Page 285 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 275
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