Ian Burrell wonders whether the 2024 riots will be a moment of transformation for the UK popular press

August 12, 2024 6:00 am(Updated 6:02 am)

Will the riots of 2024 be a moment of transformation for the UK popular press, when it saw the need to dial down its tone and become more responsible for the potential impact of its headlines?

This might be wishful thinking and run counter to the essential attention-grabbing qualities of tabloid journalism. But there is a commercial imperative to these news outlets moving to a higher moral ground and their publishers appear to have realised that.

In a notable editorial last week, The Sun attempted to draw a clear line in the sand as it blamed social media platforms for provoking the violence.

“It’s time to finally clean up the social media sewer,” it demanded. It pointed to the “dangerous disinformation” and “peddling of hate” on socials, and piously noted that “traditional media remains heavily regulated, rightly abiding by strict legal rules around the reporting of crime and disorder”.

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The Murdoch tabloid has been unambiguous in its disgust for the far-right rioters who attacked hotels housing asylum seekers and threw bricks at police. “Day of shame” was one splash headline. “Nailed & jailed” was its unsympathetic view of those convicted.

But some who participated in the protests might have felt let down, given The Sun’s history of provocative immigration stories, including reporting that “migrants storm Kent beaches”.

Meanwhile, far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is battling the Daily Mail, which pictured him pool-side at a luxury Cyprus hotel and accused him of “stoking riots from his sunbed”.

Robinson, who accuses the paper of wrecking his holiday and putting his children in danger, posted a sinister threat to three of its journalists that he had traced their addresses, warning “you know I’ve got images of everyone in your family”.

The Mail too has been at pains to distinguish itself from social content. It ran an exposé of a “Russian-linked fake news website”, Channel3 Now, that falsely claimed that the suspect in the killings of the three girls in Southport was an asylum seeker who arrived on a small boat.

The paper then ran an editorial over X owner Elon Musk’s claim that the UK faces “inevitable” civil war. It accused Musk of acting like an “excitable child” and said the violent protesters “are a small, moronic minority”.

For Robinson acolytes, and some of the Mail’s millions of readers, this might have been confusing. The Mail accompanied its riot coverage with a tagline “Tinderbox Britain” but it has a record of incendiary coverage of immigration.

In a 2016 study, journalist Liz Gerard found that the Mail splashed on immigration stories 122 times in six years. That is a lot of tinder.

Of course, media has a duty to report on our dysfunctional immigration system. I recall visiting the Home Office immigration department 25 years ago and being shocked by chaotic mountains of cardboard files. The system’s inefficiency continues into the digital age.

Press coverage of immigration slowed after the Brexit referendum, then rose as trafficking gangs switched tactics from lorries to small boats in late 2018. The highly visible new arrivals were easy to film. “That change of strategy created a different way of seeing things,” says Rob McNeil of the University of Oxford’s Migratory Observatory.

A spike in arrivals from Albania in 2022, and a stunt for sending asylum claimants to Rwanda, kept the issue on the media agenda.

Under previous owner Richard Desmond, the Daily Express saw immigration scare stories as a good way to sell papers. In Gerard’s study, it led the pack with 179 splashes.

After being acquired by publisher Reach it tempered its coverage, until a recent resurgence around small boats.

In reporting the riots, the Express has appeared conflicted. It attacked Scotland Yard chief Mark Rowley over claims of “two-tier policing” but then reported anti-fascist protests as “United Britain stands firm against thugs”.

There is much backtracking going on here. In recent years, these papers have relied on social media to aid their transition to digital publishing and drive traffic to their open websites. But news titles which previously pandered to social algorithms with clickbait, now want to be seen as offering something valuable, trustworthy and distinct.

A new digital markets regulator has powers to compel tech companies to pay for news content on their platforms.

If this leads to more responsible tabloid journalism that avoids the divisive intentions of the worst social media agitprop, then that will be a good thing. We can at least hope.