Are journalists too middle class to cover the riots?

AA Gill's scathing account in the Sunday Times Magazine of how the well connected middle class use the "patronage loop"of internships and work experience to get their kids jobs in journalism reminded me of the storming speech by The Times' football editor Tony Evans about the coverage of the riots.

As I've already reported, speaking at last week's NUJ debate about reporting the riots, Evans and the Guardian's Paul Lewis claimed journalists had failed to interview the rioters and get to the roots of what had caused the trouble.

Evans, who is from Liverpool, said he had personal experience of riots: "I've fought with policemen. I've kicked in shop windows. I've stole from shops. A lot of people haven't, but I have. And I understand the frustrations that come from being in that underclass, where you're written off, where you're given no opportunities. And you're demonised. You're demonised by the media and you're demonised by the political system. It was 30 years ago, but I felt the same way they did."

He said the riots had been building for four years and the only people who appeared to be surprised by it were journalists and politicians.

Evans claimed the riots were caused not by race but poverty: "Most of people reporting it [the riots] haven't lived through it. They are middle class," he said.

I remember at Press Gazette interviewing Barrie Williams, who edited three regional evening papers, the Kent Evening Post, Nottingham Evening Post and the Western Morning News, and described himself as a "council house kid" who joined a newspaper as a 16-year-old.

Williams claimed the new stress on academic qualifications has "cut out the council-house kids" from entering journalism. At Nottingham, he pioneered a scheme employing kids on council estates to write for the paper and supplied them with laptops.

"I wouldn't get into the profession nowadays," he said. "A lot of regional papers have lost touch with their readers. You have middle-class journalists writing for people who aren't on the same wavelength. They have lost the common touch."

Pic: Tony Evans (Jon Slattery)

UK Riots: Where's the journalism on the causes?

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 .

"It's such a prize to get to the bottom of why this really happened".

Lewis said he had also not read any articles which explained why the riots had spread to some cities but not others.

Referring to the Government ruling out an official inquiry into the riots, he added: "We've had one the most unprecedented moments of civil unrest and yet no-one is looking into it, no-one is asking why. That's where we journalists should step in but looking at the product of last week we haven't done it so far."

Tony Evans from The Times said reporting of the riots had been a "particularly grim period for journalism."

He accused 24 rolling news presenters of editorialising about the riots without providing any context or background.

Evans said Sky TV reporters had behaved like headmasters by challenging rioters and telling them: "I live round here, I can't believe what I'm seeing, are you proud of yourselves?".

"That's not journalism," Evans said. "Journalism should be the pursuit of the truth and pursuit of knowledge. We weren't seeing knowledge there we were getting the vicarious thrills of being in the middle of a riot."

He said he was disappointed that newspapers, which had the time to interview people and give them anonymity, had not talked to those involved in the rioting about the reasons why they were doing it.

"There's no sense of blaming politicians, it's all about punishment, it's all about victimisation and it's all about marginalising the people with the least voice."

Evans said he believed some journalists were afraid to confront the preconceptions of the mass of the British public at a time when public trust in them was so low.

He added: "Our role is to look for truth and I don't think we've looked for truth very well in the last few weeks."

• Don't use the riots to loot our press freedom
  

Pic: Paul Lewis (Jon Slattery)