, of explanations of how the control measures might be evaded, or of reports of coloured people being refused entry, or of editorials or letters taking up opposing sides on the issue—and indeed the material contained all this. What is important is that central to this coverage is the theme of keeping the blacks out. That, according to our papers is what immigration is mainly about. (Hartmann, 1974, p. 128)

It may be objected that the method of content analysis chosen by Hartmann et al. on grounds of reliability leads almost by sleight of hand to this conclusion. For it is one thing to say it is very difficult to measure reliably differences in tone and flavour, and another to say such differences are not very important. Even though it might not be very reliable, a division between ‘favourable’, ‘unfavourable’ and ‘neutral’ items would demonstrate the distinct differences between the various newspapers. It is hard to imagine the Guardian or The Times publishing something like: ‘Cities like Wolverhampton, Leicester, Bradford and Reading… the whole character has undergone an astonishing transformation. They now bear a closer resemblance to Bombay or Johannesburg than they do to the rest of England’ (Daily Express, quoted in Harland, 1971, p. 453). There may also be important differences in content. For example, in its coverage of race the Guardian contains a good deal of what may be called ‘hard information’ on such topics as housing, employment and migration of labour. It is worth citing several of the considerable number of such articles which have appeared in the Guardian during the 1970s: ‘Black bottom of the heap’ (21 June 1974) dealt with employment prospects; ‘Race against time’ (a Guardian ‘Extra’, 8 July 1975) dealt with black disadvantage; and another Guardian ‘Extra’ dealt with the problems experienced before, during and after immigration by the Malawi Asians (21 May 1976). Indeed, notwithstanding their general conclusion, Hartmann et al. praise the Guardian for giving more substantial coverage to housing, education and employment than the other three papers (p. 129).

Bearing in mind these qualifications, it remains the case that the position of black people in the housing or employment markets receives much less attention in the media than racial conflict and tension, though whether this is a reflection of existing hostility or whether this actually encourages hostility is a moot point. Most of the academic critics of the media coverage of race (for example, Hartmann et al., 1974; Husband, 1975; Halloran, 1974; Critcher et al., 1975; and Troyna, 1982) distinguish between media concentration on the ‘manifestations’ of racial conflict and the media neglect of the distribution of scarce social resources which they regard as the ‘underlying basis of racial conflict’.

The extent to which race relations are painted in terms of conflict is illustrated by the kinds of headlines which are often used. It is only to be expected that headlines about race will be designed to dramatize events just as political disagreements are dramatized as ‘clashes’, ‘storms’ and ‘rows’. Nevertheless headlines such as ‘A MILLION CHINESE CAN ARRIVE HERE NEXT WEEK IF THEY WANT TO’ (Daily Express quoted in Seymour-Ure, 1974, p. 118) are hardly likely to ‘keep the temperature down’. Hartmann et al. found that ‘race’ was frequently combined in headlines with ‘conflict’ or ‘violent’ words, so that race and colour came to be associated with hostility, violence and dispute as in ‘Colour Bar’, ‘Racial Clash’ and ‘Race Hate’ (Hartmann et al, 1974, p. 158).

This almost automatic association is illustrated by a front-page story which appeared in the Evening News in July 1973 under the headline ‘SCHOOL MOBS IN LONDON RACE RIOT’. The report described pitched battles between pupils from rival South London Comprehensive Schools in which ‘the mob of black youths stormed into Kingsdale School. They attacked mainly white pupils…. Passers-by cowered in doorways as white and black youths clashed’. However, in the next day's paper the headmaster of one of the schools was quoted as saying that there had been no racial clash, ‘As far as I could see they were all coloured’. Following a complaint to the Press Council, the adjudication was that ‘the Evening News story was inaccurate in a number of details…. The words “race riot” in the headline were unjustified…[and] the newspaper should have published a retraction’ (Press Council, 1974, pp. 29 and 32).

The picture which is presented by critics of media coverage of race relations is that press concentration on conflict has altered only in the sense that if the coverage of the 1960s can be encapsulated in the phrase ‘Keeping the Blacks Out’, the reporting of the 1970s might be encapsulated in the phrase The Black Problem Within’. But in a more fundamental sense there has been little change: in both decades the press has presented a white audience with the image of a black threat to a white society.

But those factors which are peculiar to coverage of race relations are inextricably linked and overlaid-with the operation of normal news values. This can be illustrated by the press coverage of the arrival of a number of Malawi Asians in 1976. This coverage was inaugurated by a report which appeared in the Sun under the banner headline, ‘SCANDAL OF £600-A-WEEK IMMIGRANTS’ (4 May). It reported that two families comprising thirteen individuals had been accommodated for some five weeks by the West Sussex County Council at a four-star hotel at a weekly cost of £600. The Sun continued to give the story extensive coverage for nine days and some of the developments of the story can be deduced from various headlines which appeared on 5 May:

Daily Express:	MORE ASIANS ON THE WAY TO JOIN 4-STAR MIGRANTS
Daily Mail:	WE WANT MORE MONEY SAY £600-A-WEEK MIGRANTS
Daily Telegraph:	MIGRANTS ‘HERE JUST FOR THE WELFARE HANDOUTS’
Sun:	ASIANS OFF TO THE WORKHOUSE
The Times:	HOMELESS ASIANS LIKELY TO BE MOVED TO WORKHOUSE BY END OF WEEK COUNCIL SAYS.

(Evans, 1976)

It is not hard to see elements in this story which would have aroused the interest of ‘our merciless popular press’ even had the individuals concerned not been black immigrants: ‘spongers’, free-spending welfare officials, wasting of public money, and so on, will usually make a good story. But in this case the racial aspects provided an added dimension sufficient to push the story onto the front pages and keep it there for some nine days. This dimension may consist of fears of an unending flow of black immigrants (perhaps attracted by welfare handouts), the belief that immigrants live off the welfare state, and the strong passions aroused by immigrants’ entitlement to council accommodation. In short, what made it a good story was that the threat implied by black immigrants was sufficient to ensure that ‘race was news’.

Because race was news in this case does not mean that race is always news, or that stories about race are not subject to the normal criteria of news value. But the operation of news values and the definition of news are extremely elusive. The journalist, perhaps quite prudently, is not much concerned with analysing why a story is ‘news’; it is enough he has—or believes he has—a nose for the kind of story which, in the words of a distinguished American newspaper editor, makes the reader say ‘Gee Whiz’. It is left to the outsider to try to go beyond this cliché—that ‘news is news’, to try and arrive at some understanding of the way in which all sorts of newspapers select which news is fit to print, though it should go without saying that such an understanding in no way equips us to say which stories will see the light of day or reach the front page. In the most general terms, however, we can say that news values tend to neglect background material. Events are likely to appear as sudden and unexplained or as having only direct and immediate causes. The underlying state of affairs which social scientists would say helps explain or gives rise to a particular event tends to be absent or to be taken for granted in the news reports. And of these dramatic and immediately-caused events, those which are readily associated with conflict, tension, threat and violence are the most likely to make news. The authors of Colour and Citizenship allege that the tremendous publicity that race receives has less to do with ‘actual conflict’ than with the conflict which editors think is inherent in race (Rose et al., 1969, p. 740). The idea that conflict and violence make news may serve as a rule of thumb whether it is applied in the popular press in the words of a cigar-chewing editor greeting news of a murder committed in horrifying circumstances, ‘Don't forget we're in the bad news business’; or whether it is applied to the quality press in the more sober words of the Press Council: ‘Bad news has always been a more salutory instructor than good news and its publication is necessary to the efficient functioning of society’ (Guardian, 9 May 1977).

There may be'aspects of the way the media report race which are special to race in so far as a large black presence in a predominantly white society may be automatically depicted as a threat. But even if it can be justly claimed that there is thus what amounts to a special ‘racial angle’ in news coverage it does not follow that each omission and commission of media reporting of race should be explained in such terms. For example, it is easy to assume that the instinctive association of black people with threat and conflict explains why the press devotes little attention to such background issues as the position of black people in education, housing and employment, without stopping to consider that the press—guided by considerations of news value—may generally devote inadequate attention to such background areas whether or not the people concerned are black.

NEWS FRAMEWORKS

News values not only govern what will be selected as newsworthy, but will also help determine how a particular story is presented to the reader. Whatever ingredients a story has to recommend it, it will be more acceptable, however unexpected or dramatic it appears, if it can, at the same time, be readily slotted into a framework which is reassuringly familiar to both journalist and reader.

The coverage of race relations is very likely to change in tone and scale according to whichever views currently prevail about the state of race relations throughout the media as a whole or within an individual newspaper. For example, a race riot or disturbance could be portrayed as an isolated incident, the result of a conspiracy or as part of a growing wave of racial unrest. The sort of considerations which might influence an editor's decision on how to treat the story might include: is race currently regarded as particularly newsworthy, perhaps because we are in the middle of a ‘long hot summer’ of racial unrest? How are other newspapers running the story? Are politicians making play of the event or are they trying to play it down? And are there other events which either magnify or overshadow the event in question?

Reporting is not simply a matter of collecting facts, whether about a race riot or about anything else. Facts do not exist on their own but are located within wide-ranging sets of assumptions, and which facts are thought to be relevant to a story depends on which sets of assumptions are held. These sets of assumptions are referred to as ‘news frameworks’. It stands to reason that journalists faced by the need to meet their deadlines must have a set of preconceptions of what is related to what, a sort of ‘ready reckoner’. If both journalists and readers associate race relations with conflict and see black immigration as a threat, then reporters and editors, presented with a vast number of events from which to choose, pressured by deadlines and constrained by the limited amount of space available, may simply treat news about race relations in a way which fits in with this definition. In other words, what they are doing, as they must, is to present the news which is unfamiliar by virtue of just having happened—in as familiar and easily digestible a fashion as possible.

Of course, there may be circumstances in which a newspaper goes out of its way to highlight an issue. For example, an editor may pursue a campaign about, say, rising crime in order to demonstrate that ‘law and order is breaking down’ or ‘violence is on the increase’, even though crimes of violence may be decreasing even as the campaign becomes more shrill (Davis, 1973). But there need be no campaign or conscious decision for the media definition to begin to distort the reporting of race relations (or any other subject). Indeed, the distortion may be most pervasive where the media definition is not employed consciously, where there is no campaign.

This distortion could occur in two ways. First, events which conform to this framework might have a better chance of being reported than those which conflict with it. For example, an announcement in 1970 that the birth-rate among New Commonwealth immigrants was rising received a great deal more coverage than the news that immigration from the New Commonwealth was declining. Whereas seven out of the eight national dailies carried the birth figures (five on the front page), only four of them carried the figures on immigration (only one on the front page) (Hartmann and Husband, 1974, p. 167). Second, an event may be reported not as it happened, but as it is expected to happen (Murdock, 1973, Knopf, 1973). Combining these two possibilities, we can speculate that once a decision is taken to give an event publicity, based on its ‘consonance’ with the prevailing news framework, it may then be reported in such a way as to conform to this framework.

The extent to which the media definition of race influences or distorts the reporting of events is a matter of controversy. Max Wall, editor of the South London Press, says that

Today any newspaper which attempts to cover community relations, even remotely adequately, is aware of constant surveillance, not only from those working in the field, but by social and political groups, trade union organizations, university researchers and often the minority press. (Wall, 1978, pp. 463–4)

Thus, according to Wall, reporters on the South London Press—although they inevitably make errors of both fact and judgement—are ‘instructed to check, check and check again all stories with any ethnic content—to an extent far beyond that felt necessary in other fields’ (Wall, 1978, pp. 463–4). On the other hand, according to Harold Evans, the former editor of the Sunday Times,

Racial stories tend to be reported against only the flimsiest background of verifiable fact…. There is persistent carelessness in sources. Odd individuals without any real following at all are elevated into ‘spokesmen’ for immigrant groups, though a moment's enquiry would show that they are spokesmen for no-one but themselves. (Evans, 1971, p. 45)

If either of these two views is to be accepted then we must conclude that there is something special in the way the press reports race: either particular care is exercised (partly because of the expected surveillance by numerous outsiders), or there is unusual ignorance and carelessness.

Perhaps the perfect illustration of Evans’ contention was the New York Times's coverage in 1964 of the ‘Blood Brothers’—an alleged organization of Black teenagers in New York who were said to be pledged to maim or kill any white person venturing into Harlem. The Times cited four isolated and unsolved slayings of whites in hold-up attempts and credited them to the Blood Brothers. According to one commentator, despite denunciations of the story from every responsible social and anti-delinquency agency in Harlem and despite, as another commentator put it, the difficulty—as those who work in Harlem know only too well—of getting 400 Negroes organized to do anything, ‘the Times continued to pursue it with its competitors panting in its path—and with the Blood Brothers’ membership growing from 30 to 400 and then dropping to 90 in successive editions’ (Poston, 1967, p. 68; also Klein, 1967, p. 148). Moreover, this was not an isolated example, for as Poston explains, there was hardly a year without a season of black scare stories: ‘One paper may pick up a legitimate and dramatic story of racial conflict and then the season is on. A competitor will seek a “new angle” only for the story to be topped by a third and a fourth rival’ (Poston, 1967, p. 67).

This process of a dramatic story being launched in one paper with other papers rushing to produce ‘new angles’ was repeated in reports that a black power group was trying to take over Manchester City Council (Kushnick, 1970). It was also an example of reporting in line with prevailing assumptions rather than by careful probing of sources and evidence. The story broke on 4 September 1970 in the Guardian under the headline ‘Black Power Bid to Rule Manchester’, and in the Manchester edition of the Daily Telegraph under the headline, ‘Black Power Attempt Poll Sabotage’. The essence of the plot was revealed the following day by the Daily Sketch (similar reports were carried in the Daily Mail, Manchester Evening News, Scottish Daily Express and Western Daily Press) under a three-inch banner-headline, ‘BLACK POWER ELECTION PLOT’: it involved a plan to swamp the city council elections by putting up more than 100 candidates for a single seat, and the report relayed claims from the plot's instigators that they had launched similar campaigns in several major cities.

By contrast, a report which appeared in the Sunday Times on 6 September claimed that inquiries ‘into the so-called Black Power bid to seize political control of seven major cities’ seemed to show that the organization which had been reported as being responsible for the Black Power election plot—the Campaign for Relief of Need (CARN)—might be controlled not by blacks but by white right-wingers. The report claimed that two of CARN's organizers had long associations with various right-wing organizations. These associations were further explored in the ‘World This Weekend’ (BBC Radio 4) on 6 September and in the Guardian on 7 and 8 September.

It may be thought that the press would seize on this dramatic reversal of events and so extract further mileage from the story. But in spite of exposures carried by the Sunday Times and the ‘World This Weekend’, the press stuck to the original story and gave no hint of these developments as is shown by some of the headlines which appeared on 9 September:

Sun:	‘94 BLACK POWER MEN “IN ONE HOUSE” GET POLL BAN’
Daily Mail:	(Manchester Edition): ‘Lord Mayor Foils Black Election Plot’
Daily Mirror:	‘Ban on Black Power Election Plot’
Daily Sketch:	‘95 at One Address Foils a Black Power Votes Plan’
Daily Express:	‘Black Power Poll Bid Fail’
Daily Telegraph:	‘Ban on 94 Black Power Nominees’

Why these newspapers should uniformly ignore the new information provided on 6 September is not altogether clear. Perhaps it was because the original idea of a ‘Black Power Election Plot’ was so good a story that to reveal that it might actually be a plot to discredit Black Power in particular and therefore black people in general would be too tame an ending. Or perhaps it was, as Kushnick suggests, that the press ignored new evidence because the original story fitted so well with the framework of attitudes held by the British public about Black Power. In any event this ‘media blindness’ was not confined to the press. As Downing recorded, BBC TV News

Took with the utmost seriousness the claims of a Manchester West Indian to be a colonel in the black power movement, and to have discovered a loophole in electoral law which would enable him to flood Manchester City Corporation with black power advocates…. Later in the year the whole affair was exposed by a ‘24 Hours’ item; the news section, however, maintained a stony silence in the face of their own gullibility. (Downing, 1975, p. 115)

It may seem that the reporting of the ‘Black Power Plot’ is an extreme case; that the safest conclusion is that once the media had ignored contrary evidence (or at least had not let it alter the framework within which the story was being reported), it simply became too embarrassing to admit that they had—partly by virtue of the sheer intensity of coverage—perpetuated a hoax on themselves. What makes the case of general interest is the nature of the prevailing assumptions themselves and the ease (rather than the tenacity) with which the media were able to adhere to this readymade framework, in which blackness appears to be automatically coupled with threat and conflict. It must be borne in mind, however, that just as ‘bad news’ is more newsworthy for journalists than is good news, so ‘bad reporting’, in the sense outlined by Evans, is more noteworthy for media critics than is careful reporting. The reporting of the Blood Brothers or of the Black Power Plot may thus be typical of slipshod or careless reporting without being typical of all reporting.

What most media critics do hold to be typical of all reporting is that the media have concentrated on the threat perceived by the white majority to be implicit in black immigration and in the black presence; and that they have neglected the extent of discrimination and disadvantage experienced by blacks except in so far as these very conditions seem to contribute towards the supposed threat, for example, by fostering anti-social behaviour. They seek to give the impression that in all important respects the media have presented their audience with an unvarying picture of race and immigration in Britain. Husband, for example, writes that the ‘news consensus’ suggests that the bulk of the white population

receiving news media definition of events would find a statement that black immigration is a threat and a problem quite reasonable…the news media have reported race relations in too uncritical a way: they have reflected racist assumptions and reported without adequate analysis racist behaviour and racist policy. (Husband, 1975, pp. 26–7)

It is true that because news values favour stories about racial conflict rather than about racial harmony, media reporting is likely to portray black immigration as a threat. But it is also true that other factors have influenced coverage of race relations.

THE CHANGING CONSENSUS

Foremost amongst these have been considerations of ‘media responsibility’ which have been invoked by many media controllers in order to keep down the temperature of race relations. The most notable expression of these considerations during the 1960s came from the then Director-General of the BBC, Sir Hugh Carlton Greene, who said:

In talking about the BBC's obligation to be impartial I ought to make it clear that we are not impartial about everything. There are, for instance, two very important exceptions. We are not impartial about crime…nor are we impartial about race hatred. (Quoted in Harland, 1971, p. 21)

Whereas this permitted plenty of coverage of crime but excluded giving a platform to those who advocated robbing banks, in the case of race relations this precept was interpreted as meaning that merely to exclude those who advocated ‘race hatred’ was insufficient, and that it was best to have as little coverage of any kind, based on the proposition, allegedly adopted by liberal-minded producers of such programmes as ‘Panorama’, that to focus on racial problems at all would merely serve to stir them up (Seymour-Ure, 1974, p. 112). Moreover, as long as those who expressed strongly anti-immigrant opinions were confined to the unsavoury political fringes, those who controlled the media felt they could be safely ignored.

If in the Britain of the mid-1960s the media did then proclaim a consensus on the subject of race and immigration, it was not, as the media critics contend, simply that black immigration was a threat, it was also that black immigration was a threat that had already been greatly diminished by the passage of stringent new immigration laws, and which would be diminished still further if the presence of black people was not made the subject of media controversy. The problem that resulted was—contrary to Husband's contention that media coverage reflected racist assumptions—that the media gave little or no airing to opinions which, though they appeared unsavoury to media critics and media controllers alike, were very widely shared among the general public. As Enoch Powell remarked: There's very little connection here between the manner in which these subjects are discussed…and the realities as they are known by the citizens of this country’ (1970 TV interview, quoted in Downing, 1975, p. 134). It seemed in the end that the attempt to play down racial conflict and hostility had been counter-productive. At least this was the view expressed by the BBC to the Select Committee on Race and Immigration. In its evidence the BBC departed from its position of the mid-1960s to state unequivocally that there could be no manipulation of the audience by the suppression of certain stories, nor could there be any departure from its policy of truth in order to achieve racial harmony (Toynbee, 1976).

According to Jeremy Isaacs, a former producer of ‘Panorama’, it was Enoch Powell who demonstrated that the media consensus had been counterproductive:

Television current affairs deliberately underplayed the strength of racist feelings for years, out of the misguided but honourable feelings that inflammatory utterances could only do damage. But the way feelings erupted after Enoch Powell's speech this year was evidence to me that the feeling [i.e. presumably, against black immigration] had been underrepresented on television, and other media. (Quoted in the Guardian, 13 November 1968)

The main purpose of the speech on immigration which Enoch Powell delivered in Birmingham in 1968 was to sweep away what he saw as an artificial consensus. It could be argued that he succeeded in this purpose in so far as many opinions which would formerly have been labelled as ‘unsavoury’, and could therefore have been safely ignored, were now regarded as expressions of legitimate attitudes and fears, and as such could be given circulation in print and on the air. Much later, however, Powell paid tribute to the resilience of the old consensus:

One cannot but grudgingly admire the success with which those in authority, political and official, and the ‘best people’ of all parties and of none, have succeeded in burying out of sight the greatest problem overhanging the future of Britain. (1975 speech, quoted in Evans, 1976, p. 11)

Powell challenged, in particular, two important elements of the consensus. First, he pointed out that the threat of black immigration had not been ended by the various Immigration Acts because the rights of dependents of existing immigrants remained untouched. Second, he questioned the viability of a peaceful multi-racial Britain in face of a black presence which would grow irrespective of any immigration laws which might be passed, as growing numbers of blacks would be born here.

The speech received extremely wide coverage (an opinion poll taken a few days later revealed that 96 per cent of respondants were aware of the nature of the speech) because Powell had chosen to speak out on a subject that everyone else of repute in politics had chosen to avoid. He chose to speak in a way, moreover, which he believed expressed the feelings of the general public and which was designed, in his own words, ‘to bring out the sense of oppression, the sense of being victimized which is felt in these areas’ (i.e. of coloured immigrant settlement) (quoted in Seymour-Ure, 1974, p. 113). The result was, in Seymour-Ure's words, ‘an earthquake’: London meat-porters and dockers—hardly traditional supporters of Conservative politicians—marched in his support; thousands of other workers laid down their tools; and Powell received 110,000 letters (containing something like 180,000 signatures) all but 2000 of which expressed approval for what he said. The speech and its immediate consequences dominated the headlines for a full eight days.

Although many of the newspapers condemned what Powell had said in their editorials, and most condemned the way in which he had said it, this was outweighed by the sheer intensity and duration of coverage, an intensity which signified that what could now be taken for granted in public debate over race and immigration had changed. As a report in The Times observed:

Over the past six days Mr. Powell has stirred the national emotions more than any other single politician since the war. Not even Aneurin Bevan at his most acerbic so inflamed opinion—and so cut across traditional political loyalties. (quoted in Seymour-Ure, 1974, note 16)

Powell has remarked that as a politician he regrets only what he has refrained from saying rather than anything he has actually said; and that as a politician what he says should aim ‘to provide people with words and ideas which will fit their predicament better than the words and ideas which they are using at the moment’. In his Birmingham speech (and in later speeches on the same subject) Powell was concerned to give voice to a public opinion which had been unable to find public expression although he knew it to exist.

Powell would claim that he did not seek to change public opinion but only to give voice to the feeling—albeit an unfocused feeling—which already existed. The change that Powell did seek was in the attitude of those in control of the media—‘the best people’—so that instead of suppressing stories about the discontent and hostility which resulted from black immigration and settlement, the media should illuminate ‘the greatest problem overhanging the future of Britain’. It may be objected that this is disingenuous in that whatever the discontent surrounding race and immigration, the moment a politician of Enoch Powell's prominence draws attention to it, it is amplified and so a problem of a different magnitude is created. But whatever validity this objection has should not distract us from drawing the correct lesson from the coverage of the speech, and from the impact of that coverage on future coverage of race and immigration: namely, that the speech could only have created an ‘earthquake’ in a climate where anxiety and discontent about race and immigration were both widespread and deep, and where this anxiety and discontent had been accorded insufficient attention in the mass media.

The effect of Powell's speech was to convince those media controllers who required convincing that any special responsibility to avoid worsening or inflaming a delicate situation, which had often led them in the past to suspend or downgrade normal news values, was now clearly outweighed by the need to keep public confidence. After the speech, for example, the Wolverhampton Express and Star received 5000 letters supporting Powell and only 300 opposing him. A subsequent poll conducted by the newspaper recorded a ‘vote’ of 35,000 for Powell and only a tiny number against him. As the editor of the paper remarked:

We cannot build up the sort of reader-editor relationship which establishes the local paper as a local ombudsman on matters like unemptied dustbins, uncut grass verges, unadopted roads, unlit streets, excessive council house rents and all that sort of thing, and then snap it off shut on a major social issue like this. To do this would be to betray that faith which readers would have in us and the social function of newspaper production. (Jones, 1971, pp. 16–17)

CONCLUSION

Much has been claimed about the power of the media to determine what are regarded as major social issues and the sorts of questions most people have in their minds about them. According to Spiro Agnew, for example, the small group of men who control the media ‘decide what forty-five million Americans will learn of the day's events in the nation and the world…these men can create national issues overnight’ (quoted in Burns, 1977, p. 59). Particular reference has been made to the power of the media to influence the state of race relations. For example, UNESCO declared that the media can have a crucial role in encouraging or combating racial prejudice; and Harold Evans believes that what the media publishes about ethnic groups can directly affect ethnic tensions. The coverage of Powell's speech, however, indicates that the power of the media might be much smaller than is often supposed and that it was Powell who changed the definition of the situation so that the focus of debate became a concern with the consequences of a large and growing black presence, and that the media controllers saw no alternative but to pass on this message.

Even if as Evans says, ‘the way race is reported can uniquely affect the reality of the subject itself’ (1971, p. 42), the effectiveness of the media message depends on how well it accords with various feelings, dispositions and circumstances already present in a particular society.

Where prevailing beliefs are hostile to immigrants in general or to black immigrants in particular, stories which present black people in a favourable light may be widely seen as evidence that the media are not giving a true picture, whereas ‘selective perception’ will exaggerate the amount of material unfavourable to blacks which is perceived to be in the media. If the media message is uncongenial it is likely to be distorted or rejected in order to fit in with the recipient's outlook, because people tend to react to the media according to their initial attitudes. The editor of one provincial newspaper, for example, noted that news about black immigrants is read by many whites who live in areas of high immigrant density, many of whom, in his experience, regard any favourable reference to black immigrants as evidence of media bias (Jones, 1971, p. 19). On the other hand, it can be presumed that the majority of his readers would not question items which could give an unfavourable impression or which could be used to reinforce stereotypes: for example, they may see reports of crimes committed by members of immigrant groups as proof that most blacks are criminally inclined.

This is not to concede, as Husband argues, that the contents and impact of the mass media coverage of race should be assessed on the basis that ‘We are a society with racist beliefs entrenched in our culture and racial discrimination evident in our laws and in our behaviour’ (Husband, 1975, p. 23). If we bear in mind that the reception accorded to black immigrants has been far less violent than that which met Irish immigrants to Britain in the nineteenth century, it could equally well be argued that the hostile predisposition referred to by Jones can be explained in terms of traditional dislike of foreigners and resentment at the influx of immigrants (of whatever colour) into particular local communities.

If the media now presented a picture more in keeping with this resentment and did more, as Powell wished, ‘to bring out the sense of oppression, the sense of being victimized’, so satisfying their white audience, they have, as we have seen, been roundly criticized from another source. Critics of media coverage argue that there has been undue concentration on the manifestations of tension—such as hostility and conflict—at the expense of such topics as housing, education and employment which ‘might be thought to represent major social resources, competition for which would seem to be among the underlying roots of tension’ (Hartmann et al., 1974, p. 132). This amounts to saying that the media have concentrated on the effects, the tip of the iceberg, rather than on social structure and the distribution of resources, a concentration which would presumably be explained in terms of news values. But the housing and employment markets, and the study of discrimination and disadvantage within them, cannot be arbitrarily designated as ‘background’ factors with the implication that they are causative (i.e. if you take away shortages of housing and jobs, race relations will become universally smooth). It is just as plausible to argue that competition for housing and jobs provide a pretext for expressions of ethnocentrism or racialism.

This cautionary note does not, however, dispose of the criticism that media coverage of race has ignored structural factors. The press has, for example, given little consideration to the context within which New Commonwealth immigration occurred. The great bulk of this immigration took place in an era of excess demand for labour and as such was welcomed by both government and employers. Until social and political considerations were judged to outweigh economic interests, black immigration seemed the easiest means of filling the gaps left by indigenous workers who were increasingly demonstrating their refusal to perform a whole range of jobs characterized by low wages, unsocial hours and poor conditions, whereas, except for the occasional mention of poverty and unemployment in the Third World and the attractions of a steady job and comparatively high wages in Britain, little or nothing of this economic aspect has been presented in the media.

Against this it has been argued that it is a misconception to treat ‘the problem’ of the mass media as primarily a cognitive one: that news is not a surrogate form of social enquiry; and that media critics are wrong in treating media men

as if they have signed up to be professional sociologists and have fallen down on the job…where the measure of distortion is precisely the extent of discrepancy between their account and that given by the favoured sociological theories of the media scholars’. (Anderson and Sharrock, 1979, pp. 369 and 383)

The irony is that the sociological definition of race relations which has been the product of lengthy ‘scientific enquiry’ is itself open to grave criticism. In particular, the sociological definition has been unduly influenced by the American experience and the wealth of research which is available about that experience. The consequence has been that race per se has generally been unquestioningly accepted as the key to understanding the position of black people in Britain; it is regarded as sufficient to refer to a ‘society where racism is entrenched’ or in which the connotations of blackness are wholly negative. On the other hand, the parallels which may be drawn between the position of black immigrants in Britain, and that of the more than eleven million migrant workers who work in the North-European industrial triangle to perform the jobs which indigenous workers no longer wish to perform, have received—until the appearance of certain publications in the early 1970s (Castles and Kosack, 1973, Bohning, 1972)—insufficient attention. Thus it can be said that both the media definition and the sociological definition have ‘fallen down on the job’, though editors may reasonably point out that it is not their task to provide an adequate sociological definition of race.

The standards by which the press should be judged, according to the Royal Commission on the Press, included the need to provide ‘a clear and truthful account of events, of their background and their causes; a forum for discussion and informed criticism’ (Royal Commission, 1949, Para. 362). Measured against these standards, the performance of the press may leave something to be desired. Perhaps this is because such standards have little to do with newsgathering and rather more to do with scientific enquiry. News, by contrast, has more to do with what is happening now than what has evolved over many years; as Walter Lippmann put it: ‘the news does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the ground but it may tell when the first sprout breaks through the surface’ (quoted in Daniel, 1968, p. 8).

As far as reporting race relations is concerned, once the contradiction between ‘keeping the temperature down’ and following ‘news values’ was resolved in favour of the latter, it became inevitable that the bulk of media coverage (with the exception of the quality press to which media critics pay insufficient attention) would be formulated in a way which would both reflect the changing consensus and hold the attention of the mass audience. Thus the news framework is constructed around the problem of the black presence and within it news values revolve around conflict and tension.

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