We Predict a Riot?: Public Order Policing, New Media Environments and the Rise of the Citizen Journalist
Open Access
- 19 July 2010
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in The British Journal of Criminology
- Vol. 50 (6), 1041-1059
- https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azq039
Abstract
This article explores the rise of ‘citizen journalism’ and considers its implications for the policing and news media reporting of public protests in the twenty-first century. Our research focuses on the use and impact of multi-media technologies during the 2009 G20 Summit Protests in London and evaluates their role in shaping the subsequent representation of ‘protest as news’. The classic concepts of ‘inferential structure’ (Lang and Lang 1955) and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker 1967) are re-situated within the context of the 24–7 news mediasphere to analyse the transition in news media focus at G20 from ‘protester violence’ to ‘police violence’. This transition is understood in terms of three key issues: the capacity of technologically empowered citizen journalists to produce information that challenges the ‘official’ version of events; the inclination of professional and citizen journalists to actively seek out and use that information; and the existence of an information-communications marketplace that sustains the commodification and mass consumption of adversarial, anti-establishment news.This publication has 18 references indexed in Scilit:
- Influencing Trust and Confidence in the London Metropolitan Police: Results from an Experiment Testing the Effect of Leaflet Drops on Public OpinionThe British Journal of Criminology, 2010
- Reporting demonstrations: The changing media politics of dissentMedia, Culture & Society, 2008
- Environmental protest and tap-dancing with the media in the information ageMedia, Culture & Society, 2006
- Media coverage of police misconduct and attitudes toward policePolicing: An International Journal, 2006
- Maintaining legitimacy using external communication strategies: An analysis of police-media relationsJournal of Criminal Justice, 2005
- Mediatized public crisis and civil society renewal: The racist murder of Stephen LawrenceCrime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 2005
- Will a Crisis in Journalism Provoke a Crisis in Democracy?The Political Quarterly, 2002
- New challenges in public order policing: the professionalisation of environmental protest and the emergence of the militant environmental activistInternational Journal of the Sociology of Law, 2002
- Globalization and the policing of protest: the case of APEC 1997British Journal of Sociology, 1999
- The Structure of Foreign NewsJournal of Peace Research, 1965