The Media Column: Why has the press played down black-on-black crime?

I heard a particularly ugly and un-British word on the news at the weekend. Listening to LBC on my car radio, I wondered if its reporter had overdosed on Humphrey Bogart films over Christmas. He described the shooting of two girls in Birmingham as a "slaying". No doubt the word was in familiar use on The Tribune in Chicago in the 1930s; but I can't recall hearing or reading it over here. Perhaps the reporter had fantasies of being an American undercover investigator. But, on reflection, there may be another, more disquieting, reason for his use of the word.

The killing of the girls, apparently in the cross-fire of a gangland shoot-out, did seem to belong more to pre-war Chicago than to present-day Birmingham. It was not something that British reporters were used to reporting, or that British newspaper readers were used to reading. As the story developed, we learnt that there was a history of violent gang warfare in Birmingham, usually accompanied by guns, and that there had been numerous injuries and some deaths.

It is an appalling and frightening situation. But I can recall no in-depth investigations of Birmingham's gangs in the national press, no Panorama on the escalation of violence in the West Midlands. True, I cannot recall many ministerial speeches on the same topics; but the press and TV pride themselves on uncovering such things before governments, so on this occasion we should examine ourselves rather than ministers.

From what has been written in the press in the past couple of days, and from the comments of Birmingham residents ("There have been too many mothers crying"), it is clear that the shoot-outs and the gang warfare have been going on, largely unreported, for a very long time.

One reason is that black-on-black crime poses a difficulty for crime reporters. A largely white group of journalists (like the largely white police force) has found it difficult to forge contacts or gain trust in the black community, crime reporters will readily admit.

A second, more depressing, reason is that news editors have been largely uninterested in such crime, which has been waged in many of the big British cities, not just Birmingham. Black-on-black crime has ranked fairly low in news value, for no good reason. The shooting of an innocent woman in front of her child in south London was barely reported; likewise, gangland-style executions in Bristol and Leeds. Indeed, if the two teenage girls in Birmingham had been two men in baseball caps, the shootings would have received only a fraction of the coverage.

It may also be relevant that few national papers now have full-time staffers in England's second city, whereas once they nearly all did. But, as an explanation for the under-reporting of this gang warfare, that, I am sure, is secondary to Fleet Street's attitude to black-on-black crime.

The killings of two teenage girls last week may have felt like "slayings" because they seemed to have the unpredictability, the horror and the arbitrariness of a drive-by shooting in an American gangster movie. That they are an inevitable consequence of a history of reckless gang warfare, which is part of the British urban landscape, is something that the press is realising and beginning to make clear only belatedly.

All newspapers seem to share the quest to widen ever further the definition of an exclusive. But The Times added a novel twist last Friday. Its interview with the BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies, explained in the strapline that it was Mr Davies's "first big interview for a year". Not his first interview; his first "big" interview. What precisely is a "big" interview? A thousand words and a new photograph, rather than 600 words and a library picture? A conversation over lunch rather than breakfast? Another interview with the chairman of the BBC, only a bit longer than the last one you read? Perhaps such a strapline will have any meaning only when The Times is consistent and labels a conversation a "small interview".

d.lister@independent.co.uk