British city riots

Some of you may have noticed, and I guess that some people may have been puzzled, by the fact that I frequently take as a hinge for the talk the first item that we see on our nightly network television news.

Now when you consider the vast range of life on this, a continent of a country, it may seem an odd way to begin but I remember the days when I always made a point, before talking about New York, to read through the New York Daily News as well as the New York Times because, simply, about three or four times the number of New Yorkers who read the New York Times read the News, which was then and still is the liveliest, the best written and the least corrupted of our tabloids.

But there's a danger that lurks for every foreign correspondent, especially when he's new to a country and its capital city of leaning too heavily on one or two serious newspapers, not only for one's views of what's going on, but for one's view of the facts that are interesting people. What this does to a man is to make him take a more or less official view of things and begin to write like the most serious of the local journalists.

It was a wise decision of the wisest editor I ever had, the late and unforgotten A. P. Wadsworth of The Guardian, when he appointed me as the paper's chief American correspondent, to ask me to base myself not in Washington, but in New York. This was an astonishing proposal at the time. Every other overseas bureau might have a man or woman in New York, but the base was always Washington.

Little, porky, old Wadsworth said to me at the beginning, 'I think it would be better. We don't want you to report Washington so much as America' and it's still overwhelmingly true that New York is the centre, or clearing house, of the news of the nation.

I came to applaud that decision the more I saw very able friends of mine, correspondents here, British and French mostly, one or two Scandinavians, dive into the political waters of Washington, flounder for a time and then begin to get the feel of the tide and the currents and, at their best, write thoughtfully and well about the Senate, the House, the White House, the judiciary, the treasure and so on. Just like the New York Times. But they were not writing for the New York Times audience and, to the extent that they were ignoring the curiosity and the wider interests of their home audience, they were missing the mark.

It reminded me vividly of a quarrel in Hollywood in the early Thirties when two famous Chicago newspaper men were lured out there to write movies. They were welcomed with almost fawning courtesy. They were given the big house, the big car and at once put into story conferences with a raft of studio executives, writers, designers and the like.

And pretty soon they saw their first effort bogged down in studio politics and considerations that had not much to do with the finished product that would be seen in the movie theatres. Secretly, they had a sign printed and secretly they had it tacked up one night on the transom of the office door of the head of the studio. Next morning, when the great man arrived, there it was – a handsome scroll pasted over his door. It read, 'What's the audience doing all this time?'.

Well, the two sassy writers were fired. They raised their own money. They wrote and produced their own film. Incidentally, their names were Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Their film, made for nothing but watching by you and me in a movie theatre, was called 'Crime Without Passion'.

Well, since television has become the medium through which the huge majority of people get their news, their ideas of what's going on, here, there and everywhere, and their judgement of what is most serious in the news, it has become more essential for a reporter from abroad to follow the nightly TV news and to notice what is being played up and what isn't. I don't wish to imply anything sinister in that choice. The networks, it seems to me and most of the time, get a fair feeling for what is important to know at home and abroad.

Of course, sometimes you and I would make more of an item that's mentioned in passing. The other night, for instance, the networks merely mentioned that the British government had accepted the offer of the international Red Cross to send a committee to Belfast, an international committee, to make a study of the facts about the IRA's imprisoned hunger strikers. This seemed to me and to a friend from the United Nations secretariat who was watching, seemed to me to be a really heartening breakthrough and was worth going into. However, little was made of it, though no doubt when they have found their facts, we shall hear a good deal about them.

Now you may have noticed I say networks' news in the plural, which is what makes it even more important to stay in nightly touch at 7pm, for at that hour, the three national networks – NBC, ABC and CBS – come on with their own half-hour of national and international news and since each of them has its virtues and large and able staffs, it's annoying to say the least that they all choose to go on at the same hour. But then they are in the business of commercial rivalry as much as the business of news.

What it means, however, is that to be conservative about, say, between 50 and 60 per cent of all American homes are tuned into those programmes, it means that something close to 80 or 90 million Americans are getting their picture of American and overseas life from one or other of those three sources. In the days of newspapers, no correspondent, however brilliant, however clairvoyant, could possibly guess whether he was touching on something known about by one per cent or 20 per cent of the population.

Now this, in some ways, insensate competition between three networks, each of which has an average of about 220 member stations between Florida and Alaska, Maine and California, does give a reporter a firm finger on the national pulse and so, although this week I should like to talk on several things that particularly interest or amuse me, I have to tell you that for the better part of a week, the first item shown and reported on each of the three networks, not to mention on the 240 stations of the public non-commercial television system, was the riots in Britain.

I should guess, therefore, that almost as many Americans as saw the dreadful scene earlier in the year outside that Washington Hotel and equally dreadful scene at St Peter's, just as many people, I'm sure, let's say 100 million, saw night after night the scenes of fire and looting and the running vandals and police and Mrs Thatcher's comments and Mr Whitelaw's and Mr Heffer's and heard, like tolling bells, the mounting list of afflicted cities.

The first one, Liverpool, excited little explanatory comment; a fit of hooligans can happen anywhere, some mischievous Sunday evening in Brighton or Los Angeles, in Berlin or Chicago. But as it went on and there was no let-up in the spread of the violence and the wounded cities were counted at 10, 20, 30, I think it's accurate to say that Americans were as shocked as Britons themselves, and even more baffled. More baffled because there is a wider gap in this country between the facts of law and order in Britain as Britons have come to know them and the fantasy about them which Americans have preserved for decades.

A reporter for the New York Times put the American view in a nutshell when he wrote that, 'the rioting has shattered the popular view of England as a well-mannered country where harmony prevails and policemen are beloved'. Now that may be an outdated view of Britons themselves, but even as a myth, it's been a useful myth – the myth of national civility in earning and keeping respect for Britain in this country.

In the bewildered aftermath, all the theories of why it happened have been well and very fully reported here with, so far as I've seen, very little intervention by know-alls, no easy explanations. There is no Republican view or Democratic view that I can see. Maybe because – it's about time we said it – more and more in the past two or three decades, Americans – whatever their party label – have come to divide off as liberals and conservatives, whatever their party label means in the often puzzling American party system, that there are liberal Republicans and there are conservative Democrats. In fact, there have never been so many conservative Democrats, especially in the South and they've been responsible so far for helping President Reagan give to his budget plans and his tax bill a big conservative shift.

So, for once, you can talk about the movement of American opinion as conservative and liberal. The conservatives – small 'c' remember, there's no such national party – the conservatives appear to be as distraught and baffled as their English opposite numbers. The conservatives way on the right express shock that British policemen go unarmed and tend to stress the need to beef up the punishment for all crimes of violence.

The liberals are the only people, in my experience, who even start to lisp, 'We told you so!' In other words, they swallow whole the belief that the root cause is the high and rising rate of unemployment that has flowed from Mrs Thatcher's economic policies. But I have to say that both conservatives and liberals are appalled for the first time when they hear about the unemployment rate in the industrial cities of the north. It's been noticed here that, after the first automatic outcry of sheer hooliganism on one side and unemployment on the other, even The Economist, the magazine which has supported Mrs Thatcher, concedes – I'm quoting – 'the role of the high rate of unemployment and its calling for collective programmes and for compassion by the government in response to the unrest' – unquote.

If there is one indigenous American reaction, which is common to thoughtful people of all views, it's a guilty one – a feeling of apprehension which grows out of the recognition that President Reagan's economic beliefs and policies are a carbon copy of Mrs Thatcher's.

Suppose – we dread to think – by this time next summer, unemployment in our central cities has doubled or tripled. Will we, too, in 1982 cry, 'There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight'?

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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