Writing Wrongs: Mainstream Media & Grenfell

The mainstream media will return to North Kensington this week for the seventh anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, having collectively failed to hold the powerful to account, contributing to the denial of justice. Here are 10 criticisms of their coverage…

1. They don’t quite know where they are. The legacy media regularly calls North Kensington ‘Notting Hill,’ saving them the effort of understanding and explaining local culture. Their readers already know there’s a Hugh Grant film and there’s a Carnival, and they don’t go beyond these caricatures. When a journalist uses up their word count criticising the film Notting Hill, as in this recent Unherd article, it’s an attempt to mask their ignorance of local history and politics. 

2. They are positive about the local multicultural demographics. Or some of them. The Unherd journalist, Tanya Gold, skilfully avoided using the words “Moroccan,” “Arab” and “Muslim” – 17% borough-wide, and just under a quarter of North Kensington. 
3. After an initial interest in identifying the criminals responsible for the fire, mainstream publications soon chose to focus on human interest stories. They start their Grenfell articles with sentences like: “Doris lives on the 10^th floor of a tower block just 100 metres from Grenfell Tower…” It is far easier to write human interest stories than to challenge power by looking at the causes of the fire or the ongoing injustice of its aftermath. 
4. As well as caricaturing the local population, legacy journalists like to present us as passive victims without agency. To an extent, this is right, but it doesn’t make sense to present us in this way without explaining who wields power and why they cling to it. 
5. The exception to point four is the allocation of the adjective “angry” by the mainstream media, deploying this word every time we speak up or resist , ensuring their journalism captures both dimensions of this celebrated multicultural population: victimhood and anger.
6. Journalists are sometimes critical of the economic and social order but present Kensington as an aberration rather than a symptom of the system.
7. They might mention the local authority but don’t delve into why the council is so hated. This laziness saves them time doing detailed research and helps them avoid challenging power.
8. The mainstream likes to publish Kensington & Chelsea Council’s statements uncritically as if they are a neutral player. They don’t bother fact-checking an institution that lies like most of us breathe; they even lie about sports pitches to grasp a bit of credit for something. Aside from a short period in Summer 2017, mainstream journalists have avoided mention of important issues such as the council returning to business-as-usual, another time-saver that keeps the bigger, structural issues off the public agenda. They find there is no need to address the publicly-funded fraud of ‘Grenfell recovery’. No need to utilise the expertise of local organisations and researchers. Even as the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor grows to two decades in neighbouring council wards, they choose human interest stories rather than anything more forensic or investigative.
9. To shore up the status quo, some curious choices are made. Most significantly, The Guardian used a journalist with family directly implicated in the Grenfell atrocity, with reasons to be deeply invested in the survival of the British establishment, to lead their Grenfell coverage for years. This was Amelia Gentleman, who is the sister-in-law of former Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who was responsible for cuts to fire services. Using Gentleman was canny move that enabled ‘Britain’s leading liberal voice’ to publish extensively about North Kensington while retaining its instinct for where to hold back.
10. If the mainstream media’s role as guard dog for the establishment over the Grenfell atrocity is not yet clear, there is one example that should convince you. The establishment was exposed following the fire. A respected highbrow establishment magazine published a book-length hatchet job against the North Kensington community, including those who had warned about the risk of a fire. London Review of Books’ The Tower is a tour de force of victim abuse and bringing journalism into disrepute. Perhaps the piece will be utilised by avaricious individuals for their defence in court, if they ever face criminal charges. Speaking of which, we’ll have an update on former Deputy Leader of the council, Rock Feiliding-Mellen, soon.   

by Tom Charles @tomhcharles @urbandandyldn

Thanks to THINK for the title suggestion.

 

Appendix – Unherd

I hated the Unherd article, How the rich destroyed Notting Hill by Tanya Gold. Published last month, it represented a typically ignorant mainstream approach to North Ken and Grenfell Tower. It says nothing that challenges power. Instead it is an intense bombardment of edgy vocabulary to sound radical and clever, hence it pinballing round the local WhatsApp groups.

From the first line, the writer is out of her depth. A very weird opening paragraph about being sexually assaulted by her landlord is perhaps intended to position Gold among the victims of housing injustice, to somehow link her to the victims of the crime at Grenfell Tower. It has nothing to do with the rest of the article but Gold calls it a “Notting Hill story: a housing story.” Sexual abuse isn’t a specifically Notting Hill phenomenon.

The writer goes on to critique the hit 1999 film Notting Hill for its avoidance of Black characters, even in the street scenes. But Gold manages to avoid using any of the following words: Moroccan, Muslim, Arab in her defence of our multicultural demographics.

Gold did fit in a sympathetic mention of “exhausted Israelis” though, which led me to check her Twitter and see that she’s a genocide supporting liberal Zionist.

Like most mainstream features on Grenfell, UnHerd’s is so vague as to be useless. The journalist seems to blame those who can afford to buy a home in Notting Hill for the terrible injustice. As usual, specific politicians, council officers and corporations are let off the hook.

I was left to presume that the real source of the writer’s anger is that she got priced out of the area. After all, this is somebody who thinks it’s okay to ethnically cleanse an indigenous population and replace them with people who have no connection to a place. She is not consistent with her demands for housing justice.

As with most mainstream coverage of North Kensington, local history and politics are skipped over, and the story is moulded to fit the journalist’s own experience. UnHerd reflects the editorial failures of the mainstream media to understand how people live, even so close to central London. Only in this way do they tell us something about the times we live in.