CHAPTER 5 Inter-communal assassinations and the British Dress Since the early l970s, British media coverage of Northern Ireland has focused almost exclusively on violence and its aftermath. However, given that over 2,500 people have been killed and many thousands more injured as a consequence of the continuing crisis in the North, that this particular dimension of the Irish conflict should have attracted so much media attention is perhaps hardly surprising, and, to the extent to which this coverage contributes to our understanding of violent conflict, even desirable. Yet, as we have seen in Chapter Two, rather than aiding our understanding of the conflict in the Six Counties, much of this coverage has been criticised as being superficial in nature, and exceptionally limited in focus. While the violence of the IRA and other republican groups has tended to dominate the headlines and the editorial columns, violence emanating from other sources, most notably from the state, has largely been ignored or underplayed; so much so, some commentators have argued, that the casual observer of British media coverage could be forgiven for concluding that violence in the North was the sole prerogative of republican groups)' The scenario of violence implicit in the British media's coverage of Northern Ireland noted in several studies, in which the IRA is presented as its principal source and the security forces and the Protestant community its principal victims, is, when viewed in the light of statistical evidence, highly misleading. As we have seen in Chapter Two, away from the publicity that has so often been given to the IRA and its activities, statistics on violence in the North reveal that the security forces and loyalist paramilitary groups have between them accounted for nearly 1,000 of the 2,304 deaths recorded up to July, 1983.(2) -246- -247- Nowhere, perhaps, is the scenario of violence suggested by the British media in its coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict more misleading than when it comes to the subject of violence against civilians. Violence against civilians in general, and large-scale indiscriminate violence such as the bombing of public places in particular, has, without doubt, been one of the most sensitive and controversial issues raised by the conflict. Given the negative public evaluation of violence against non-combatants, it has also, and not surprisingly perhaps, been an issue which has featured prominently in the propaganda war that has attended the conflict for much of its present phase. As we shall see when we return to this subject in more detail in Chapter Six, in their efforts to secure the conventional objectives of propaganda in wartime, the security forces in particular have sought to exploit the issue of violence against civilians to discredit their opponents, and in particular the IRA.31 The IRA and other republican groups have undoubtedly been responsible for a large proportion of the 1,297 civilian deaths recorded up to July, 1983, but they have scarcely been the only nor the most • (4) • important component. Since the early 1970s, with varying degrees of intensity, loyalist paramilitary groups have engaged in a particularly brutal campaign of civilian assassinations which has claimed the lives of many hundreds of Catholic civilians. In 1972 alone, the year which marked the commencement of the campaign, this particular form of political violence claimed as many as 200 victims, the vast majority • • • • (6) of these being Catholics killed by loyalists. Directed against the most vulnerable members of both communities, and claiming as many as two-thirds of all the civilian fatalities recorded since 1969, the assassination of civilians represents one of the most important forms of political violence in Northern Ireland, and -248- one which has done much to polarise the relationship between Catholics and Protestants in the North. This chapter focuses on the coverage accorded to civilian assassinations by the British press during a five week period in 1972. It assesses the prominence and amount of coverage given to this particular form of political violence as a news issue, and evaluates the range of explanations advanced by journalists as to the underlying social and political factors that give rise to it. The arguments it presents are based on the findings of a content analysis (the background to which being examined in Chapter Six) of British press reports over a five week period commencing on the 1st July, 1972. Civilian assassinations and the British popular press During the five week period examined here, the number of victims claimed by the assassination campaign being waged by the paramilitary groups, loyalist as well as nationalist, far outweighed those killed by bombings or other major incidents of violence. Indeed, during an IRA truce from the 25th June to the 10th July, no deaths were recorded due to bombings. In what was to prove to be 1972's highest monthly total for such killings, July witnessed 36 assassinations, many of them involving the torture of their victims. 7 July was also to be the one month during the 1972 campaign in which the number of Protestants killed (17) almost matched the number of Catholics (19). In a society as small as Northern Ireland this was, by any measurement, violence of considerable proportions. Yet, as Table 1 shows, in terms of both the quantity and the prominence of the coverage it attracted, this daily catalogue of civilian killings was accorded relatively little attention in the pages of the popular press. -249- Table 1 Coverage devoted to assassinations: the popular press Daily Daily Daily News format Express Mail Mirror Sun Primary news report 2 4 5 4 Round-up report 6 3 2 6 Follow-up report 0 1 2 1 Editorial 0 0 0 0 Total reports 8 8 9 11 Taken together, the four papers included in the sample carried between them a total of 36 reports dealing with civilian assassinations and their aftermath. Spaced out over the sampled period, this gave the Daily Express and the Daily Mail a weekly average of 1.6 reports and the Daily Mirror and the Sun a weekly average of 1.8 and 2.2 reports respectively. From Table 1 it can also be seen that a given assassination stood a less than average chance of being selected for separate and prominent treatment in the Daily Express and the Sun which both carried a higher number of round-up reports as a proportion of total coverage. Nevertheless, even when we take all four papers together, civilian assassinations provided the main news angle of a story on only 15 occasions. The round-up report, which provided the vehicle for 17 of the 36 assassination-related reports carried by the popular press, is, by its very nature, an exceptionally limited news format. Limited in space, -250- and often dealing with several discrete incidents or developments at the same time, such reports rarely provided the reader with more than the bare essentials of the assassination - the age, sex and religion of the victim, and the manner in which they met their death. For example, on the 31st July, the Sun's main Irish story of the day ('Ulster poised for no-go war') concentrated on the rumour that the army was set to invade Ulster's no-go areas, and assessed the likely opposition it would meet. The report was concluded with a round-up account of the previous day's violence in which it was reported how: "A Catholic youth of 19 was shot dead at the door of his house in Blackwood Street, Belfast". In some instances, however, the information provided by round-up reports was even more limited with neither the victim's age or religion being reported. For example, on the 28th July, the Daily Mirror devoted its main Irish story of the day ('"Hit the IRA". Troops pour in') to an announcement by the Ministry of Defence that a further 4,000 troops were to be flown to the North in a major new offensive against the IRA, bringing the total number of troops to 21,000. The paper concluded by reporting: "But yesterday, the terror campaign went on in Belfast. The bodies of two men were found in a blazing car. The hooded body of a man who had been shot through the head was found wrapped in a sack". Despite the fact that assassinations are often inexplicable unless the religion of the victim is given, over the sampled period it was not uncommon for the popular press to omit this detail in their reporting of incidents. The Daily Express failed to identify the religion of victims on four occasions, the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and the Sun on three occasions each. The editorial decision to present an assassination as part of a round-up report, rather than a news story in its own right, may well, initially at least, have been informed by purely practical considerations. British journalists in the North work to tight -251- deadlines and if an assassination were to occur close to a deadline and some distance from the journalist's base, then the amount of information they may be able to provide for their news desk could well be limited, in which case the journalist may well be content simply to record the incident, returning to it in more detail as time allowed. However, had this been the case, then one might have expected to have found a more detailed report in a subsequent edition. Over the sampled period, though, it was relatively unusual for an assassination first reported as part of a round-up report to be followed up with subsequent and more detailed coverage.