The British Media
An article by
Roy Greenslade,
media commentator of The Guardian Newspaper
A MAN was jailed for life eleven days ago for the foulest of murders. He had shot dead a teenage girl as she lay sleeping in bed. It was, said Lord Justice McCollum, “a despicable crime” and the perpetrator had shown himself to be “a violent and unstable man.” At the end of his trial the killer, showing no remorse, swore at the judge. Readers of British newspapers would know nothing of this Belfast courtroom drama. No word appeared in national dailies (with the exception of early editions of The Guardian). Viewers of BBC TV news would have remained in ignorance, though listeners to Radio 4’s 6 o’clock news and a bulletin or two on Radio 5 Live heard a short item. It wasn’t covered by any ITN news programme.
So the vast majority of the British people don’t know about Trevor McKeown’s contemptible deed. They are unaware that he belonged to the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF). They have no clue that McKeown, 38, used the same pistol to kill Bernadette as that used to murder Catholic taxi driver Michael McGoldrick during the 1996 Drumcree march crisis. Then again, few people in Britain read or heard about Bernadette’s murder in the first place. Her death in July 1997 happened on the same day as the killing of fashion designer Gianni Versace. So papers largely ignored the tragedy of Bernadette. Yet it was the kind of Romeo and Juliet story which usually sets tabloid pulses racing. She was an 18-year-old Catholic in love with a Protestant lad, Gordon Green. McKeown crept into Green’s house in Aghalee, Co Antrim and shot Bernadette six times in the head. She was neither politically aware nor devoutly religious.
A report of Bernadette's heinous killing appeared on only one British front page. It was neglected altogether by four papers. There was some coverage in later days and it has received occasional attention in the months since, but it hardly impinged on the public consciousness. When I contacted editors about the reason for giving the murder so little space, I got the expected replies. The slaughter of Bernadette was tragic but it was, after all, just another statistic in an old story with too many tragedies.
As I wrote at the time, that reply just didn’t ring true. Bernadette grew up in Lurgan, Co Armagh and the month before she died, two RUC men - Constable John Graham and Reserve Constable David Johnston - were shot dead by the IRA. They were the 300th and 301st RUC officers to die. But the media didn’t view them as just another statistic. It was front page news in every paper and the lead story on BBC TV and radio. Almost every paper wrote leading articles of condemnation. Quotes were sought from, and given by, political leaders from Britain, Ireland and the USA. None of this happened in response to Bernadette’s murder.
It reminded me of a similar contradiction years before, in March 1993. In that month an IRA bomb killed two young boys in Warrington. It was front page news for weeks, reported with all the prominence one would expect: pages of pictures, interviews, follow-up features. It was, papers agreed, a massacre of innocents. Two political analysts later commented that the bombing created "a wave of revulsion throughout the British Isles against terrorist killings." What they meant, of course, was that media coverage created a wave of revulsion.
Just five days after the Warrington bombing, four Catholic men - James Kelly, James McKenna, Gerry Dalrymple and Noel O'Kane - were shot dead by loyalists as they arrived for work at Castlerock, Co Derry. That same evening, 17-year-old Damien Walsh was shot in the back by loyalists in west Belfast.
The Castlerock murders received almost no coverage in the tabloids. Damien's murder wasn't even mentioned in three of them. The broadsheets didn't do much better. They gave very little space to these “sectarian assassinations”, as they were called. No paper referred to them as massacres of innocents. There couldn’t have been a wave of revulsion throughout the British Isles because too few people knew about the murders.
The noticeable feature about the disparity in the coverage of all these incidents is that IRA murders got the full treatment while loyalist murders were virtually ignored. But surely, I asked myself, it was a coincidence. A closer look at other cases would show no such bias. In fact, an analysis of the way in which murders in Northern Ireland have been reported - or gone unreported - in English-based papers since the early 1970s reveals a disturbing pattern. I soon came to realise that the media, both print and broadcasting, had constructed a hierarchy of death.
So obvious was it that, after studying the coverage in terms of both quantity and quality, I was able to draw up rankings. In the first rank - getting the most prominent coverage - were British people killed in Britain; in the second, members of the security forces, whether army or RUC; in the third, civilian victims of republicans, including prison officers; in the fourth were members of the IRA or Sinn Fein, killed either by the security forces or loyalist paramilitaries; and finally, in the fifth rank, garnering the least coverage of all, were the innocent victims of loyalist paramilitaries. Among many examples in recent years were Robert Hamill, John Slane and James Morgan.
Of course, there were certain key events which didn’t fit this classification: the IRA’s Enniskillen atrocity was elevated to the first rank, as were the deaths of Anne Maguire’s three children in 1976 and the shooting of the IRA trio in Gibraltar. But, until last summer, there has never been an instance where the victims of loyalists have been deemed to merit front page splashes, two-page spreads, concerned quotes from politicians and leading articles.
A tentative turning point came with the horrific murder of the three Quinn children in Ballymoney during the Drumcree stand-off last year. This time, most papers did make some attempt to deal with the murders in the same way as they have those perpetrated by republicans. Why the change of heart? Because there were children involved? No, there have been many instances of children dying in Northern Ireland without papers marking their deaths with big headlines.
The answer is much less humanitarian and altogether more political. It is also controversial because it suggests that, throughout the Irish conflict, a supposedly free media has slavishly adhered to the government viewpoint.
For 29 years successive British governments - largely unchallenged in Parliament due to a bipartisan approach - have identified the central enemy in Northern Ireland as the Provisional IRA. All policy, both in the security and political spheres, has therefore been directed towards beating the IRA.
That policy has been enthusiastically endorsed by the media which has played a leading part in both demonising and marginalising the IRA and its supporters, particularly its political wing, Sinn Fein. Given the full-frontal assault on the British state and the nature of the bombings and the shootings, that is hardly surprising.
But its single-mindedness was also flawed. Apart from continually denying to the British people a sense of political and historical context, it took no account of the reality in Northern Ireland in which loyalist violence was a problem that was as bad, if not worse, than republican violence.
So low on the news agenda was loyalist paramilitary activity that even the barbarous murders of the Shankill Butchers from 1975 to 1977 hardly registered with the media. There have been condemnations of loyalist killers in all papers, but these have been random, never coalescing into the wave of propaganda mounted against the IRA.
As far as the national press was concerned, until the early 1990s, loyalist violence occurred in the background. That’s why so many murders went unreported. Even if they were published, they were always presented as a ITALS---reaction---END ITALS to IRA violence. The persistent use of the phrase “tit-for-tat killing” is specifically related to the notion that loyalists were claimed never to strike first.
In recent years, as the peace process has developed, and especially with the IRA on ceasefire, newspapers have found it difficult to cope with the changed political situation. Still convinced that the IRA remains the enemy, they refuse to change their tune by treating loyalist paramilitaries to the same relentless publicity and scrutiny. They may be routinely castigated in leading articles but they aren’t the subject of endless front pages. Fleet Street investigation teams have not been dispatched to look at the many allegations of loyalist gangs dealing in drugs.
Perhaps the clearest example of continuing tunnel vision came with the way in which Rosemary Nelson’s murder was reported. The third paragraph of the the Mirror’s story, placed unbelievably on page 2, began: “The solicitor, who made her name defending IRA men, had to be cut free from the wreckage...”
Amid the reportage is a phrase calculated to demean Nelson in the readers’ eyes, implying that her killing by loyalists is somehow justified. The fact that the story didn’t make the front page indicates that the murder was relatively unimportant.
That was reinforced by other tabloids in the following days. There was an absence of the kind of follow-up feature and comment by columnists which were routine after IRA murders. Broadsheet papers did much better, indicating that there is a gradual change may be on the way.
Similarly, the reaction to the Quinn murders does suggest that at least part of the press might be on the verge of adopting a new approach. That’s no compensation for the grief of Bernadette’s parents, of course.