The acquittal of armed police officer Martyn Blake for the murder of Chris Kaba was, yesterday morning, the focus of intense national debate. But it was a debate based on incomplete evidence.
Absent from that debate – due to reporting restrictions imposed by the Old Bailey judge – was one critical fact. It’s a fact that changed everything.
The fact is this: a week before he was shot and killed, Kaba, 24, had been filmed shooting someone in a nightclub in the feet and legs.
Add that to the fact Kaba was driving a getaway car used in a shooting a couple of days before, and the fact he was trying to ram police officers with that getaway car, and a rather clearer picture emerges of exactly who Martyn Blake was facing in that split-second he decided to shoot Kaba.
This morning, those facts are today to be found in the 15th and 16th paragraphs of the BBC homepage report headlined “Chris Kaba verdict leaves south London black communities traumatised”.
In the 14 paragraphs preceding those story-changing facts, a Croydon youth worker, Anthony King, describes the effect of the two-year trial on the community.
His comments are perfectly reasonable and articulate and are clearly made with the best of intentions for his community. He’s right to make them. Ditto the comments of a local pastor Beryl St James, who has a more nuanced view of Mr Kaba.
Ms St James understood, the BBC article reports, why the judge waited to release the fact that Kaba shot someone in a nightclub until after the verdict. “You don’t want to prejudice the jury,” she said, reflecting however that the new information “may have very well changed some people’s opinion (in the community)”.
Quite so. Members of the community are not stupid, but like all communities they are best-served with a clear presentation of the facts. We’ve been here before with the BBC.
Emily Maitlis’s excellent 2022 McTaggart lecture spoke of the damaging effects of false equivalence in presenting news. That in presenting one side of an argument (however well evidenced) it was somehow the job of journalism to present the other side with equal vigour.
And that the perception that this quest for equivalence is the job of journalism can inculcate a dangerous sense of self-censorship in editors and reporters when it comes to just saying the obvious things, loudly and clearly.
The failure to correctly weigh facts (and relegate mere opinion, never mind pure bullshit) in our reporting is one of the contributing factors in us being saddled with Brexit.
Yet, this morning, I smell that kind of editorial decision making at work.
The balance is all wrong. Croydon would be much better served by the loud and clear reporting that in this case the threat to their community was not Martyn Blake, but the man he shot. Those facts – that Kaba was a hardcore gangster – need presenting with absolute clarity in all reporting.
Soft-soaping that fact does grave damage to the authentic campaign to correct the blatantly racist stop-and-search policy and self-evident incidents of police bigotry within the Met.
It’s not progressive journalism to avoid saying the plain truth. Just like Chris Kaba, the BBC has been engaging in some damaging foot-shooting this morning.
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