“Harumph!”, croaked the dinosaurs.
As Belfast erupted into flames last night amid violent protests over the ISIS-like attempted beheading attack on a local by a Sudanese migrant, politicians south of the Irish border took to television screens to attempt an explanation – and a remedy – to the problems that caused the disorder.
“It sort of beggars belief that a video of that nature was allowed to be circulated for hours and hours”, declared Mary Regan, political editor of the country’s largest newspaper by circulation, the Irish Independent.
The video in question was, of course, mobile phone footage of the attack. In the hours after the incident, the Irish media’s first reaction was to play down the incident, describing it variously as a “stabbing incident” or a “knife attack”. Even as official channels were parroting that line, hundreds of thousands of Irish people, as well as countless millions around the world, were watching the uncensored truth on their phones and on their computer screens. There was no mistaking what they saw. […]
Three years ago in Dublin, police arrested an Algerian man – who has gone on trial this week – after a stabbing attack on children at a north Dublin primary school. There was no video of the actual incident, but details of it spread widely on social media despite a similar campaign of media suppression in which only the most sanitized details were shared by the major outlets.
That night, as in Belfast last evening, widespread public disorder broke out as the public took to the streets to violently express their dissatisfaction with an immigration policy that very often appears to treat the safety of the host population with reckless disregard. Then, as now, politicians deployed the same playbook: the incident was not the problem; the problem was that people found out about the incident.
At the time, this reporter was widely criticized for publishing details about the incident – including the nationality of the attacker – by fellow journalists, on the grounds that telling the public what had happened in their own country was contrary to the ethics of responsible journalism.
Then, as now, the perversity of modern media thinking was exposed: for many journalists in traditional outlets – influenced, one might argue, by taxpayer subsidies – the point of journalism is not to report stories, but to suppress them. As the American satirical blogger Iowahawk once noted: “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”
