Page 280 - Culture Society and the Media

270 HOW THE MEDIA REPORT RACE
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