How the newspapers nourish racial intolerance
Published 24 April 2000
Media - Ian Hargreaves
Through my letterbox drops the booklet setting out election statements of the candidates for London mayor. One of them, Michael Newland, gives 12 reasons why Londoners should support him - namely the "£12 from the pocket of every London voter" to meet the cost of paying for asylum-seekers. "Even if you don't give a penny to the beggars and the squeegee merchants, New Labour is picking your pockets for them anyway."
This message, you must understand, is not racist. Newland's party is "not opposed to individual immigrants. Opposition to immigration is not a matter of racism". As for the language, he is merely echoing words and statistics fearlessly championed by ministers and by newspapers. Newland is the candidate of the British National Party. And Newland is an honourable man.
So, too, are Max Hastings and Paul Dacre honourable men. Hastings's paper, the London Evening Standard, has worked hard to give credibility to the tenuous financial calculations picked up in the BNP manifesto. Dacre's paper, the Daily Mail, campaigns most days against "bogus asylum-seekers".
Last weekend's Mail on Sunday reported that "family gangs of East European asylum-seekers are terrorising Middle England's villages in a wave of robbery and shoplifting". In a story thin on dates, the paper stated that the criminals were "mostly Romanian refugees". So far, four such had appeared on shoplifting charges and one 17-year-old had been conditionally discharged after admitting stealing "a quantity of pain-killing tablets from a Spar shop at Eastleigh, Hampshire".
If the case of the Paracetemol Terrorists leaves you cold, you may prefer the Standard's stories of Romanian babies drugged on Calpol - an analgesic for infants. Or the horrific suggestion that some asylum-seekers might be accommodated in the village where the Mail's moraliser-in-chief, Paul Johnson, enjoys his country home.
Am I suggesting that Dacre, Hastings, Johnson and lock-'em-up Hague are racists, on a par with Newland? Actually, no. What I am suggesting is that the arguments, language and emotional infrastructure of racial intolerance are being actively nourished day in day out by these newspapers.
The Daily Mail, like Jack Straw and William Hague, seems to think that so long as it accompanies its inflammatory commentary on the asylum question with an array of disclaimers about racism and a range of compensatory "fair" actions, it cannot be properly accused of wrong-doing. So one day this month, the paper carried half a dozen stories on race, including a balanced account of police discrimination against a young black man near Manchester and a double-page spread of stories about "successful" immigrant families.
On 15 April, the same paper gave Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the prolific British Asian writer, generous space to promote her new book, though if I had been the author I would not have been happy with a headline that stated: "let me tell you this is not a racist country", when the conclusion of her own text was only that Britain is "a multi-ethnic country which appears at ease with itself".
At ease? A country where the papers carry daily accounts of the most violent racial crimes, where both the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police agree that they are "institutionally racist", and where one paper (the Sun) can mock another (the Independent) for naivety because it takes seriously the idea that the hanging of two black men in Telford might conceivably involve racial motivation - a proposition now being taken with the utmost seriousness by the police.
It is not that I view with cynicism the Daily Mail's efforts to achieve balance in its reporting of racial issues. Rather, I think the paper is misguided in discounting the encouragement its asylum coverage gives to racist sentiments. No amount of compensatory balance can overwhelm the recourse to intemperate language and questionable statistics elsewhere, any more than it is helpful for the Home Secretary to tell Bill Morris that the discriminatory £10,000 visitor-bond scheme proposed by his department "originated from members of the ethnic minority communities".
The point about racism is that it is pervasive. No community, no institution can ever be free of it, including ethnic minority communities. This places an exceptionally large responsibility upon the media and politicians.
Many politicians and newspapers have failed in this responsibility. We now have a situation where it is almost impossible to separate dubious facts from ill-begotten emotions. Thus, a Times editorial can open with an unblinking reference to "the past decade's sharp increase in asylum applications", suggesting an unsustainable long-run trend, when in reality, over nine years of that time frame, there was no increase at all. Only Nato's highly acclaimed ethical war in Kosovo altered that.
The situation is so serious that logic has buckled under the force of emotion, enabling newspapers and politicians to argue simultaneously that Britain is both Europe's "soft touch" on asylum, yet about to be made even softer by the calamitous incorporation of European human rights law.
Anyone can play this game. Take the latest asylum figures reported in the Daily Mail on 11 April. These showed previous estimates of the 1999 asylum applications figure to be grave exaggerations. They also showed that the number of applications refused - ie, considered and found, to coin a phrase, "bogus" - stood at 10,685. This compared with 22,315 in 1998. But did anyone go for the headline: "BOGUS ASYLUM NUMBERS HALVED"? You know the answer.
Ian Hargreaves is Professor of Journalism at Cardiff University
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