Newspaper Article - Metro

All three newspaper articles have published about the riots on the 9th of august but this one uses a more close up version of the independent photograph of the same male walking away from the flaming vehicle. However this one is titled different as it states in big bold letters 'Riots: The madness spreads' and the under text doesn't mention 'yob' or 'mob' but a more stereotypical view as it states 'Gangs of youth' putting a direct blame of the riots onto the younger generation damaging their reputation unlike the previous articles - this one places a blame onto a particular age group rather than suggest it. It also mentions social media has it states at the bottom 'Tweeters warned they face arrest', suggesting a pre-medicated crime is been organised online. 

Newspaper Article - The Independant

This article was also posted on the 9th of august, showing a male with his face covered with a scarf walking away from a burning car suggesting he could of set it on fire. While the title is similar to the Daily mirror of 'Yob' but instead it's 'mob rule' as the small text states ;Police and politicians powerless' again suggesting the power has been switched but also that instead of the more aggressive word of 'Yob' they use 'mob' which could suggest an older age limit are using the riots for anti social activities. 

Newspaper Article - Daily Mirror

In this news article it shows the iconic picture which has been shown through out many news articles - this was published on the 9th August 2011 so it's was published in the peak of the violence which is most likely why this photo was used as it shows the violent destruction of what was once a peaceful protest is know buildings engulfed by flames. The title 'Yob rules' suggesting that the balance of power has been switched as the rioters are now in control rather than the government and police. 

London Riots Broadcast Three - BBC

Who do the reporters interview?

They interviewed the MP Michael Gove who is the education secretary. Who agrees that the government failed the duty of care that they give the public. He talks about how the extent of the riots have put a strain on the police. He talks about how they're around 16000 police on the streets of London and that police are cracking down. When the reporter asks about the youth rioting and the disconnection however when he came to answer it he had no response has to why they did it although he stated that they had evidence to suggest some. They suggest that it's been a drive opportunity by gangs and that their storys that suggest they're angry for a different reason is disproven.

What images are used in the broadcast? What does this suggest about representation of the riots?

Because it's an interview they're is not many images but one - this image shows the riot police on one side of the road standing by some cars while watching a burning vehicle which this image has been shown through out several broadcasts and articles.  

London Riots Broadcast Two - BBC

Who do the reporters interview?

They went live to their reporter Andy who gave a brief describtion of what it was like and said there were 'gangs of youngsters' running about causing destruction. As well they said that MP's was caused by youngsters outside the area that had been planning the attack through social media. 
What images are used in the broadcast? What does this suggest about representation of the riots?

They show the riot police chasing after some of the looters during the beginning and burnt out cars and the furniture store which is quite an iconic image. Hundreds of looters run run away from the riot police while police struggle to contain them all to back up their reporter Andy's comment about 'gangs of youngsters'. They showed a picture of a damaged firefighter truck that came under attack while trying to put out the fire before showing some of the damaged shops. 
Is the broadcast biased?

Yes because they're just taking to the governments side by reporting what they and the police think and by placing a media reporter in between the action they can report what they saw but they never went to interview any youths before gaining comments from the Local MP's.
Are youths given a fair voice?

No, they're no youths that talk in this report it just talks about how the youths were running around destructively and showing some of the violence towards the police with hand made missiles and the firefighters trying to put out the fire. How ever they do not get a youth that has been a victim from the violence which could lead the public to think the youths are all the same.

Article Three - London riots

London riots: the underclass lashes out

London's rioters are the products of a crumbling nation, and an indifferent political class that has turned its back on them.

A looted store in Tottenham. Photo: JOEL GOODMAN/LNP

No one seemed surprised. Not the hooded teenagers fleeing home at dawn. Not Ken and Tony, who used to live in Tottenham and had returned to stand vigil over the missiles and torched cars littering an urban war zone. Tony claimed to have seen the whole thing coming. “This was always going to happen,” he said.

The police shot a black guy in suspicious circumstances. Feral kids with no jobs ran amok. To Tony’s mind, this was a riot waiting for an excuse. In the hangover of the violence that spread through London, the uprisings seemed both inevitable and unthinkable. Over a few days in which attacks became a contagion the capital city of an advanced nation has reverted to a Hobbesian dystopia of chaos and brutality.

“In the evening there is fear, and in the morning they are gone. This is the fate of those who take our goods, and the reward of those who violently take our property.” Isaiah 17:14. No such Old Testament fate awaited the pillagers of N18, strolling away from 21st-century megastores with a looted haul of iPod accessories and designer trainers.

This is the most arcane of uprisings and the most modern. Its participants, marshalled by Twitter, are protagonists in a sinister flipside to the Arab Spring. The Tottenham summer, featuring children as young as seven, is an assault not on a regime of tyranny but on the established order of a benign democracy. One question now hangs over London’s battle-torn high streets. How could this ever happen?

Among several obvious answers, one is a failure of policing. The evidence so far points to more ignominy for the rudderless Met, as doubts emerge over whether Mark Duggan, whose death inspired the initial riots, fired at police. The stonewalling of Mr Duggan’s family precipitated the crisis, and the absence of officers to intervene in an orgy of looting led to a breakdown of order suggestive of the lawless badlands of a failing state.The second alleged culprit is ethnicity. But, as David Lammy, Tottenham’s MP, has said, these are no race riots. The Eighties uprisings at Broadwater Farm, as in Toxteth and Brixton, were products, in part, of a poisonous racism absent in today’s Tottenham, where the Chinese grocery, the Turkish store and the African hairdresser’s sit side by side.

So blame unemployment and the cuts. It is true that Tottenham is among London’s poorest boroughs, with 10,000 people claiming jobseeker’s allowance and 54 applicants chasing every registered job vacancy. In other affected boroughs, such as Hackney, youth clubs are closing. Unwise as such pruning may be, it would be facile to suggest that homes and businesses have been laid waste for want of ping-pong tournaments and skateboard parks.

The real causes are more insidious. It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then. Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion.

Europe’s leaders, our own Prime Minister and Chancellor included, were parked on sun-loungers as London burned. Although the epicentre of the immediate economic crisis is the eurozone, successive British governments have colluded in incubating the poverty, the inequality and the inhumanity now exacerbated by financial turmoil.

Britain’s lack of growth is not an economic debating point or a stick with which to beat George Osborne, any more than our deskilled, demotivated, under-educated non-workforce is simply a blot on the national balance sheet. Watch the juvenile wrecking crews on the city streets and weep for all our futures. The “lost generation” is mustering for war.

This is not a cri de coeur for the failed and failing. Nor is it a lament for the impoverished. Mob violence, despicable and inexcusable, must always be condemned. But those terrorising and trashing London are also a symptom of a wider malaise. In uneasy societies, people power – whether offered or stolen – can be toxic. Most of the 53 per cent of e‑democrats calling to have the death penalty reinstated (of whom 8 per cent would opt for firing squad or gas chamber) would never dream of torching a police car, but their impulses hardly cohere either with David Cameron’s utopian ambitions.

What price for the Big Society as Tottenham, the most solid of communities, lies in ruins? The notion that small-state Britain can be run along the lines of Ambridge parish council by good-hearted, if under-funded, volunteers has never seemed more doubtful. Nor can Ed Miliband take much credit for his unvaried focus on the “squeezed middle”, rather than on a vote-losing underclass that politicians ignore at their peril, and at ours.

London’s riots are not the Tupperware troubles of Greece or Spain, where the middle classes lash out against their day of reckoning. They are the proof that a section of young Britain – the stabbers, shooters, looters, chancers and their frightened acolytes – has fallen off the cliff-edge of a crumbling nation.

The failure of the markets goes hand in hand with human blight. Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution. After the Great Crash, Britain recalibrated, for a time. Income differentials fell, the welfare state was born and skills and growth increased.

That exact model is not replicable, but nor, as Adam Smith recognised, can a well-ordered society ever develop when a sizeable number of its members are miserable and, as a consequence, dangerous. This is not a gospel of determinism, for poverty does not ordain lawlessness. Nor, however, is it sufficient to heap contempt on the rioters as if they are a pariah caste.

One of the most tragic aspects of London’s meltdowns is that we need this ruined generation if Britain is ever to feel prosperous and safe again. If there are no jobs for today’s malcontents and no means to exploit their skills, then the UK is in graver trouble than it thinks. Mr Osborne may congratulate himself on his prudence, but retrenchment also bears a social cost. We are seeing just how steep that price may be.

Financial crashes and human catastrophes are cyclical. Each reoccurrence threatens to be graver than the last. As Galbraith wrote, “memory is far better than the law” in protecting against financial illusion and insanity. In an age of austerity, there are diverse luxuries that Britain can no longer afford. Amnesia stands high on that long list.

How does the article construct representation of youth identity?

During the article it did begin with a negative side of youth as they started off with 'Not the hooded teenagers fleeing home at dawn' and when they were talking about unemployment and the London riots they described youths as 'feral kids with no jobs who ran amok'. 

- Is the broadcast biased?

No, simply because although it states about the youths and does place some blame on them for the riots, it also states the problems that the Goverment are doing such as the cuts causing community and work places to close and unemployment rates go up and the failing of policing during the riots and their  attitude towards race. It includes some past facts such as 'In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then.' and talking about how 'we need this ruined generation if Britain is ever to feel prosperous and safe again. If there are no jobs for today’s malcontents and no means to exploit their skills, then the UK is in graver trouble than it thinks. ' suggesting that the riots could back up theory that because there is nothing to do because of the cuts and no jobs, the UK is heading for the worse as well suggest that financial woes and human catastrophes are cyclical. 

- Are youths given a fair voice?

No, they're no youths that speak at all in the newspaper article however it does suggest that it's not all the youth that is causing the problems completely in the UK but does place some blame on the common problems such as the government  unemployment, lack of support. 

Article Two - London Riots

London riots escalate as police battle for control

• Full-scale alert as violence spreads across capital
• Disorder breaks out in Birmingham city centre
• Prime minister, mayor and home secretary return

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A masked man on the streets of Hackney where a car burns out of control on the third day of street disturbances across London. Photograph: Kerim Okten/EPA

The prime minister cut short his holiday and flew back to Britain as London witnessed devastating scenes of violence stretching the emergency services beyond limit on a third night of rioting in the capital.

Buildings were torched, shops ransacked, and officers attacked with makeshift missiles and petrol bombs as gangs of hooded and masked youths laid waste to streets right across the city.

The sheer number of incidents – including in Hackney, Croydon, Peckham, Lewisham, Clapham and Ealing – seemingly overwhelmed the Metropolitan police at times, who had poured 1,700 extra officers onto the streets.

Disturbances continued into the early hours on a breathtaking scale, and they spread outside London for the first time with riots reported in Birmingham and Liverpool.

David Cameron, forced to break off from holiday in Tuscany, was this morning due to chair a meeting of the government's emergency committee, Cobra. He was travelling on a UK military flight leaving Italy at 3am. Asked why the prime minister had now decided to return, a Downing Street source said: "The situation has become more serious."

Officers from Thames Valley, Essex, Kent, Surrey and City of London were drafted in to support the Met. But apparent "copycat" riots continued to spread in the wake of Tottenham's riots on Saturday precipitated by the fatal shooting by police of Mark Duggan, 29, a father of four, last Thursday. So far 225 people have been arrested and 36 charged.

The violence erupted in daylight in Hackney, east London, where police confronted rioters hurling missiles and setting fire to bins and cars. One officer could be seen lying on the ground after being struck on his shield by a missile.

In Hackney's Pembury Estate, the centre of the violence in east London, masked youths – both men and women – helped carry debris, bins, sticks and motorbikes, laying them across the roads to form a flaming boundary to the estate.

Several buildings were set alight in Croydon, south London, one massive fire consuming the 100-year-old Reeves furniture store. The fires were so severe that approach roads into Croydon were thick with smoke leaving some residents struggling to see or breathe. "Words fail me. It's just gone, it's five generations. My father is distraught at the moment. It's just mindless thuggery," said owner Trevor Reeves.

A bus was torched in Peckham as police struggled to respond to the spread of sporadic incidents. Witnesses said a 100-strong mob cheered as a shop in the centre of Peckham was torched and one masked thug shouted: "The West End's going down next."

A baker's next door was also alight. One onlooker said: "The mob were just standing there cheering and laughing. Others were just watching on from their homes open-mouthed in horror."

A trail of bins and abandoned vehicles were ablaze in Lewisham.

At Clapham junction, looters – some as young as 14 – moved from shop to shop laughing as they smashed shop windows and clearing shelves of stock, unimpeded by over-burdened police.

Tim Godwin, acting Metropolitan police commissioner, made a direct appeal to parents to get their children off the streets. "I do urge now that parents start contacting their children, and ask themselves where their children are," he said. "There are far too many spectators who are getting in the way of the police operation to tackle criminal thuggery and burglary." He said "significant disorder" had broken out in many communities. These included incidents in Camden, Bethnal Green where a Tesco was looted and two officers hurt, Stratford, Notting Hill, Colliers Wood and Dalston.

Reassuring Londoners police were there in numbers, Godwin added: "We remain steadfast and determined."

The unrest spread beyond London with West Midlands police confirming outbreaks of disorder in Birmingham city centre. Shops including a branch of Louis Vuitton had windows smashed and were looted. An unmanned police station in Handsworth was torched. Extra officers were being sent into the streets of Britain's second city.

Merseyside police also confirmed 'a number of isolated outbreaks of disorder," including burning cars and criminal damage in south Liverpool.

Boris Johnson, mayor of London, also cut his holiday in North America short and was returning overnight. Kit Malthouse, London's deputy mayor of policing, said: "I don't think anybody could have predicted this sort of horrendous spectacle." As the home secretary, Theresa May, broke off her holiday to return to London, she condemned the "sheer criminality" of the violence. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Kavanagh said one-third more officers were available on Monday nightthan on Sunday, when shops were ransacked and torched in Brixton, south London, and trouble reported in Enfield, Edmonton, Walthamstow and Islington.

Kavanagh vowed to deliver "speedy justice" for Londoners, condemning the waves of looting as "disgusting behaviour, ripping apart people's livelihoods and businesses".

In a bid to contain the trouble , Scotland Yard introduced special powers in four areas – Lambeth, Haringey, Enfield and Waltham Forest, allowing stop and search without reasonable suspicion. The section 60 powers were invoked at midnight on Sunday. One incident of stop and search in Hackney was reportedly the catalyst for violence which erupted in Mare Street shortly after 4pm, and saw local hooded youths battle police.

The Guardian understands senior officers are prepared to add more areas to the list. The special powers have been perceived as targeting certain ethnic groups, thus fuelling tensions.

Meanwhile, the maker of the BlackBerry smartphones, Research in Motion, said it would co-operate with a police investigation into claims its popular BlackBerry Messenger service played a key role in organising the London riots.

Brixton bore the brunt of Sunday's violence. The Lambeth council leader, Steve Reed, said: "We are asking the mayor's office for additional police for tonight and the next few nights." Condemning the "copycat activity", he said: "Somebody described it as gangs of kids doing Supermarket Sweep. It was Curry's where they were after plasma screen TVs, and H&M and Foot Locker where it was clothes and trainers. It wasn't about social issues, it was an opportunity to go on the rob."

Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, visiting Tottenham, said the violence would leave "big scars" on the community. Surveying the wreckage after the torching of businesses and homes in Tottenham High Road, he spoke to Steve Moore, who lost his jewellery shop in Saturday's violence. "I'm devastated, it's completely gone. My shop just doesn't exist anymore," Moore told him.

Referring to the "copycat" violence across London, Clegg said: "Let's be clear, the violence we saw last night had absolutely nothing to do with the death of Mr Duggan. It was needless, opportunist theft and violence – nothing more, nothing less."

Boris Johnson released a statement describing the scenes of violence and destruction as "utterly appalling".

"I understand the need for urgent answers into the shooting incident that resulted in the death of a young man and I've sought reassurances that the IPCC are doing exactly that," he said. "But, let's be clear – these acts of sheer criminality across London are nothing to do with this incident and must stop now."

Three police officers were taking to hospital after a car was deliberately driven at them in Chingford Mount, Waltham Forest, where a shop was looted on Sunday.

An inquest into Duggan's death was due to open on Tuesday though there seemed to be conflict between Scotland Yard and the IPCC over complaints by his family over "lack of contact" following his shooting.

On behalf of Scotland Yard, Kavanagh said: "I want to apologise to the Duggan family because I think both the IPCC and the Metropolitan police could have managed that family's needs more effectively".

Rachel Cerfontyne, who is in charge of the investigation, said: "Following my meeting with the family yesterday I am very clear that their concerns were not about lack of contact or support from the IPCC. Their concerns were about lack of contact from the police in delivering news of his death to Mark's parents."

She added that "if necessary" the complaint would become part of the IPCC's investigation.

How does the article construct representation of youth identity?

The article mainly refers to 'looters' and often includes MP's talking about how it was not at all a social problem but just an opportunity to steal. How ever Steve Reed commented "Somebody described it as gangs of kids doing Supermarket Sweep." leading the public on that it is just children that're going out rioting Tim Godwin Metropolitan police commissioner backed this up by making a direct appeal to parents to get their children off the streets. "I do urge now that parents start contacting their children, and ask themselves where their children are." Again this suggests that the youth are just opportunists who are using the death of a man to rob and it's not any protest of 'social problems'.

- Is the broadcast biased?

Yes, they talk about how the MP's are cutting back there holidays short and take in there statements about how the situation has gotten much more seriously and how they're going to get 'speedy justice' against the rioters and then go on to interview some of the victims of the riots such as the Reeves store in which they talk about about the 'mindless thuggery' how ever through out the article there is not one young person who has a comment and in the article they make constant references that it's just youths such as when Tim Godwin who is the acting Metropolitan police commissioner, made a direct appeal to parents to get their children off the streets. "I do urge now that parents start contacting their children, and ask themselves where their children are," again backing up that it's just youth's who are causing damage in the riots.

- Are youths given a fair voice?

No, they're blamed for the full extent of the riots as they're mentioned several times in the article when the pleas of Tim Godwin made to parents to find out where there children are and mention that in Clapham junction 'looters' which they describe their age 'some as young as 14' and then go on to describe how they 'moved from shop to shop laughing as they smashed shop windows and cleared shelves' yet they fail to mention any older looters or offer any youth victims a voice in the article.