UK Edition
Sticking a question mark at the end of contentious statement has long been a journalistic ruse. Absolved of any responsibility, you can then sit back and finger your chin – lofty and philosophical – while others air their reprehensible views. Because, hey, you’re just asking the question. “Opening up the conversation.” And what could be more noble, more useful, than that?
Well, I didn’t think there was anything noble or useful about the question being asked on LBC radio on Sunday afternoon: “Is the coverage of Jodie Chesney’s stabbing racist?”
For this to have become a theme worth exploring less than 48 hours after the 17-year-old schoolgirl’s death strikes me as both sick and senseless.
“Leading Britain’s Conversation” (as the station’s catchline has it) was broadcaster Ian Payne, who was “in no way trying to downplay” what happened in Harold Hill, Romford, on Friday night, when an innocent young woman was stabbed to death as she sat on a park bench with her boyfriend. He was, however, “intrigued” by the prominence that Jodie’s death was being given across media outlets, and questioning “whether or not the media’s coverage is unbalanced.”
Indeed, as Payne had looked through the papers that day, he’d come to the conclusion that “the reason why she’s getting the coverage that she’s getting is because she’s white and sort of middle class. And she isn’t part of a gang or drug crime, so I ask the question: is the media coverage racist?”
Now, I love listening to LBC phone-ins precisely because the presenters are blunt and provocative, and the callers still more so. Like Twitter – where that same pointless question is now being asked – talk radio gives you an informative overview of the various strands of public thought out there. And maybe one of those strands was always going to be “Is it because Jodie’s white that she’s getting more coverage than the 18 other knife and gun victims killed since January 1?”
Never mind that unusual events have always made news, and that as a keen Explorer Scout who appeared at the BBC Festival of Remembrance months before her death, a girl who doesn’t appear to have known her attackers, the victim of a completely random crime, and yes, white, Jodie Chesney definitely defied statistics.
Never mind that the fatal stabbing of a 17-year-old boy of Lebanese descent, Yousef Makki, just hours later, in an affluent area of Manchester, has also received a great deal of coverage. Or that the tragic high-profile cases of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor will never be forgotten. Here was a narrative that Payne knew other commentators and the Twittersphere would be onto within seconds, if they weren’t already: on a professional level, getting in there early was slick.
On a human level, however, I found the idea that this would be the first question we’d ask – our instinctive go-to – in the immediate aftermath of a girl’s vicious killing not just repellent and lacking in all sensitivity and respect towards Jodie’s family, but demonstrative of a deep societal sickness, where we’d rather go off on titillating tangents about racial bias than discuss crucial but complicated and uncomfortable issues like knife crime.
You see those same “jolly” tangents wherever the real conversation gets too gnarly. So we tie ourselves up in knots over sexual bias – if only we could find a better word for ‘woman’ which is just a little bit degrading, don’t you think? – and avoid discussions of Female Genital Mutilation.
We agonise over gender bias and how precisely to depict trans people on toilet doors without offending anyone rather than question whether or not vulnerable children with mental health conditions should be encouraged to start changing gender.
Yes, these are hard conversations to have, but they’re not impossible. And if the unprovoked deaths of two schoolchildren – Jodie and Yousef – at the same time on opposite ends of the country helps crystallise consciousnesses into the “enough” moment we should have had last year, before 154 people lost their lives in London alone, then surely they’re worth attempting. They’re certainly worth more than the hot-button, trigger-word-focused, cut-and-paste-from-your-PC-bible-of-choice pretence at discussion social media has upturned onto real life.
So next time someone suggests “opening up the conversation” on a subject as crucial as knife crime, I’d be tempted to say no. Because all that will prompt is headlines. But if we narrow it right down, if we maintain a laser focus where it matters, we might actually prompt change.
Yet another fatal knife attack? Must be time to talk about racial bias instead…