On 4 August 2024, the riots and disturbances that followed the killing of three children in Southport, on Merseyside, spread even further. That day, in the midst of a seething mess of far-right misinformation and rumour-mongering, the violence hit Rotherham – where people tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum-seekers – as well as Middlesbrough and Bolton. Serving notice of his new interest in UK affairs, Elon Musk posted a picture of violence in Liverpool on X with a characteristically measured caption: “Civil war is inevitable.” And 24 hours later, the wave of unrest reached the city of Plymouth.
Where could the city’s 260,000 residents turn for reliable information?
Social media? Yup!
As ever, as people’s social media feeds brimmed with untruths and provocations, more traditional outlets were an obvious choice. But if you tuned into the local BBC radio station while the riot was happening, you might easily have had no idea about any of it. BBC Radio Devon carried a report about the violence in its 6 o’clock news, but at 7pm and 9pm, Plymouth received no mention at all.
Welp, there you go. If there's a vacuum, something is bound to fill it.
We now know all this thanks to the BBC’s response to a complaint made by David Lloyd, a radio veteran who has worked for both the corporation and commercial stations. The relevant official document, written by the corporation’s complaints director, is quite a read: it includes an admission that “there was little evidence of the BBC having a presence on the scene”, something partly connected to “several logistical problems” on the day in question, including “the availability of journalists who had the required riot training”, as well as “technical issues with broadcasting kit”.
What does all that mean? 'Journalists' who no longer go out chasing stories, perhaps, who are content to sit in a warm office, and farm social media for their 'scoops'?
Even online, where the modern corporation insists it must focus a lot of its efforts, there was no dedicated live coverage of the Plymouth riot – nor, the report suggests, enough updates posted on the big social media platforms. On the latter score, “more would have been done, had it not been for staff leave”.
Once, journalists would have come in regardless if there was something interesting happening. It was how they made names for themselves.
Something happens, but what do people read or hear about it? Either nothing at all, or some awful version of it plucked by a foreign billionaire from the fringes of the internet or algorithmically amplified, to the point that questions of truth or falsehood fall away, and a mendacious story creates its own shockwaves. If that is the kind of future we should all be striving to avoid, local reporting ought to be our first antidote.
And yet, no-one’s doing it. Times have changed.
