Other than being the Big Swinging Dicks in their very different respective 'hoods, there might at first sight appear to be little in common between a rap superstar and the editor of the Daily Mail.
But following on from a comment in the Shakilus Townsend thread below, I am rather taken with a possible parallel between 50 Cent (pictured) and Paul Dacre, namely the role they wittingly or otherwise play in popularising 'knife culture'. Are these two evil men mounting a pincer movement or something?
Fiddy, of course, routinely glorifies violence for commercial reasons, because that's what sells records. For his part, Dacre regularly ramps up the reportage of the latest moral panic, becauses that's what sells newspapers.
And as a commenter using the name Asquith points out:
I think the media's relentless focus on 'knife crime' is having a terrible effect, because it sends a message that carrying knives is cool and street and will piss off the Daily Mail, your parents, teachers, and twats of that variety. A vicious circle.
This point inevitably puts me in mind of my own youth, especially the media furore that surrounded a Sex Pistols' interview on London Weekend Television back in 1976. Several of the band used four-letter words.
The resultant outrage was spectacular. Before the incident, the Pistols - yet to release their first single - were unknown to those who did not read New Musical Express. Thanks to front page coverage across the tabloid press - 'Must we throw this filth at our pop kids?', the Daily Mirror famously wondered - they became the most controversial group in the country. The more the press urged teenagers to hate them, the deeper a generation fell in love.
Of course, both rappers and newspaper bosses will insist that they reflect social conditions and do not create them. Moreover, both popular song and popular journalism have treated crime as suitable subject matter for centuries, so there are traditions at stake.
As an ex-punk, I would never join the array of politicians - from Tipper Gore to David Cameron - that argue for the censorship of music deliberately designed to shock parents. Such a step would only be counterproductive, anyway.
But just maybe one practical means of defusing some of the tension that really exists on the capital's streets right now would be to keep the reporting straightforward and the four page spreads to a minimum.
Posted at 18:59, 7 July 2008
Comments (16)
You have to laugh.
Dave Osler posting two articles on stabbings and substituting a shocking photo copied from the NOTW for a previous neutral one.
And then he asks ‘are we all creating a climate by all this discussion?’
A discussion he generally won't deign to get involved in, save post the initial comment on his own personal blog.
Bill Grundy’s back.
Artists and journos don't merely reflect the world they amplify it.
Mrs Grundy's back too. Why shouldn't Dave stimulate a discussion on violent crime, after all it's what troubles a lot of 'normal' people, especially in teh inner city. I would hate to be a mother of a boy in inner London nowadays. My sister has just had a baby boy and I am already worrying on her behalf for what might happen tin thirteen years time.
Thank God for cynical posters like Southpaw. I thought I was the only one.
I would add that it's a pity that DT is reheating a very old bit of ethnomethodology - I thought you'd like that word - expressed in "Folk Devils and Moral Panics".
Pity too that, if anything, appearance is not moulding reality. It's not the other way around either.
According to a registrar at King's College Hospital's A & E department knife attacks are seriously under-reported in official crime figures. The victim chooses to describe a knife wound as an accident to the clinician in which case the incident is not reported to the police.
In other words, the real situation is much worse than you - even courtesy of Paul Dacre - think it is.
It's a classic example of a moral panic. Apparently one in three young people living in cities thinks it's acceptable to carry a knife in self-defence because violence is so rife. As ever, the media build up and exacerbate a crisis by whipping up fear and tension in a way that makes matters worse.
http://republic-of-teesside.blogspot.com/2008/06/teenage-killers-and-moral-panics.html
Pedantic point. The Sex Pistols incident was on a local Thames programme not LWT.
Paul Dacre and Fiddy have something else in common fact fans - they're both very enthusiastic about George W Bush.
So what? Stop the nespaperman printing his storys. Big deal!
Nobody is stoppin our boy Fiddy. Its capitalism, stpid!
I saw that show on Channel 4 to stop knife crime. Nice middle lcass folks talking like theyre Chairman Moa - gunna start a cultral revolootion. Yeah right!
Now the sex Pistols are played on Radio 2 !!
I never ever thought that it would happen. How old and sad and comical the pistols must appear to 50 cent and his followers.
Yet in 20 years time, 'stabber' cent will be on radio 2 as well..
As for Paul Dacre.. well he loves it when his browbeaten staff call him PD.
Anything in his newspaper can be safely ignored.
"Anything in his newspaper can be safely ignored."
I'd like it if that were the case, but I'm not so sure. Could it be that the wank he writes is taken seriously?
Well, actually, I sometimes think the answer is no. It's crossed by mind that Dacre, and even more so Murdoch, don't have half the power over the electorate that they want you to think.
They tell Brown they are holding a gun to his head, so he does what they want, & is in fact a lot more authoritarian than Cameron (though the latter definitely wobbles).
But what if this isn't true?
What if they wield no power over Joe Average, only over the government, & the government could face them down without there being any great loss.
Let's start with a more liberal policy on drugs, which would draw the twats' ire but which would work very well.
The Hate Mail hammers the nails into its own coffin every day. Its assault on "emo", which as any under-50 surely knows is very tame, proved how laughably out of touch it is. I regard emo as shit, partly because of its very tameness, but I was on its side against the Hell, which has seriously misjudged.
I do not know whether the electorate are swayed by the authoritarian cunts, but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was no.
"the latest moral panic"
"Daily Mail"
"Stanley Cohen"
Where's Geoffrey Pearson ?
I was looking at a CiF post by criminologist David Wilson about the 'moral panic' over garotters in 1862, when there were 90 street robberies a year in the Met area. The figure's now 29,000 street robberies, yet he semed to think there were viable parallels to be drawn.
My wife's just come back from a reunion in the smoke. One of her friends has kids in state school in Sutton - not by any means the hardest bit of London - and they say that a lot of the boys carry knives. Of course we all carried knives some thirty years back - but not for use on others.
I went to a showing of some old home movies of the area where I live a few months ago. As it happened I was sitting next to our Tory MP (who is younger than myself!!!). The film showed a local parade etc but there were some scenes of Boy Scouts setting off for camp. A crowd of boys was sitting in the back of a lorry and the MP muttered, 'You couldn't do that now. Health and Safety'. I pointed out to him that the three-inch dagger that was hanging from the Scouts' belt would also be illegal nowadays. Plus ca change.
D.B.
"It's a classic example of a moral panic. Apparently one in three young people living in cities thinks it's acceptable to carry a knife in self-defence because violence is so rife. As ever, the media build up and exacerbate a crisis by whipping up fear and tension in a way that makes matters worse".
Agree. Interesting that there's no moral panic or outrage at the level of domestic violence.
One crime that is still pretty much hidden
@Mike, Islington
"According to a registrar at King's College Hospital's A & E department knife attacks are seriously under-reported in official crime figures. The victim chooses to describe a knife wound as an accident to the clinician in which case the incident is not reported to the police.
In other words, the real situation is much worse than you - even courtesy of Paul Dacre - think it is. "
That's odd, because there was a consultant on television last night stating that knife crime injury figures are OVERSTATED as they are drawn from hospital figures which do not distinguish between accidental, criminal and self injury.
"I was looking at a CiF post by criminologist David Wilson about the 'moral panic' over garotters in 1862, when there were 90 street robberies a year in the Met area. The figure's now 29,000 street robberies, yet he semed to think there were viable parallels to be drawn."
Can I just this straight: you actually think you can take the 1862 figure at face value? You actually think that there were 90 street robberies in London in 1862?
And just to add to that, 29,000 street robberies equates to roughly one for every 300 Londoners. That's about about 0.3% chance of being robbed in any one year, or a roughly one-in-five chance of being robbed in your entire life. And that's in London, the supposed epicentre of the 'epidemic'. Now, 29,000 robberies a year is 29000 robberies too many, and as a recent victim of an attempted robbery myself (not in London, not by a black assailant) I know personally that it can be a pretty horrible experience for those it does happen to, but let's get this straight, we're not talking about the wild west of some people's imaginations. Nor, I would imagine, London in 1862. Moral panic? Spot on, I reckon.