What we didn’t learn from the Manchester Airport police ‘attack’

There’s a famous 1986 TV advert for the Guardian (remember when newspapers had TV adverts?) which shows you footage of a rough-looking skinhead pelting down the street and appearing to grab at the briefcase of a startled-looking city gent. Just as the viewer is digesting this scene and drawing the conclusion that suits his or her prejudices, the screen cut away to another, wider shot: the young man, as we discover, wasn’t trying to mug the older man, but was wrestling him out of the way of a pallet of bricks collapsing overhead. Despite the improbable, Wile E. Coyote quality of the imagined peril, it was a cute idea for an ad. We read into a snippet what we choose to read. 

Had that ad been screened in the age of social media, dollars to donuts the first half of the clip would still be circulating among the anti-skinhead-o-sphere, with no number of forlorn ‘community notes’ or fact-checks making any difference to its virality.