Sarah’s murder exposes TV news failings
Background of campaigning groups wasn’t even investigated
IEXPECT television news reporting to be informed, incisive and investigative. But sadly I am often disappointed. Last weekend was no exception. After the murder of Sarah Everard a feminist group named Reclaim These Streets organised a vigil at Clapham Common.
This was said to be in breach of Covid-19 regulations and the group cancelled its event, instead urging people to remember Sarah Everard in other ways.
Nevertheless, several thousand people gathered on Saturday night at the bandstand on Clapham Common and the rest has been reported endlessly. Or has it?
We were told by reporters people just turned up around 6pm, the time of the cancelled vigil. But was it something that just happened, unplanned and uncoordinated?
In fact, earlier that afternoon a collective of radical “direct actionists” called Sisters Uncut tweeted: “Meet at 6pm at the bandstand on Clapham Common.”
Those attending were told to bring their “rage” and were advised: “Don’t speak with the police!”
This was the organisation behind the Saturday night gathering and it was able to draw on its membership, with three groups in London and at least a dozen more scattered across England.
Not everyone at the gathering was a member of Sisters Uncut, but many were, and many others came in response to its invitation. Yet this organisation received barely a mention in news coverage.
Do mainstream television reporters not have access to the internet?
Have they never heard of search engines?
Even a quick look at the Sisters Uncut website should have raised some questions.
Their homepage carries an inspirational quotation by Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, a Marxist urban guerrilla gang that operated in America during the 1970s.
Shakur was convicted of the murder of a police officer during a shoot-out in New Jersey in 1973, but escaped from prison, fled to Cuba and is now on the FBI’S list of most wanted terrorists.
By Sunday afternoon another crowd had gathered in London, with assorted anarchists and Trotskyists on hand to carry the placards demanding “Defund the police”, an euphemism for “Abolish the police”, while others carried the acronym ACAB, or “All cops are b ****** s”.
The murder of Sarah Everard and the events of the weekend raise several issues.
The first is that of violence, especially against women, and the factors that contribute to it.
The second is about freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, and that includes not only the freedom to protest in public, but also the public freedom to preach and to parade.
Freedom of assembly and freedom of expression are basic rights and should be protected.
The irony here is that many of those who were demanding the right to assemble were from the “cancel culture” crowd, who would seek to ban or silence anyone who expresses a view contrary to their own.
The third is about police tactics and how to police public demonstrations, especially when some demonstrators with an anti-police agenda set out to provoke the police.
It is more than half-a-century since the Grosvenor Square riots and police tactics have evolved, but so too have the challenges.
The fourth is how such situations are reported and the need for investigative reporting.
We know very well, especially from experience in Northern Ireland, of the power of a single photograph to set a narrative.
But with 24-hour news, there has to be more to television reporting than that.
Finally, the events of the weekend have started a bitter war of words between two feminist factions, with the radical Sisters Uncut being described as “real feminists” and Reclaim These Streets now dismissed as “fake feminists”.
Yet, that bitter feminist infighting has never made it on to our screens.
We should sympathise with the family and friends of Sarah Everard, but we also need a thoughtful conversation about the issues which have been raised by the murder and the subsequent protests.