Say no to tabloid tv!

By Hal Austin

No three subjects lend themselves more to sensationalism and hype than race, sex and crime. Put the three together and you have an explosive social mix guaranteed to stir public passions.

In November 1998, Channel Four Dispatches programme screened a half-hour documentary on the alleged rising epidemic of gang rape by black teenage boys. Their victims, 65% of whom were also black, were like themselves in their early teens.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the media bringing such examples of socio-pathology to a wider audience, this is after all part of the raison d'etre of the media.

But, by its very socially explosive nature, it is incumbent on journalists working on such topics to check and double check their facts not only in order not to give offence, but equally not to create social division and hostility in a society pregnant with racial suspicion.

This self- regulation is a fundamental part of the social responsibility of the media in a democratic society.

It has nothing to do with self-censorship, perceived attempts at shackling the press or social control. It is simply a reminder to the press that its freedoms are rooted in its role as a key institution of the democratic process. If the press is not part of the democratic process then it is its enemy.

It would be unfair, however, to put the blame for the shortcomings of the Channel Four Dispatches on this democratic deficit. The programme was badly put together because of its subjectivity and proselytising.

These professional shortcomings are made worse by the fact that rape is an emotive and serious offence - second on the check list of ordinary criminality only to murder - and when carried out by children is particularly dastardly.

It was for this reason that the Laurel Productions programme came in for such bitter criticism from right-thinking people.

The basic message of the programme was that there is a growing epidemic of gang rapes by teenage and pre-teenage black boys carried out mainly on black girls (65%), but also on white and (this is presumed) ethnic minority young women.

Apart from a single incident involving Asians, even when the offences were carried out by multiracial groups, blacks featured prominently in those attacks.

What compounds the situation, the programme stated, black professionals and parents who have been aware of this development have remained silent for misguided reasons of racial solidarity.

The political and sociological implications of this bold statement were clear: there is a black teenage sub-culture of violent, loveless, predatory sex, of which young black women are the main, though not necessarily the only, victims.

Black adults, parents and professionals, who are aware of this social rot and do nothing about it are themselves guilty of conspiracy. These adults may not have taken part physically in the sex attacks, but by their behaviour they are morally guilty of condoning these heinous offences. In short, the black British community stands collectively accused - there is no mitigating factor.

As evidence, the programme-makers admitted to questioning court officials, court reporters and police, which led them to arrive at the estimated 14 serious offences they listed.

So, from this hearsay evidence, they extrapolated that there was an epidemic of teenage gang rapes or so-called gang-bangs. The programme-makers then went on to give a dramatic reconstruction of an 19-month Old Bailey court trial, in which some of the accused - alleged between 13 and 15 - were acquitted.

The programme also dredged up a four-year-old case and one in the West Midlands, to legitimate what by then they must have realised was a weak and dangerous generalisation.

But this is professional trickery, an old device used almost daily by tabloid reporters (the tip-of-the-iceberg argument). It has no professional validity, neither as a way of elucidating the subject-matter for an ordinary public nor as compressing complex and incomprehensible details.

In its natural journalistic theatre, the tabloid press, it is a fraudulent device; as part and parcel of the armoury of tabloid television, an imported Americanism, it is a poor imitation.

A final word to the profession
Journalism is a thankless, high-stress, risky endeavour for which practitioners of the craft are regularly 'rewarded' by being voted most unpopular occupation, just behind burglars and slightly ahead of politicians, estate agents, accountants, solicitors and hangmen.

It is made even more stressful by the escalating organisational and structural changes forced on the industry by economic forces, such as casualisation of the craft which attracts a flood of young media and cultural studies graduates seeking employment in this high-profile industry, mainly as freelance jobbing researchers and reporters.

However, all this cannot excuse sloppy, inept and - to my mind - fabricated stories by these young people, put together for the sole purpose of amplifying and sensationalising statistically minor incidents, however awful and degrading, in order to get themselves known and, understandably, make a living.