This is going to be a difficult post to write. The stabbing of young children at a summer holiday dance class in the tucked-away seaside town of Southport in the north of England last week was truly shocking. Three young children killed, others seriously injured. For days, everyone was talking about it. Trying to make sense of it. Not on the scale of some of the school shootings in the US, but heart-rending all the same.
From my viewing and reading, it was clear that the UK media reacted quickly to the breaking story. The main evening TV news programmes were presented from the police barrier just up the road from where the killings had taken place. The British newspaper front pages also caught the mood of the country. The Guardian, ‘You can’t help but cry’. The Express, “Why were they taken from us?”. I think that the coverage on the day was, in general, sensitive and measured. It then developed into a more complicated story, of course, as the killings became embroiled in the UK migration and immigration debate, and led to street violence and riots in Southport and other British towns and cities.
But staying with the original news of the stabbings, there’s no doubt, in my mind, that events like that are acutely difficult to cover when they first break. Getting the right balance between reporting and intrusion is challenging. It’s a fine line. I know this from first-hand experience.
Dunblane – 1996
On Wednesday, March 13th 1996, I was nine months into my new job as Editor of what we then called ITN News on ITV. I can remember standing in the middle of the newsroom in London, chatting to colleagues, at about 10.30am. The cycle of morning news meetings had ended. The ITN1 machine was quietly ticking over, with the teams getting TV packages and interviews sorted out for the day’s bulletins, the Lunchtime News, the Early Evening News, and the much-watched and respected News at Ten.
But all that changed in an instant. A Press Association flash alert appeared on the newsroom monitors, of a shooting in a school at a small Scottish town called Dunblane. The newsroom abruptly swung into action – assigning reporters, crews, and edit and links trucks to the breaking story.
By the end of that day in March 1996, we knew that it had been the UK’s deadliest mass shooting – the killing of 16 young children and their teacher in a small-town primary school. I remember Trevor McDonald reading out the ‘bongs’ of News at Ten that night. His first headline: “The class that died, massacred by a crazed gunman”.
Filming
Five months later in August 1996, at the annual Edinburgh TV festival, I was on a panel discussing the way the media had reacted to the story. I was involved in two points of discussion.
Firstly, were we right on ITV to include a sequence of images of parents and local residents gathering to hear news about what had happened?
On News at Ten, the video was part of the ‘lead story’ package by one of our top reporters, Colin Baker. It was a powerful report, and won several awards at the following year’s Royal Television Society annual news event. Colin let the pictures of Dunblane tell the story. His script was calmly delivered, but had immense impact. Over a picture of parents being reunited with their children, he wrote movingly: “These are the ones tonight who may give thanks. Evil touched them, but just brushed past”.
I recently spoke to Colin about the coverage. He said the journalists and crews in Dunblane were all, understandably, deeply shocked by the event, and it was an emotionally draining story to cover.
All these years later, I think we were right to show what were carefully selected pictures of the scenes on the public road outside the school – the images matched the harrowing nature of the story. I still feel that it would have been wrong to mask or dilute what actually happened on that dreadful day.
Too many journalists?
The second issue of debate at Edinburgh in 1996 was whether there were too many press and TV journalists and crews in the small town of Dunblane in the days after the killings – and whether they were too persistent in trying to get interviews and exclusives. One report said there were about 600 journalists, crews and other media staff in a town of 7,000. It didn’t help that links and satellite vans were a lot larger in the 1990s than they are these days, and used more staff to operate them.
At the Edinburgh TV event, Pat Greenhill, a spokesperson for the Dunblane community, said that she was swamped by media demands. Certainly, in the days after the shootings, we became aware that the intense worldwide journalistic attention on the town was indeed starting to cause local resentment. In the end, all media organisations, print, radio and TV, voluntarily agreed to pull out of Dunblane after 5 days, from the Sunday after the killings. Pat Greenhill praised that decision at the Edinburgh discussion.
Southport seems to be different, interestingly. The TV crews and journalists are still there, well after the event. It’s a much bigger town than Dunblane, of course. But I do wonder whether in the mobile era we are just all used to having cameras photographing and filming us?
Social Media
Of course, what was massively different from Southport compared to Dunblane in 1996 was the dramatic role last week of social media, and how it helped stir up riots and violent protests in UK towns and cities.
Last Thursday, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he wants the British government to work with tech firms to tackle online misinformation. This is clearly easier said than done. I will be interested to see in the coming months how the British government follows up on that ambitious statement.