Jon Slattery: UK Riots: Where’s the journalism on the causes?
►http://jonslattery.blogspot.com/2011/08/uk-riots-wheres-journalism-on-causes.html
The Guardian’s Paul Lewis, who has won plaudits for his frontline reporting of the riots in the UK, says journalists have so far failed to provide a thorough analysis of why the trouble broke out.
He contrasted the innovative way in which social media like Twitter was used to report the riots with a lack of analysis and attempts by journalists to get to the roots of what caused such large scale civil unrest.
Speaking at an NUJ meeting to discuss coverage of the riots, Lewis described much of the journalism in the aftermath of the riots as “really quite bad”.
He said: "I haven’t read a single good piece which has interviewed a lot of people who were involved in the riots. Not one. I cannot understand why that is. Foreign reporters manage to interview members of the Taliban but not interview kids who were involved in the riots in the UK. It’s almost incomprehensible .
