Media Magazine - THERE'S A RIOT GOING ON

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THERE’S A RIOT GOING ON
(Quotes in Red)

A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as

a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible.

The Daily Mirror, for example, blamed the pernicious culture of hatred around rap music, which glorifies violence and loathing of authority (especially the police but including parents), exalts trashy materialism and raves about drugs.

Blaming the media is a common aspect of moral panics.

According to The Telegraph: technology fuelled Britain’s first 21st century riot. The Tottenham riots were orchestrated by teenage gang members, who used the

latest mobile phone technology to incite and film the looting and violence. Gang members used Blackberry smartphones designed as a communications tool for high-flying executives to organise the mayhem.

Such young people – by which Hastings primarily means working-class youth – apparently live lives of ‘absolute futility’:

They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the

accessible property of others... The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist. They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings... My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

Peter Oborne (writing, surprisingly enough, in the right-wing Daily Telegraph) was one of many to make the link between the rioters and the bankers and politicians. The rioting, he argued:

... cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society... It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat... the sad young men and women, without hope or aspiration, who have caused such mayhem and chaos over the past few days... have this defence: they are just following the example set by senior and respected figures in society.

But perhaps the more challenging question, and the one you should be asking as a media student, is why the media see it as appropriate to give space to people who – whatever other expertise they may have – clearly have none whatsoever in the area they are supposed to be discussing.