BBC Apologizes To Darcus Howe For Calling Him A Rioter In Testy Interview, the huffington post, 10.8.2011
The BBC has apologized for suggesting that a man who had a testy interview with one of the corporation's newscasters was himself a participant in the violence which has shaken London.
Darcus Howe's combative interview with BBC News presenter Fiona Armstrong [...] Howe, a longtime writer, broadcaster and activist, said that the violence in the British capital was an "insurrection" by young people tired of continual harassment by the police. At one point, Armstrong said, "'You are not a stranger to riots yourself I understand, are you? You have taken part in them yourself.''
"I have never taken part in a single riot," Howe replied. "I've been part of demonstrations that ended up in a conflict. Stop accusing me of being a rioter and have some respect for an old West Indian Negro, because you wanted for me to get abusive."
On Wednesday, the BBC issued a retraction [...] His run-in with the media might have been on Howe's mind when he appeared on "Democracy Now!" Wednesday morning. He condemned the press for what he said was an inadequate response to the unrest:
"It comes like a thief in the night to them, because they deal only with what has happened, not what is likely to happen, which is a kind of speculative truth. So they're always surprised. And whenever there's surprise, they look for people to blame, to cover up their own inadequacies."
l'intervista, inizia così:
There is a mass insurrection. And I’m not talking about rioting; I’m talking about an insurrection that comes from the depths of society, from the consciousness, collectively, of the young blacks and whites, but overwhelmingly black, as a result of the consistent stopping and searching young blacks without cause. They changed the law. Before, you had to provide evidence that you were looking at this character, doing this and bouncing ladies and pushing his hand in a handbag, before they stop and search you. They moved that clean out and replaced it with anti-terror legislation, that you could stop and search anybody, anytime, anywhere. And my grandson is 14 years old, and I asked him, I said, "Nathan, how many times have you been stopped and searched?" He said, "Papa, I can’t count, it’s so many." And that anger has been simmering beneath the surface, because when you have hundreds of thousands of young people acting simultaneously, the issue has to be simultaneously experienced. And so, when Mark Duggan was executed, they all had empathy with it and issues in their minds about what life is and what it is not.
