the meedja: reflecting the news, or creating it?

Take a look at this photo of a G20 protester rioting in London. It’s taken from the BBC news website on Wednesday 1st April:

nasty destructive protester smashing stuff

You can just see the bottom of a logo on the building (in the top left of the picture); it looks like RBS to me.

So, you can see the news story coming: “As feared, G20 protesters are smashing up banks in the City of London”.

But look again at the photo. Perhaps it’s just me, but there’s only one protestor in the shot – the bloke doing the smashing. Virtually everyone else is a photographer. And not just opportunist protestors with their cameras – they’re proper professional photographers with expensive looking cameras and big lenses. Look at the ones at the back – holding their big expensive cameras up to take the shot; they all look a lot like photojournalists, don’t they? There’s even what looks like a TV camera in there (under the looks-like-RBS building logo).

To help identify protestors  and photographers, I’ve enhanced the picture with some rudimentary child-like bubbles:

count the photographers

Protesters in red, photojournalists in green.

I’ve even gone to the bother of counting the different groups. I think you’ll find it revealing:

protestors > 1
photographers > lots 

Call me a cynic if you like, but could this possibly be a case of the meedja setting up a nasty-protester-smashes-up-bank incident? Who knows – maybe they’ve already decided that tomorrow’s headlines will be all about riots and destruction in the City, and now they’re ensuring that they’ve got pictures to go with their pre-written stories.

Or maybe it’s all a big April Fools trick.