The Big Smoke

The BBC’s ‘Newsbeat’ interview with two BNP organisers has copped a lot of flak, and quite rightly given its soft-soap questioning of the two chancers involved and the implications it has for Nick Griffin’s forthcoming appearance on ‘Question Time’. There’s more at 853, where Darryl pertinently asks ‘Now, I wonder when we’ll get special 'Newsbeat' features on the Greens and UKIP?’

This questions cuts to the heart of something press, radio and TV will never admit: the media loves the BNP.

There are two reasons for this: the BNP provide brilliant publicity. With very little prompting, their members and politicians will say incredibly stupid and offensive things. This will inevitably provide the one thing the media is really desperate for these days – publicity. Indeed, even the possibility of the BNP appearing on TV or radio to say incredibly stupid and offensive things guarantees the participating media outlet plentiful coverage from other media outlets, as the producers of ‘Newsnight’ will know.

This is partly because people love being offended. A well-oiled sense of personal outrage can be really rather stimulating. So if there's a BNP interview doing the rounds, people will read or listen to it, because they know it will make them angry, and people like to be made angry. Perhaps that is because society has been so stripped of risk through laws that dictate what we can and can’t say that we are desperate for any whiff of danger, of the forbidden. (I’ll happily admit I get my – pathetically weak – self-righteous rage kicks from reading the Spectator’s blogs and the Guardian’s football coverage.)

The other reason the media loves the BNP is that it makes great copy. It is very difficult – almost impossible, in fact – to write a dull piece or make a boring programme about the BNP because of the incredibly stupid and offensive things they say. The same, sadly, could never be sad about the Green Party, who languish behind the BNP in the publicity stakes despite the fact the two parties got exactly the same number of seats – 2 – at the European Elections.

So interview the BNP, and you get a tremendously ire-inducing story and a rich dose of attention-boosting controversy. For a depressed and terrified media, what’s not to like?

There are, of course, lots of very good reasons for writing about and speaking to the BNP – it’s democratic for one, and it exposes them as bigoted buffoons for another – but these are not the reasons that motivate the greater part of the media, whatever they may say. For them, it’s a case of reap the short-tern rewards, begger the long-term consequences.

Update: So is there a better way of addressing the problem of the BNP? A friend of mine writes: 'I’ve long advocated that the media (and other politicians) simply don’t engage them correctly. Inviting the easy soundbite on race/immigration when a few better placed questions about their policies on things like the economy would hole them below the waterline with such ease they would soon lose their ‘shock value’ attraction and just become a laughing stock.'

You know what, I think he's right.