Roy Greenslade,

media commentator of The Guardian,

Delivered to "Kneading The Story",
a conference organised by the
North West Institute

on March 20, 1999 in Derry...

The people who live in Britain are largely ignorant of the conflict in the north of Ireland. Of course, they know about violence in general. They know about the IRA. They know about loyalist para-militaries. They certainly know about bombings that once took place in England. They know there's a peace process. They know about the saintly Mo Mowlam.  But there's a complete absence of context, almost no understanding of the history and, most significant of all, no sense of the complete picture.  For the overwhelming majority of people who depend for their news on tabloid newspapers, that isn't surprising. Because, for the past 30 years, the reporting has been patchy, partial and partisan.  That's been particularly true throughout the 1990s.

This past week has been a classic and tragic example.  Rosemary Nelson's horrific murder was surely one of the most important incidents to occur in Northern Ireland in this past year. Though it is distasteful to make such comparisons, it ranks alongside the Omagh bombing and the murder of the Quinn children during last year's Drumcree stand-off in terms of its significance.   Apart from the human tragedy itself, there are far-reaching implications for the peace process. It blasts wide open the so-called loyalist ceasefire. It impinges on the continuing Unionist attempt to disarm the IRA. It calls into question the activities of the RUC, and therefore has an impact on Chris Patten's commission of inquiry.  In newspaper jargon, it was - and is - a major story.

It is one of those stories which, apart from the description of the act itself, the reportage if you like, it demands contextual analysis.  This is especially true in Britain because it is British people, the British electorate, which controls what happens in Northern Ireland. The voters of Britain, the newspaper readers of Britain, elect governments which - on their behalf - carry through political and security policy in these six counties. So it's surely vital that these voters and readers have the kind of information which will enable them to make up their minds whether the government is doing the right thing in their name.

After all, they're deluged with coverage - news stories and feature articles - day after day about the economy, the health service, the state of education, the level of immigration and so on. Enough information reaches people for them to make an informed decision about how to vote, whether to support this band of protesters or that lobby group.  It may be an ineffectual form of government, but that's another question altogether. The point is, through the media - by that I mean the totality of the media:papers, TV and radio - people are able, over time, to pick up information about life in Britain.

But Northern Ireland is, to the British reader of tabloids, a truly foreign country. In other words, for 30 million people in Britain - that's the approximate readership of the six main tabloids every day - it exists only as a place apart., on the fringes of their consciousness. When things do happen and do get reported, they don't quite make sense, except in a rather crude way. Needless to say, it's not therefore surprising that British people have pretty crude views about the situation here and favour crude remedies.

Let me give you some idea of what I mean from this week's papers. After Rosemary's Nelson's killing on Monday, Tuesday morning's London-based national papers were full of the story. Well, up to a point they were. It was front page news for the serious broadsheets and for the two  middle-market tabloids.  But it obviously wasn't quite cataclysmic enough for the two which sell the most. So 2.3 million buyers of the Mirror and 3.7 million buyers of the Sun gained the impression that it wasn't really much of a story after all.  The Sun did manage to mention it on page one but the Mirror   found no room for the murder on page one, what with an immensely earth-shattering story about James Hewitt and Posh Spice and a Cheltenham race blurb. So it appeared on page 2.

But that's only the space. What is missing from the tabloids is detail and context. While the broadsheets explained why Mrs Nelson was such an important figure, relating her career and so on, the tabloids relied on the kind of journalistic shorthand which reinforces prejudices and, incidentally, is often inaccurate. So the Mirror told us confidently (in the third paragraph of the grudging 20 paragraphs it devoted to the story): "The solicitor, who made her name defending IRA men, had to be cut free from the wreckage..."
Keep that in mind. Note how in just one sentence the bias is entwined into reportage. Note also the form of journalese... "made her name".  What does that suggest?   That she was seeking spurious fame, perhaps? That she wasn't quite up to representing ordinary people?  Needless to say, the mention of IRA is clearly designed to smear Mrs Nelson in the eyes of the British reader.  Without the need to be explicit, it is suggesting to readers that they shouldn't waste their emotions. She was "connected" to the IRA. Readers need no more. The acronym IRA needs no explanation. Indeed, the very fact that Mrs Nelson's murder isn't front page news is already an indication of the paper's view of her.  She didn't merit it.

We also ought to take account of what wasn't in the tabloids. The best way of illustrating that is to consider the following day's papers. It's a tabloid habit in the aftermath of murders to focus attention on the bereaved. Feature writers are dispatched to write poignant pieces on the family, particularly if it includes young children. Under a series of pictures and a headline, most usually a quotation from a grief-stricken family member of close friend, there is a lengthy emotional piece about the loss of a loved one. Columnists also weigh in with their views on the circumstances surrounding the murder: did the police do enough? What can we do to prevent it reoccurring? Can security be improved?

So what did we get on Wednesday? There were certainly follow-up stories, mostly about the RUC Chief Constable's decision to call in outsiders to hold an inquiry because of allegations of collusion.  This made the front page of the Telegraph, which also carried a piece inside on the RUC's crisis of confidence. The Times, Guardian and Independent gave full pages inside to that story and to pieces on threats to Mrs Nelson. The Guardian also carried a three-page feature on Mrs Nelson plus an op. ed. page article. It and the Independent also carried letters to the editor. The Express and the Mail each devoted a page to the subject. The Mirror gave it a few paragraphs next to a huge two-page inquest story about an boy who died from a fainting game.

Then again, he was an Eton schoolboy! And the Sun, Britain's biggest-selling daily, what did it report? Nothing, not a peep. No follow-up story.

In fact, not one tabloid feature appeared. No tabloid columnist touched on the subject. No letters were published in tabloids. In popular paper terms, it was just a one-off story. It didn't require explanation or explication. A woman who helped terrorists had died at the hands of terrorists. Just another Ulster story. Not really significant.

Then came the murder of loyalist para-military Frank Curry, and Thursday's papers were even more revelatory of the British media agenda, showing a distinct split between the broadsheets. Both the Guardian and the Independent thought this death of such magnitude that they devoted most of their front pages to it. The Times and the Telegraph didn't share this view and placed it on page 2. I would hazard a guess that those choices reveal the four papers' differing views on the peace process and their "reading" of the impact of the Curry shooting.  Was it helpful or not to their opposing political agendas in relation to Northern Ireland?

Broadly, The Guardian and The Independent favour the entrance of Sinn Fein into the assembly executive without the need for the IRA to give up arms in advance. They would take the view that a second murder inside a week by loyalists was proof that it's a waste of time to expect the IRA to disarm.

Therefore, it's helpful to highlight the story on page one. On the other hand, The Times and the Telegraph are both sceptical about the process, arguing that there must be decommissioning. Therefore, they wished to play down its significance. Hence the choice of page 2.

The tabloids, which gauge almost every story in terms of sales rather than importance, treated it as a relatively minor matter. It got a reasonable show in the Express, but on pages 28 and 29. It made the page 19 lead on the Daily Mail. The Mirror gave it one paragraph at the bottom of page 2.  And the Sun? Once again, nothing. Not a line. A man is murdered in a place which The Sun regularly points out is part of the UK, but it doesn't warrant a mention. Yesterday (Friday), the papers covered Mrs Nelson's funeral. Now this would normally be an occasion for specialist writers to write purple prose across two pages with big pictures. In fact, the coverage was patchy. There was appropriate front page coverage in the Telegraph, Independent and Guardian.

The Mirror also thought the politics at least deserved a page one mention but, scandalously, it published just eight paragraphs on the funeral on page 2.  The Times, Mail  and Express did relatively little on inside pages, as did the Sun which placed it on page 10. The message in these papers was that they were fulfilling an obligation.

So there's the lesson from just one week. The more popular the paper, the less the coverage about the north of Ireland.  And when violence is covered, when editors do think killings need to be covered, they appear to readers like bolts from the blue. There cannot be any understanding about the growing tensions which lead to incidents because there's no continuity of coverage.  Only really major events get published. And this is also true of the broadsheets too.  The daily problems around the Six Counties, the mayhem which is part of the fabric of life, is rarely reported.

For instance, eleven days ago the Irish Times carried a three column story which told how new dissident loyalist groups were on the rampage. The report told of three Catholic families who had just received bombs - not bomb threats, bombs.  It also said that the groups known as the Red Hand Defenders and the Orange Volunteers had carried out 20 similar bomb attacks on Catholic homes, pubs and churches in recent months.  Now I believe these kinds of attacks are very relevant indeed to our understanding of the situation. They provide a context in which we can understand only too well why Catholic people continue to feel aggrieved, why the police force isn't trusted to keep the peace, why - to the disbelief of both British people and British politicians - many nationalists aren't pressing the IRA to disarm.

Of course, these previous attacks on Catholics also provide a context for the attack on Mrs Nelson.

Not a word about these loyalist attacks has appeared in a London-based British newspaper. This isn't new. Down the years hundreds if not thousands of incidents have happened here without a word appearing in newspapers, incidents that if they happen in England would merit yards of copy over several days. It's one of the features of the coverage of the conflict in the past 20 years, especially since papers have cut staff and given up having permanent correspondents over here. They rely now on freelancers who rarely get their copy into the English editions. The editorial mantra is London newsrooms is that "Ulster doesn't sell."  And sales are everything.

Okay, you may say, but so what? The opinion-formers read broadsheets, so they are informed. If people buy tabloids and choose to be ignorant, does it matter? Anyway, doesn't TV news make up for it?  Well, my contention is that, whether you like tabloids or not, they can bring substantial pressure to bear on the government. They're able to mobilise huge numbers of people.

It's surely significant that New Labour set out to woo the tabloids before the last election, and continues to woo them, for precisely that reason. So the long absence of material about the Irish conflict, and the subsequent absence of pressure, has been of immense value to successive British governments.  The conflict has been patchily portrayed in a black-and-white way which has enabled governments to do as they wished without the least pressure from the British people.  In their turn, the people - the newspaper readers - have been happy in their ignorance.  They have been convinced over time that there's nothing to be done, it's nothing to do with them, and anyway it's all boring. Most importantly, it doesn't impinge on their lives any longer.

Of course, it once did, when bombs were going off in Britain. But that illustrates another aspect of the tabloid coverage. Patriotism. British national daily papers, with the exception of perhaps only one, possibly two, see the Irish conflict in terms of their obligation to the British state.

In some cases this takes the form of a simplistic chauvinism: our boys, whatever they do, are always right.  Union flag front pages, and so on. No soldier who shoots an unarmed civilian can ever be guilty. A shoot-to-kill policy is perfectly acceptable.   It's fine for the SAS to gun down three people in Gibraltar.

But I'm not thinking of that overt example of blind patriotic fervour. The patriotism I'm referring to is altogether more subtle.  I guess we could call it intrigue, but that's too conspiratorial.  It's my contention that both newspaper coverage and, to some extent, broadcasting coverage, is closely related to contemporaneous British government policy, both in terms of the quantity and the bias.  In other words, I am contending that editors have been influenced in how they present material about the conflict by whatever the government policy initiative has been at any given time. I'm not suggesting that editors are called in and briefed by prime ministers.  That hasn't been necessary.  British editors have been happy to go along with Parliament, especially during the long years of bipartisan agreement, because they couldn't be bothered to do much else.

Indeed, the only instance of a newspaper breaking ranks with this phenomenon has been the super-patriotic pro-Unionist Daily Telegraph, which has always opposed the peace process and was sceptical about the Anglo-Irish agreement from the start.  Again, that's another story.  Let's concentrate for the moment on the central thesis.   Needless to say, you require some proof of this generalisation. To do so, I'm going to look at some other murders which have occurred, and the way in which they were covered.

Let me go back to March 20th, 1993.  That was the day a bomb went off in Warrington, killing two young boys.  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. Political analysts Paul Bew and Gordon Gillespie 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 of the deaths created a wave of revulsion.

On March 25th, just five days after the Warrington bombing, four Catholic men -- James Kelly, James McKenna, Gerry Dalrymple and Noel O'Kane -- were shot dead as they arrived for work at Castlerock, Co Derry. That same evening, 17-year-old Damien Walsh was shot in the back in west Belfast. You might have thought these murders would have been seized on by the press and TV. Instead, they were virtually ignored. To say they received scant coverage in the London-based press is to redefine the word scant.

The Castlerock murders were covered in
five lines in the Sun,
two paragraphs in Today,
three paragraphs in the Express,
three paragraphs in the Daily Star,
four paragraphs in the Mirror and
five paragraphs in the Mail,
which passed it off as "a revenge attack".   Damien's murder wasn't even mentioned in three of these papers.

The broadsheets, didn't do much better. They gave very little space to these "sectarian assassinations", as they were called. That's a telling shorthand for uninteresting, run-of-the-mill, not worth a thought.  No paper referred to Castlerock, or the killing of Damien as a massacre of innocents. Meanwhile, the Warrington coverage continued just as before.

Nor would deprived readers have had much chance to discover what happened on TV. The main BBC bulletins placed small items way down the running order. Yet, large headlines were still being devoted to the aftermath of the Warrington bombing. It was the day Tim Parry finally died of his injuries and a nation was asked to mourn for him.  They weren't even aware of Damien's murder by a loyalist gang.

It was a defining moment for me. The British media was treating news in Northern Ireland differently from the way it treated news in England. Though I felt for the parents of the Warrington boys, I didn't have any lesser feelings for the relatives of the Castlerock victims or for Damien. Why then were they not accorded the same respect by the media?

When I wrote about that disparity in the Guardian my article was spotted by BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight programme and, fair play to them, I was given a chance to make a film about it. This gave me an opportunity to ask some of the key decision-makers in newspapers and TV why they had acted as they had.

The answers were both fascinating and horrifying. The editor of BBC's 9 O'clock News stuttered that Warrington was "extremely unusual" because it involved children and one of the reasons it attracted attention was, wait for it, "because the parents were extremely articulate."  I ought to tell you that Damien's family are articulate too. But that's irrelevant. Does TV decide its coverage of murder by the articulacy of the bereaved?

Why, I asked, were the northern Irish murders less newsworthy? Well, there was Heseltine's white paper on the future of the coal industry that day. And, to be frank, death in Northern Ireland is common and, here's the nub, he said: "The news agenda is driven to a large extent by unusualness, rarity and surprise, as well as significance."  The then editor of the Daily Mirror took a similar view. He said there was a difference between "news as an extraordinary event and merely chronicling news", and he added: "It makes my flesh creep to say this, but what has, over the last 25 years, become rather more commonplace in that region of the United Kingdom was shockingly out of place, and out of the ordinary, indeed extraordinary in a Cheshire town. And that's no justification but it is, if you like, an explanation."

The then news editor of the Guardian, an Irishman by chance, was much more honest. "Warrington," he said, "was just down the road, part of quote 'mainland' unquote Britain. It was an attack on us in our country. Northern Ireland is another country. Now that may not reflect the legal and constitutional reality, but I think that's how people really do see it." He also referred to a sort of weariness about the conflict, which is so distressing that "it's hard for anyone to retain an interest."

So there we are. A neat summation by three key people in the media about the reason for giving Warrington maximum space and neglecting the deaths of five other people. In the studio discussion afterwards, The Times's northern Irish correspondent, Ed Gorman, was astonishingly frank. He was quitting his post after four years, he said, because he found it "corrupting" to work for a paper which failed to give adequate space to the story.  He said: "The really depressing part of my job, and other correspondents of quality dailies here find it too, is that you give up. After a while, you become an agent in indifference."

In the summer of 1997, a similar juxtaposition occurred. On June 16th, Constable John Graham and Reserve Constable David Johnston were shot dead by the IRA in Lurgan.  It was, said the Mail, an "atrocity". The Times called it "a cold-blooded double murder". It was front page news for every paper and the lead story on both BBC TV and radio. The political reaction was swift and uncompromising. The British government severed links with Sinn Fein; the Irish Taoiseach was outraged, as was President Clinton. Almost every paper wrote leading articles of condemnation.

On July 15th, 18-year-old Bernadette Martin, who worked in Lurgan, was shot four times in the head as she slept at her boyfriend's house in the village of Aghalee, Co Antrim. This horrific, premeditated murder was imbued with the kind of drama that normally sets tabloid pulses racing. It had a Romeo and Juliet element in that she had apparently been murdered simply because she was a Catholic in love with a Protestant. Here was an innocent girl killed for the basest of reasons.

Yet a report of Bernadette's killing appeared on only one front page, and it was neglected altogether by four national papers. Her death was even overlooked by that night's BBC Nine O'clock News. It did receive publicity in later days, but it never approached the scale of the RUC deaths, nor did it engender the purple prose used to describe them. There were no leading articles about Bernadette, no headlines suggesting that peace talks were being threatened, no quotes were sought from the political leaders of Britain, Ireland and the USA .

When I contacted editors, I got the expected replies. In their eyes, tragic though the slaughter of Bernadette undoubtedly was, it was just another statistic in an old story with too many tragedies. But this time the excuses didn't ring true. For a start, the Lurgan policemen were the 300th and 301st RUC officers to die: weren't they just another statistic too?

After more study, I soon discovered that different standards have been applied in the reporting of deaths throughout the troubles. A pattern emerged, which I've since called a "hierarchy of death", a series of ranks in which coverage is clearly related to the status or religion of the victim.

In the first rank - getting the most prominent coverage - are British people killed in Britain. In Warrington this was compounded by the tender years of the victims. But it's always been the case that violence, or even the threat of violence in Britain, is greeted with huge headlines.

In the second rank are members of the security forces, whether army or RUC. These murders have usually been reported on front pages and have generated leading articles and follow-up features. In almost all cases, the funerals have been covered fully, providing another opportunity for reflection on the need for action.

Sometimes prison officers have been included in the second rank. Generally, though, they've slipped into the third category. In this third rank are the civilian victims of republicans. There are occasions - if the victims are young, say, or if the numbers are great, and I'm thinking of Enniskillen here, or if the political situation seems to demand it - then the agenda has pushed them into second, and even the first rank.

In the fourth rank are members of the IRA, or Sinn Fein, killed by the security forces. Certain key dramatic events - such as Gibraltar and Loughgall - change the order of priorities, but most IRA deaths get little initial coverage.

And, finally, in the fifth rank, are the victims of loyalist paramilitaries, whether they are Catholics, Protestants, IRA members or innocent passers-by. In the months after Bernadette's death, three Catholics - Robert Hamill, John Slane and James Morgan - died with barely a mention in the British press.

I looked back to try to find examples when these fifth-rank murders have been elevated to the first rank, with front page splashes and two-page spreads, and concerned quotes from politicians, and leading articles. It proved impossible to find a single example. Until, of course, the murders of Quinn children at Ballymoney last summer, and now the murder of Rosemary Nelson.

Why have loyalist murders suddenly become front page news?  The answer is clear: the newspapers are dancing to a tune composed by the British government. In most cases, this may be unconscious.  Over the past years, loyalist killings were an embarrassment to the government and, by extension, the media. They didn't fit in with the overall propaganda requirement to demonise the IRA and republicans. They didn't fit with the necessary mind-set. Of course, they had to be accomodated in some way. So they were passed off as tit-for-tat killings, what David Ervine chillingly and cynically calls "returing the serve."  Loyalist murders were viewed as the result of IRA violence, not the cause of it.  The fact that almost all loyalist murders were random attacks on innocent Catholics was upsetting, but by not devoting much space to them, they were dismissed. On the other hand, when loyalists killed known republicans, that was all right. They were doing what was expected of them. And there wasn't any need to report it at length because who would have sympathy with republicans anyway.

But the tide has suddenly turned. The IRA is on ceasefire. The British government has no longer any need to marginalise or demonise republicans, not for now anyway. (If the peace process breaks down we may see a reversion to that old agenda). For the moment, holding together the peace process is the most essential government requirement.  The media doesn't need telling that this is the case. It too realises that the peace process is the only game in town. It has to be supported.  So the killings of the Quinn children and of Mrs Nelson should receive at least some coverage.

As I started by saying, even this is inadequate.  It still hasn't provided the British people with enough information. It remains partial. It's an indictment of the way in which British newspapers have reported this conflict. It may not be intrigue but it might as well be. The result is just the same: widespread public ignorance  because the media just can't be bothered to devote the resources, human and financial, or the editorial space, to the conflict.

ENDS