Billy Moore’s recent Manchester video shows how citizen media captures raw street voices often absent in mainstream reporting. Unlike institutional journalism, it presents unfiltered views and civic tensions, raising questions about who gets to speak and how UK media represents public life in 2025.
In a recent video recorded on the streets of Manchester, Billy Moore demonstrates the power of citizen and DIY media in capturing the realities of civic life. The setting is raw and unsettled: chants of “Define a Woman” and “Leave the Kids Alone” echo through the streets, as demonstrators and counter-demonstrators clash over sex and gender. What Moore presents is not a polished news package. Instead, it is an unmediated record of people expressing themselves in their own words, with all the anger, defiance, and solidarity that this moment brings.
This style of reporting is a stark contrast to the professional and industrial media that dominates the UK. Mainstream outlets often filter protests into brief soundbites, tidy headlines, and a sequence of “both sides” statements framed by official commentators. The result is that much of the emotional force, the lived texture of the protest, and the working-class voice at its centre, is lost. Moore’s method brings these elements back to the fore by standing alongside the participants rather than above them.
The distinction between citizen or DIY media and professional or industrial media is more than one of resources. It is about the relationship to the people being represented. Professional journalism, embedded in institutional routines, tends to speak about people. Citizen journalism, by contrast, hands the microphone over and lets people speak for themselves. This is not always comfortable viewing. Shouted threats, uncompromising language, and emotionally charged encounters are unsettling. Yet, they are also part of the truth of public life, which professional news often edits away for the sake of balance or civility.
There are clear advantages in this unfiltered approach. It strips away layers of mediation that normally determine whose voices are heard and whose are ignored. It highlights how public debates play out in the open, in working-class spaces, and without deference to middle-class sensitivities. Not only that, but it challenges the audience to engage with what is actually said and done on the street, rather than a sanitised version designed to preserve their comfort. In a media landscape where audiences increasingly distrust official narratives, this directness carries its own credibility.
Of course, this style of reporting comes with risks. Accuracy in the moment is limited to “this is what was said,” without verification of wider claims. Balance is skewed by who happens to speak. But the benefit lies in documenting what mainstream media neglects: the noise, the passion, and the civic energy that animates public life in Britain today. For professional journalists and media producers, the lesson is clear. If they continue to distance themselves from the realities of everyday civic engagement, they will leave a vacuum that citizen reporters like Moore will fill. And it is in that space that the most urgent and contested voices of 2025 are being heard.