If you push ignorant anger on the public, expect ignorant anger in return.
Far-right agitators encouraged and cheered on the riots that tore across the UK, but do some mainstream politicians and media organisations have their own questions to answer?
Rioters are to blame for rioting. Thugs are responsible for their own thuggery. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask who filled their empty heads with such ideas.
How febrile has the atmosphere become that a false claim, spread online by far-right malcontents and public figures who should know better, can spark a week of soul-crushing disorder?
The swift administration of justice may bring some short-term sense to the senseless, but what about the longer-term issues? The culture that has created so many perpetually angry people, arguing with strangers online one minute, trying to set fire to a hotel the next.
For several days, many media outlets struggled to find the right words to describe what was happening in towns and cities across the country. Often, we were told that “protests” had got out of hand. This was not a wave of protest — it was a wave of lawless, far-right inspired rioting.
Hang on, am I at a riot?
Perhaps some of the people who turned up in Southport, Aldershot, Rotherham and elsewhere really did think they were at a legitimate protest. Perhaps the near-total absence of banners, or any expression of political views, didn’t strike them as odd. The racist chanting maybe passed them by.
Surely, though, once the bricks are flying through the air, shops are being smashed and looted, fires are burning around them, the thought must occur “hang on, am I at a riot?” Remain beyond that point, and your culpability is certain.
This violence followed years of increasingly angry and intolerant rhetoric from newspapers, radio and TV presenters on the hard right. A constant drumbeat of stories stoking fears of immigrants and minority communities.
“They” are not like “us.” “They” have different loyalties, “they” hate us and our way of life, “they” are taking advantage of us, encouraged by a “woke mob.”
Legitimate questions about the actions of individuals have been used as evidence that whole communities cannot be trusted.
Initially cheered on by the kind of politicians who will say anything to be noticed, such views moved into the mainstream, hostility to migrants became government policy, senior ministers began to amplify views previously confined to the shadowy far-right.
An MP who, as a minister in the last government, had cartoon murals removed from a child asylum centre in a seeming act of performative cruelty, now says people should be “immediately” arrested for saying “God is great” — if they say it in Arabic. He remains a leading contender to be the next Leader of the Opposition.
As this crisis lurched on, commentators who have cheered from the sidelines insisted the rioters smashing up shops and beating up people with brown skin weren’t fascists, they were concerned citizens, pushed to breaking point by a system that never listened to them. The General Election, held just a month earlier, presumably passed them by.
Controversialists drive engagement
The media cannot escape blame for this. Yes, the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph have been a comfortable home for hard-right commentators who endlessly blame immigrants, lawyers and judges for the nation’s ills.
But ostensibly mainstream radio and TV has happily embraced the world of the professional controversialist.
They are the outspoken commentators of both left and right, happy (for a fee) to come on your programme and say something that outrages at least half the audience.
Producers love them because they “drive engagement,” sparking furious debates on social media. They may not know very much about the topic of the day, but I bet they reckon something.
That precious engagement drives the algorithm to amplify the most divisive content still further, and that engagement is frequently now the sole metric by which a programme’s success is judged.
Some of these controversialists, sensing they have gone too far, now try to row back but often condemn disorder “on all sides,” the same moral equivalence Donald Trump tried when the far-right turned up in American city centres.
Of course, this includes GB News, Talk TV and the like, regulators inexplicably standing by as they breach basic rules on impartiality.
But the same BBC that has a disinformation reporter and a unit devoted to verifying online claims produces both daily and weekly political discussions built around largely-pointless heated debate, hashtags perpetually on-screen to encourage viewers to join in — two-minutes’ hate for everyone.
If the media we consume isn’t civil, how can we be civilised?
