The British Media and Bloody Sunday

Greg McLaughlin, Stephen Baker, Greg McLaughlin, Stephen Baker

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781783201822
• eBook ISBN: 9781783202669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972, British paratroopers killed thirteen innocent men in Derry. It was one of the most controversial events in the history of the Northern Ireland conflict and also one of the most mediated. The horror was recorded in newspapers and photographs, on TV news and current affairs and in film and TV drama. In a cross media analysis that spans a period of almost forty years up to the publication of the Saville Report in 2010, The British Media and Bloody Sunday identifies two countervailing impulses in media coverage of Bloody Sunday and its legacy: an urge in the press to rescue the image and reputation of the British Army versus a troubled conscience in TV current affairs and drama about what was done in Britain's name. In so doing, it suggests a much more complex set of representations than a straightforward propaganda analysis might allow for – one that says less about the conflict in Ireland than it does about Britain, with its loss of empire and its crisis of national identity.

Chapter 1

The British Media and Bloody Sunday: An introduction

What manner of men are these who wear the maroon red beret? They are firstly all volunteers, and are then toughened by hard physical training. As a result they have that infectious optimism and that offensive eagerness which comes from physical well-being. They have jumped from the air and by doing so have conquered fear. Their duty lies in the van of the battle: they are proud of this honour and have never failed in any task. They have the highest standards in all things, whether it be skill in battle or smartness in the execution of all peacetime duties. They have shown themselves to be as tenacious and determined in defence as they are courageous in attack. They are, in fact, men apart – every man an Emperor.

(Field Marshal The Viscount Montgomery’s homage to the

Parachute Regiment, the British Army, now adopted as the Regiment Charter)¹

Paras were here and they fucking hammered the fuck out of you!

(Graffiti reportedly left for the people of Derry by soldiers of

1^st Parachute Regiment [1 Para] after Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972)²

On 30 January 1972, soldiers of 1 Para opened fire on an anti-internment demonstration in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing 13 people and wounding 13 others, one of whom, John Johnston, would subsequently die of his injuries. They shot people in the back as they fled; they shot people as they lay wounded; and they shot people as they tried to come to the aid of the wounded and dying. In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, the British Army told the media what happened. It said that the troops of 1 Para opened fire in response to a hail of sniper fire from members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It was a lie. It said that at least four of the dead were wanted by the security forces on suspicion of membership of the IRA. It was a lie. It said that one of the dead, Gerald (Gerry) Donaghey, was armed with nail bombs when he was shot. It was a lie. Many in Derry always knew that these were lies. They knew it 11 weeks later when the Widgery Tribunal of inquiry accepted the army version. And they still knew it 38 years later when, on 15 June 2010, the new British prime minister, David Cameron, stood up in the Commons, endorsed the findings of the Saville Report and told the relatives of the victims and the survivors that on behalf of his country he was sorry. The people of Derry cheered – but not for David Cameron. They cheered because at last the British state had admitted the truth about what really happened that day. The story of Bloody Sunday is, on one level, a story about how by the sheer will of ordinary people the truth can trump the lies of the powerful. But on another level, it is a story about how the lies gained currency in the first place and why they prevailed for so long.

For answers to those questions, we must turn to the storytellers, the British media, and how they reported, remembered and revised the events of Bloody Sunday over a period of nearly 40 years. We approached our analysis expecting to find a straightforward case of media lies and propaganda aimed at vindicating the actions of the soldiers and, by logical extension, protecting the reputation of the British Army. While this was clearly manifest in the content, our analysis is more than just a case study in propaganda. We realized that on a deeper, ideological and cultural level, the British media have told and retold the story of Bloody Sunday more often than not from the point of view of Britain’s sense of itself as a nation, loaded as it is with immense historical baggage and a degree of selective memory. We also found evidence in some instances of a troubled British conscience about Bloody Sunday and its legacy, which we consider to be part of a wider debate about British national identity and values in its post-imperial twilight.

What we present in this book is a media studies analysis based on three starting assumptions. Firstly, we do not conceptualize ‘the media’ as a monolithic entity; there are important differences between Britain’s daily newspapers and its public service broadcasters in terms of form and content as well as editorial and production values. There are also crucial differences between mainstream television news bulletins, current-affairs programmes, personally authored documentaries and drama-documentaries in terms of their relative openness to alternative or oppositional perspectives.³ Secondly, we recognize that not all British media representations played the propaganda role of whitewashing the events of Bloody Sunday in favour of the army version; the Sunday Times Insight investigation, of 23 April 1972, for example, was one of the first and very few in the British press to seriously challenge the findings of the Widgery Tribunal (published just four days previously). Similarly Peter Taylor’s investigation, ‘Remember Bloody Sunday’, first broadcast on the 20^th anniversary of Bloody Sunday (BBC1, Inside Story 1992); the year-long investigation by Channel 4 News (1997–1998), which gathered new or previously neglected evidence that helped make the case with the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign for a new judicial inquiry in 1998; and the sympathetic treatments of the films Bloody Sunday and Sunday, both broadcast in 2002 to coincide with the 30^th anniversary of the shootings. And thirdly, we recognize the value of local images and representations that have worked against the grain of some mainstream British representations to assert the truth about Bloody Sunday; the murals of the Bogside Artists in Derry and the Museum of Free Derry at Glenfada Park stand as permanent testaments to what happened that day, though our media analysis focuses in particular on two Derry-made films: The Bloody Sunday Murders, directed by Margo Harkin and Eamonn McCann for Channel 4’s alternative media series, Free For All (1991); and Margo Harkin’s documentary, Bloody Sunday – A Derry Diary (2007/2010).

Although our analytical framework and methodology are very much rooted in critical British media and cultural studies, we are mindful of alternative, organizational or gatekeeper approaches that explain media content with reference to factors such as time, space, objectivity and deference to authoritative sources (e.g. the military).⁴ While some of these have helped us to explain some aspects of reporting and representation, they have some critical limitations in terms of what we aim to uncover here. They inhibit a fuller exploration of the underlying ideological assumptions and dispositions that make certain sections, or forms, of media more susceptible than others to the propaganda version of what happened on Bloody Sunday. They preclude consideration of the myths of Britain’s place in the world and of its national identity, which those ideological assumptions help promote and preserve. They obscure a degree of critical, self-awareness among some sections of the British media; and they keep hidden an evident anxiety about Bloody Sunday, a questioning of and even explicit dissent from the official version. Our critical, culturalist approach does not stop at just explaining a set of media representations but asks questions about how such representations relate to each other, within and across different media forms, and, further, how they resonate with wider cultural ideas and formations. To that end, we have employed a methodology that includes discourse, propaganda, visual and cultural analyses.

Methods of analysis

The book will look at media representations of the shootings at key moments in the 38-year period from Bloody Sunday and the Widgery Report, in 1972, to the publication of the Saville Report, in 2010. It is divided into two sections. Part 1 (Chapters 2 and 3) deals with newspaper coverage and Part 2 (Chapters 4 and 5) looks at television current-affairs investigations, documentary films and television dramas.

For our newspaper analysis in Part 1, we selected a cross section of Britain’s leading newspapers according to readership and editorial outlook. Thus, on the centre-right of the spectrum, our sample comprises the upmarket Daily Telegraph and the Times, still the paper of record in Britain today, and the populist Daily Mail, often characterized as the voice of reactionary English patriotism. On the centre-left, we included the Guardian with its liberal middle-class readership and the Daily Mirror, which appeals to a Labour-supporting working-class constituency. We also include the Sun, which was a Labour-supporting populist newspaper at the time of Bloody Sunday in 1972 but shifted its allegiance to the Conservative Party in the run up to the 1979 general election. Today it demonstrates a political flexibility depending upon where it feels its commercial interests lie but usually espouses a right-wing, populist agenda. In our analysis of the coverage of Saville, we make additional reference to the liberal Independent, which did not exist in 1972 but whose treatment of the Saville Report could not be ignored. We also refer to newspapers in Derry, Belfast and Dublin because their coverage offers a critical counterpoint to that in the British titles.

The decision to look at newspaper coverage only and not TV news is based on a practical consideration. We searched in vain for a consistent sample of off-air recordings of British TV news coverage of Bloody Sunday and the Widgery Tribunal and Report. There are fragments of news film-footage from the period that are fascinating in some ways but do not allow reasonable comparison with our consistent and comprehensive sample of newspapers. TV coverage of the Saville Report in 2010 was, of course, much easier to record and analyse, but again, for the sake of a consistency throughout, we decided to focus on newspapers for this part of the study. Our chosen method of analysis is based on the thematic, qualitative content-analysis developed by the Glasgow Media Group (see for example Eldridge 1995; Philo 1995). It pays particular attention to (1) the key themes that emerged from news reporting – especially headlines, lead stories, feature items and photographs; and (2) how these themes were developed and played out in editorial content – i.e. editorials and opinion columns by senior correspondents and guest writers from the public sphere.

Our visual analysis in Part 2 is based on a sample of television representations spanning a period from 1992, which coincided with the foundation of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign, to 2010 and the Saville Report. The analysis ranges from current-affairs and documentary films in Chapter 4 to the TV drama-documentaries, Bloody Sunday and Sunday, in Chapter 5. We employ a method of structured, visual analysis that pays particular attention to the interplay between elements in three dimensions: the verbal dimension (the narrative as spoken by narrator or presenter and supported by documentary evidence and interviewees etc.); the audio-visual dimension (contemporaneous film footage, archive and found-film footage, photographs, actuality sound, sound-effects and musical score); and the performative dimension (the demeanour and body language of key actors and the personal interaction between them). As with the newspapers, our method is thematic and qualitative, but we are also aware of the institutional characteristics of television that distinguish it from those of newspapers (for example, the legal requirement for impartiality and balance); and of the formal characteristics that determine particular modes of production, presentation and potential audience-reception in different ways, and to different effect, than those of print journalism. This acknowledges essential differences between a TV news item, a current-affairs programme, a documentary and a drama-documentary, differences that affect the visual representation of Bloody Sunday and its aftermath in some revealing ways.

As we shall see, much of the British media coverage of Bloody Sunday at the time paid little regard to the context within which the fatal events of the day took place. Instead there was a tendency to portray the event as something that defied rational explanation or investigation. Bloody Sunday was either a tragedy or an example of Ireland’s violent fate. Seen in those terms it was easy to absolve the British Army of any responsibility for the deaths and injuries since the soldiers’ actions were a sadly inevitable response to the provocation of the innately intemperate Irish. However, Bloody Sunday looks less like an act of fate when seen in the context of the disputed constitution of Northern Ireland, which was created when the British government partitioned the island of Ireland in 1920.

Bloody Sunday in context⁵

Partition guaranteed unionists and Protestants an in-built majority in the newly formed northern state and, in an effort to maintain their hegemony, they discriminated against the Catholic, Irish nationalist minority in terms of employment and housing and by way of gerrymandering electoral boundaries. But by the 1960s unionist domination faced a serious challenge from a civil-rights coalition comprising an aspiring Catholic middle class and a Catholic working class, whose relative poverty fed a deep sense of grievance and discontent. They were joined in their campaign by liberal reformers and student radicals, many of whom were inspired by the black civil-rights movement in the United States. What became the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) demanded democratic reforms and an end to the sectarian allocation of jobs and housing. Faced with such a threat to its power and privilege, the unionist establishment was determined to see the nefarious hand of militant Irish republicanism at work, even though by the 1960s the IRA was largely a spent force. Nevertheless, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the reservist Ulster Special Constabulary (or B Specials) as well as hard-line unionists met the challenge with violent force.

The most dramatic affront to unionist authority was played out in Derry, where sectarian discrimination was most acute. In August 1969, amid an atmosphere of growing violence and fear, residents of the Bogside and Creggan fought the police for three days in what became known as ‘The Battle of the Bogside’. It was a remarkable demonstration of popular resistance and culminated in the establishment of the Free Derry ‘no-go’ area, which effectively put the Bogside and Creggan beyond the control of the state. Its existence was a humiliating testimony to the Unionist government’s ebbing power and legitimacy and, on 14 August 1969, the Northern Ireland prime minister, James Chichester-Clark, was forced to turn to the British government and request that troops be deployed to restore order and relieve the exhausted and beaten RUC. That afternoon, British soldiers arrived in Derry and Belfast, marking the beginning of a long and controversial involvement in the Northern Ireland conflict.

There was a brief ‘honeymoon’ period for British soldiers, with many Catholics initially welcoming them as relief from the hostile attentions of the RUC. But the accord was short-lived because the troops were there to relieve the RUC and restore law and order to the streets. By the turn of the decade, the situation was becoming increasingly volatile, with the Unionist government resorting to more draconian methods to control the situation. One of these was internment – the arrest and detention, without trial, of republican and nationalist activists. This crude, heavy-handed attempt to restore order was used with sectarian discrimination, largely ignoring loyalist belligerents. It was also entirely ineffective since much of the security forces’ intelligence was out of date. As a consequence many of those arrested were innocent, politically inactive or just critics of the government. In the event, internment achieved little but to add to the deep-rooted sense of injustice ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: The British Media and Bloody Sunday: An introduction
• Chapter 2: The British press, Bloody Sunday and the Widgery Report
• Chapter 3: The British press and the Saville Report
• Chapter 4: Inside stories and secret histories: British television investigates Bloody Sunday
• Chapter 5: Sunday and Bloody Sunday: Very British tragedies?
• Chapter 6: The British Media and Bloody Sunday: Lest they forget
• Bibliography
• Index