Manchester Arena attack: how the media responded
From the powerful to the tasteless, Ray Snoddy examines how the media – in all its forms – handled the atrocity in Manchester
The Manchester bombing has demonstrated eloquently both the best and the worst of the internet and social media.
Twitter showed once again how fast its users get onto a breaking news story with almost instantaneous coverage of events in the Manchester Arena from the time when it was thought that something benign and minor was happening, such as an exploding speaker.
Twitter says there was then “incredible” use of the service to offer help, shelter and support to those affected. Amid the carnage and the missing youngsters there were also the positive, heart-warming stories coming out of the city such as free taxi rides home being offered for the stranded.
Users could also follow the Manchester police Twitter account for the most up-to date authentic information. Facebook users could check into a special service to record the fact that they were safe – something particularly valuable in the disruption and chaos of such an outrage where young children can be separated from their parents.
A perfect demonstration of how powerful instant communications can be using smartphones and apps.
And then there is the other side. Those who use the internet and social media to make the mayhem and despair worse by deliberately spreading false information.
It gives them too much dignity and status to give them the official titles of trolls.
As The Times reported, fabricated “missing” posts carrying a mixture of celebrities and genuinely missing young people were shared all over Twitter and Facebook and even made it into the mainstream media.
The motives of those who posted pictures from an old training exercise or from the Bataclan theatre in Paris purporting to be from the Manchester Arena will have ranged from making money to making mischief or stirring up controversy.
Then there are the professional trolls. Did Katie Hopkins really call for “a final solution” on Twitter or Allison Pearson advocate interning thousands of terror suspects? Internment worked really well in Northern Ireland didn’t it.
We will probably have to accept the good and the bad of the social media for some time to come in the sure and certain knowledge that there will be more emphasis on news and live events on social media in future rather than less.
Snapchat has had a keyword-based system for stitching together collections of associated stories using both hashtags and locations for some time.
By chance this week Instagram has just launched a similar service although it’s based on algorithms rather than keywords and there is no human editor in sight. Watch out for coming pandemonium.
And so far the combined skills of the social media and the international security services have had little success in taking down the jihadi websites – assuming that is what they want to do.
Even mainstream broadcasters will find it difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with the speed and range of the social media “news” outpourings just as Facebook will need every one of its planned 3,000 new “reviewers” to manage any sort of quality control.
For newspapers circumstances are particularly difficult for events that happen after 10.30pm and there was no mention of the Manchester bombing in the subscription copy of The Times delivered to a London suburb, although the copies of The Daily Mail and The Sun that came from the newsagent had caught up very well.
Day two saw a wide range of powerful, emotional and actual headlines from the Daily Mirror’s ‘Pictures of Innocents Killed by Evil’ to the ‘Libya Terror Link’ of The Times, while the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail majored on ‘Troops on the Street’.
Wall-to-wall-coverage by the broadcasters carried its own perils as they all move to one story, virtually to the exclusion of all others.
This leads inevitably to endless, almost mind-numbing repetition as the story stubbornly refuses to move as fast as the broadcasters would like. It gets worst when this is combined with what seems sometimes like an almost random selection of guests saying mundane things. Any talking head is better than no talking head.
So it was that the distinguished novelist Howard Jacobson found himself on Newsnight because he had family in Manchester but was reduced to recommending that Mancunians should continue to entertain themselves. You knew what he meant but…
Broadcasters’ propensity for getting young girls into the studio and asking them to relive their experiences also turned some on Twitter a little queasy, but in the end the story has to be told. The most positive role for the media overall in such a tragedy, where ordinary words hardly do and come up short, is in projecting the sense of a strong community trying to come together despite everything. Displaying – on the whole – generosity of spirit.
The hope may sound hollow at times in the face of the dreadful reality but at least the effort is being made and there is also the issue of a trust that flows from a mainstream media doing its job well and without the accompaniment of malevolent trolls.
By chance the bomb in Manchester came as the European Broadcasting Union released the findings of its Trust in Media 2017 survey showing that levels of trust in the mainstream media are rising across Europe.
Following Trump and Brexit, unsurprisingly the internet and social media have been going in the opposite direction.
Broadcasting remains the most trusted media with radio being trusted by 59 per cent of EU citizens and television on 50 per cent while trust is even higher in the Nordic region with 82 per cent of Finns trusting radio and 78 per cent television.
By contrast only 36 per cent of EU citizens say they tend to trust the internet with a mere 21 per cent saying they trust social media.
There will inevitably be political consequences from the Manchester attack and it will be surprising if more funds are not immediately made available for security services.
The impact will almost certainly be positive for Prime Minister Theresa May who can use the media to appear presidential at the same time as the fall-out from her U-turn on social care funding is buried by events.
A fundraising page set up by the Manchester Evening News in aid of the victims of Monday’s terror attacks has topped £1m in just 24 hours. You can donate here.