Civitas

Your query is put in the form known technically as 'begging the question'. It assumes, that is, that I perceive that my work has being senstationalised, and have feelings about that.

As a matter of fact, I have always seen myself as having been treated extremely fairly by the media, and by the press in particular. I certainly do not except the popular press.

To the extent that I have anything to do with them, throughout my career (and I was first appointed to an academic post in January 1953) I have found journalists and feature writers in the national popular press among the most careful to see to it that they are reporting accurately and fairly what I have said or written. More than other journalists, they have contacted me personally to make sure that they've got the nuances of what I am saying right, and have very often got back to me to check that I am satisfied that what they have written is a correct representation of my views.

I have often thought, and said, that they have made a better job at expressing what I want to say than I have myself.

I have never had the slighest complaint against any journalist or feature writer in the provincial press. On the contrary, I have, as often as not, been positively grateful for the clarity with which they have brought to my work by condensing it. I've had most to do with the Sunderland Echo and the morning, evening and Sunday papers of the Newcastle Journal group, but papers like the Yorkshire Post have also been exemplary on the rare occasions that they have dealt with any of my work.

As far as the Sunderland Echo is concerned, I did have intensive contact for the four of five years of the research that I reported in several academic articles and in two books, People and Planning, and Public Participation and Planners' Blight. These are accounts of the clash between the respectable working class community of Millfield, Sunderland, and the planners and councillors who wanted to slum-clear the residents, some of them to tower blocks--a clash between, broadly, sound common sense on the one side, and certificated arrogance and ignorance masquering as expertise on the other. Who was right and who was wrong has been long answered by the history of housing in Sunderland since the 1970s.

Millfield couldn't have asked for more insight or integrity from anyone than was shown by the journalists of the Sunderland Echo, especially Carol Roberton, who reported both sides of the case, the council's and the residents'.

I once had to give an inaugural lecture when a social science department was opened at a college in Lancashire. One of the students asked whether I was worried, as a Labour party member of long standing, when the work I did was used by Conservative ministers. It was in the early days of the transfer of cultural hegemony from the old establishment--the BBC, the Civil Service, the Law, the universities, the broadsheet press etc. as it existed when Anthony Sampson came to describe it in the first edition of The Anatomy of Britain--to the what the Germans and French still call "the sixty-eighters". So I was still a bit stuck in the culture of academic impartiality, which without being pompous (or rather, today inevitably sounding pompous) meant following where the evidence led.

I remember that I said in surprise, 'Do you want me to put on the front of my books, "Not for the eyes of Conservative Ministers"?' A great roar went up: 'Yes!'

I said that that was quite the most extraorindary response I could have ever imagined from a university audience, as it violated the whole point of academic freedom, and the privileges of life-long tenure which guaranteed a life-time's income for faithful independent work, whatever anybody thought of that work. To be fair to the audience, some students came up to me afterwards and said that what I had said, needed saying.

If the question, 'What are your feelings about your work being sensationalised?' carries the meaning at all, 'What are your feelings about your work damaging or destroying this or that political assumption?', then as long as I have carried out my work as conscientiously and competently as my limited abilities allow, and as long as other people can carry out the work that could show that I am wrong, and discuss it publicly and freely, my feelings are those of complete well-being and peace of mind.

I hope that to some extent I have applied to myself the doctrine that facts should control political commitment, and not political commitment the 'facts' and what should be allowed to be considered to be the facts.

I came to the slum-clearance problems of Millfield with a view of the world that town planners had at that time. I'd taught town plannning at the School of Planning in Birmingham. I'd studied town planning at the University of Newcastle. I'd worked as a town planner for the County of Northumberland. But I closed my first book on Millfield with these words:

'My thoughts and attitudes have been radically reoriented as a result of the three years that have gone into the preparation of this book. Edmund Burke has been quoted more than once on previous pages. No concluding words seem more apt than his. "If circumspection and caution are part of wisdom when we work only with inanimate matter, surely they become part of duty too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not bricks and timber, but sentient beings. The true lawgiver ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself."'

I went on after this to be Labour councillor for Millfield (where I was born and still lived at that time). My intention was to prevent--I am sorry to use the word--ignoramuses from destroying social capital that they did not know about, and would not understand the value of if they did. Under the long leadership of the best kind of 'responsible' politician in the Weberian sense, Charles Slater, Sunderland council, I am pleased to say, was never touched by loony-leftism when so many other towns were devastated by it.

I have rarely felt that national radio and TV have been satisfactory. But that is because everybody there works within the constraints of seconds-long affirmations and refutations. For that reason I try to avoid them. But when I have been interviewed or moderated in a discussion I've never felt that, within that given context, my work has been treated unfairly.

I say most of the national press. From time to time I have entertained negative feelings about parts of the national press. Those negative feelings have had nothing to do with sensationalisation.

They have had to do with bigotry--by which I mean a sustained determination not to allow any findings to disturb one's established view of what the facts are.

A few years ago I presented some detailed research to support my conclusion that boys were no longer being socialised, to the same extent as their forebears, to take responsibilty, together with the mother of their children, for creating and maintaining their common 'home' for life-time. Young men were increasingly obtaining access to young women without the expectation that they would be husbands and fathers within the constraints of life-long monogamy. This retreat from socialisation for adult responsibility was one of the reasons for the increase in incidents of criminal and disorderly behaviour among boys and young men.

This was reported on the front page of the Guardian under the headline 'Bollocks'. Bad language was a lot rarer then than it is now. Sex causes crime. Ho, ho, ho! The Guardian's profound report was repeated in even cruder forms elsewhere. Boys are too tired after a bonk to go out mugging ... and much of the same.

My feelings about such treatment by the Guardian or any other commentator have nothing to do with the sensationalisation of my work.

My objection is completely the opposite. I don't think you need to read a report headlined 'Bollocks' to guess that the intellectual content will not be especially elevated. The treatment by the Guardian this week of Cultures and Crimes arouses negative feelings in me for the same reason.

I think that most people will agree that crime and policing are important contemporary issues.

Well, the 'news value' of Cultures and Crimes for the Guardian was not that robberies in England and Wales stood at 800 in 1954, at 3,000 in 1964, at 9,000 in 1974, at 24,000 in 1984, at 60,000 in 1994, and at 101,000 on the last count, 2003/4, after having reached a peak of 121,000 two years earlier.

The Guardian's news value was in the headline, 'Experts deride report on crime and moral decline'. Until I saw that, I had not the slightest inkling that it could be national news that anybody should deride the work of an extremely obscure retired academic, even if he or she was an expert.

The experts were a Professor Mike Hough, who 'reacted with bemusement, because the book says that crime is rising, and it is not'.

A Barry Irving of the Police Foundation was quoted as saying that the report 'failed to take into account changes in the reporting and recording of crime, the huge changes in property ownership, and the great increase in material wealth, meaning there were more goods to steal'.

Oh dear. Please read the book again, Mr, or Dr or Professor Irving.

The Guardian then presented its own devastating intellectual critique of the contents of the book. The two authors, 'have a history of controversial work'. As the Germans say, 'Ja, und ... ?'

This is the same newspaper that it totally devoted to the idea that the prime purpose of the modern artist must be 'challenge' all the taboos of respectable society. But perhaps being 'challenging' is not the same as being 'controversial'.

In a previous book the authors had 'called the Stephen Lawrence inquiry "a Stalinist show trial"'. Now that really is desecrating the holy of holies. No need to go into any evidence, then, on either what that book actually said, or more importantly, this one.

If data put forward by someone are wrong, then it is an excellent thing for somebody else to put them right. If their conclusions are wrong, then it is excellent thing for arguments to be put forward to show why they are wrong. Contentless criticism and innuendo are contemptible.

My other negative feelings are reserved for the Home Office, which put up spokespersons to reply to the robbery figures--the data on which the book concentrates--by referring to another set of figures entirely: "Your chance of being a victim of crime is now at its lowest level for more than twenty years--about the same as it was in 1981". Ja, und... ?

In two newspapers the Home Office exceeds even my expectations by stating that crime is at its lowest levels since records began.

Again, my negative feelings are not aroused by sensationalism, but by something else:ignorance, whether naive, wilful, or paid for and simulated for the purposes of misleading the public.

I hope these thoughts will help you in your studies, and especially to a consideration of where cultural hegemony lies today; what the contents of the hegemonic culture is; how far it is the press and how far it is other institutions, and which institutions, that misappropriate and misrepresent research findings; and whether the problem is a sensational press or a trivial one.

Of course, people who know that the press has sensationalised my work, because a press that sensationaises without exception is what their view of the world requires, can easily deal with the the above 'anecdotal' accounts of my life. I'm a just a typical case of 'false consciousness'. On that premiss, their theory remains intact.

To those who have read--well, have been told about--Engels, Marcuse, Althusser, Derrida or Foucault, all except the Marxist or post-modernist illuminati are the pathetic victims of 'systemic' manipulation.

I don't expect that any of this applies to you. But if you are interested, I deal with this phenomenon of experts 'saving their theory' in Cultures and Crimes, and extensively in Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics, People and Planning and Public Participation and Planners' Blight, as well as in journal articles such as 'Sociology and the Spirit of Sixty-eight'.