Like many people living in a working class area 'Nour' – not his real name – is angry at media coverage of the urban unrest that spread across France after the death of 17-year-old Nahel last month at the hands of the police. “To some journalists, Nahel was a criminal, his death was just another news story and the unrest which followed was simply an excuse to loot and pillage shops,” he says. Nour knows what he is talking about when it comes to understanding how sections of the media see deprived areas; he is himself a journalist on a daily regional newspaper in the south-east of the country.
After each successive night of violence he witnessed in their WhatsApp chats his colleagues' disdain for youths in those areas, and heard the racist commentary that made its way into newsroom discussions. “When my colleagues talk about Nahel's death I prefer to leave the room or say nothing, because I know it'll be me against everyone else,” he says, somewhat disillusioned.
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Nour showed Mediapart several messages that were exchanged on an internal discussion group. One journalist comments that “when the police are attacked or killed by the rabble it's described as normal because it's in the context of their job”. And there is clearly no question of raising the issue of 'police violence' in the newsroom, where the expression is banned.
In the same chat another journalist shared a montage of photos of the priest Father Jacques Hamel, killed in an attack at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, in northern France, of murdered teacher Samuel Paty, and of Lola, the 12-year-old Parisian girl whose suspected killer was an Algerian woman who had been served with an order to leave France. That journalist commented: “No one burned a single car when this priest had his throat cut, or when this teacher was beheaded, or when this child was tortured then murdered. None of the three had broken the law, none had a criminal record.”
An oppressive atmosphere at work
In the newsroom people feel so unrestrained about what they can say that two of Nour's colleagues have openly declared themselves as fascists. Of North African origin himself, Nour describes the workplace atmosphere as oppressive and says it is impossible not to feel targeted by comments that have a racist tinge. This is exacerbated by the fact that, in his view, these prejudices have also seeped into the columns of the newspaper for which he works. “In the minds of male and female colleagues, working-class neighbourhoods are seen as violent areas,” he says. “As a result, everything that happens there is treated through the prism of violence, from drug trafficking to the unrest that broke out after Nahel's death.”
Nour is not the only journalist to condemn the way that clichéd attitudes towards deprived areas persist in newsrooms, and the impact this has on media coverage of the suburbs; many other journalists deplore such views. But they keep quiet for fear of being mocked or of being accused of exhibiting a lack of neutrality.
For a week I felt really ashamed.
That is the predicament in which 'Ali'- not his real name - a journalist with public broadcaster FRANCE 24, finds himself. He is angry at the way his own media outlet covered the unrest and disturbances that set several deprived areas ablaze after Nahel's death. “For a week I felt really ashamed working for this television channel,” he says. What caused his disgust were the images of damage and looting being broadcast endlessly on the station, and special programmes and reports that were almost entirely devoted to the urban violence.
“For a whole week the station focussed its attention on the destruction without really trying to give information to help you understand, or to explain, how it was that teenagers had just set fire to their neighbourhood,” he says. Ali feels that through its selection of studio guests and the issues it tackled the station ended up glossing over the socio-economic causes of the violence, and simply looked upon youths in these areas as criminals. This was also reflected in the choice of words employed in reports, he believes.
“The term 'riots' gives the impression of youths who cause damage for no reason and it denies the political nature of this unrest,” he explains. “If the journalists had asked these teens without just going by their own prejudices they'd have known that this violence stems from political factors: police violence, the weakness of public services in their neighbourhood, spatial and economic segregation and so on.”
Social separation and lack of diversity
As far as Ali is concerned the majority of the media is similarly blinkered, and he believes this can be explained by the social disconnect of the journalists – who are not always interested in what does not directly affect them – and the lack of diversity in the profession, which is largely white and consists mostly of journalists from better-off backgrounds. “Some colleagues feel much more concerned about the damage than by the death of a kid of 17 killed by the police, and have developed a narrative, on the channel itself too, of 'us against them',” he says.
Though Ali did not himself grow up on a working class estate he feels worried about police violence because he carried out a study to “deconstruct and understand the experiences of racialized people in the suburbs”. He says: “If there's one profession that should not limit itself to personal experience it's ours. You can't just content yourself with what you think you know about working class areas when you're describing and explaining what's happening in them. Otherwise you're increasing the gap between the media and a section of the population.”
After this article was initially published the director of FRANCE 24, Amaury Guibert, while not wanting to react to anonymous comments, said that his was the only channel to offer a regular programme on the suburbs, called 'Pas2Quartiers', which had also produced a “special edition after Nahel's death”.
Estelle Ndjandjo, a spokesperson for AJAR*, the Association des Journalistes Antiracistes et Racisé·es, also thinks that media coverage has avoided the social and political causes of the urban unrest. But she says that a lack of diversity in newsrooms is not enough to explain this on its own. “When a racialised journalist or one who comes from a working class neighbourhood tries to assert the racist dimension of police violence, they're accused of being subjective or an activist,” she says. “Editors don't let us cover our own areas on the grounds that we'd be unable to stick to the facts. No one would make the same accusation against a journalist from the Creuse [editor's note, a département or county in central France] if they were covering their département of origin.”
I prefer to keep my criticism to myself and censor myself.
'Linda' – not her real name – fears being labelled as a militant because of the damage it would do to her professionally. She works on a leading national daily newspaper and opted to go on holiday after Nahel's death to “protect” her from the sterile discussions that she sometimes has with her bosses on coverage of working class and deprived neighbourhoods. “When I remark that the newspaper should report from the scene to avoid passing on clichés, and to hear the views of young people in the suburbs, my colleagues reply that I'm taking the issue too much to heart,” she says. “So I prefer to keep my criticism to myself and censor myself.”
With some bitterness, the journalist goes through the articles and videos produced during the six nights of unrest. The words riots' and 'violence' are everywhere in the headlines, there is a marked absence of any sociological questioning, and there is a deliberate choice of images of “smoking wrecks of burnt-out cars”, a journalistic photographic cliché associated with the suburbs. She also describes the lead role given to crime and security reporters, with coverage focussing on the shops that were looted and the clashes between the police and youths.
In Linda's view the reporting of the unrest that took place after Nahel's death revealed the inability of her newspaper to grasp the political dynamics at play in working class areas. “In the newsroom it doesn't occur to many people that a riot is a form of political expression, that it's a form of statement for people who are invisible in the media. We analyse the unrest through the prism of the prejudices that we have about deprived areas and what we think we know of them. And, given that we don't consider that these youths have anything interesting to say, we don't consider it necessary to go there and talk to them.”
Coverage of the unrest causes disagreements at Le Parisien
There is a reason for that: prejudices still linger in France's newsrooms. A survey by the journalists' trade union the SNJ-CGT, based on a sample of 167 journalists, reveals that 24.4% of the news professionals consulted consider that they have been the victim of racial discrimination. However, Linda is keen to make a distinction between the online version of her newspaper, which is produced by a younger team who are careful to use nuance in their coverage of the urban unrest, and the print version which is “rather conservative and keen not to give the impression of excusing the destruction”.
This distinction between the online and print version has also been noted by journalists at the daily Le Parisien newspaper. Indeed, one member of the editorial team says that “this distinction is a deliberate strategy by management aimed at attracting a younger audience to the website, for whom the issue of police violence matters”. Meanwhile coverage of the urban unrest led to concern and some discontent within the newsroom. The issue was even raised at a meeting of unions and management – a meeting from which Mediapart has obtained the minutes.
Union representatives told managing editor Nicolas Charbonneau that several journalists were concerned at the “absence of articles containing the views of residents of working class estates about the anger that followed Nahel's death, about relations between young people and the police, police violence, the profile of the rioters”. The union branch at Le Parisien also criticised the fact that out of the seven front pages devoted to the “Nanterre affair – Nanterre is the north-west Paris suburb where Nahel was shot and killed - five headlines focussed on the urban violence. Some journalists were also astonished to see an exclusive interview with the passenger in the car that Nahel was driving “hidden away” on page seven, above an advert.
Nicolas Charbonneau defended the decisions made by the editorial management and said that the article in question had “not been hidden away” but had been on the home page of the website “all weekend”. He insisted: “We didn't have the rioters but we spoke to the mothers and the associations, I don't see how we failed in any way.” He then promised to “revisit” what was still an ongoing issue.
According to 'Ilyes' – not his real name – a journalist at public broadcaster Radio France, changing the way that media bosses look at working class neighbourhoods is “a daily combat, which takes time and isn't easy, but it has to be done”. He says that the reporters on the ground have a desire to shift the dial and describe daily life in these areas, and not just when they are up in flames. “It gets stuck at boss level,” he explains. “They're sometimes afraid to send us out on the spot. Straight away you're then giving a voice to those in associations and elected representatives but very little to residents. And the less you go into these neighbourhoods the less you make contacts and the less you are accepted there. It's a vicious circle. We have to end these bad practices.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter