The Metropolitan Police chief, Sir Ian Blair, who has a literature degree from Oxford, once told me he had considered a career in journalism. If he can't understand why the Soham murders were a big story (as he said on 26 January), I can only say he was wise to look elsewhere.
Start with the picture. How often can the papers show murdered children at the very last moment their parents saw them alive, wearing the clothes in which they were killed and with a clock above their heads? Add the protracted hunt for their bodies; a murderer who lived locally, spoke to the press and took part in the hunt; the echoes of Little Red Riding Hood and the curious role of Maxine Carr. Only a policeman, his imagination deadened by years of trying to establish incontrovertible facts, could fail to see what gripped not just Britain, but much of the western world.
Yet Sir Ian has a point - several points, in fact - when he questions how the press chooses its stories. Would Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman have been such a focus of attention if one had been a bespectacled child with learning difficulties and the other a drug-taking teenager, suspended from school for swearing at the teacher? And would the story have been so "good" (as journalists say) if the abduction had taken place in an inner city rather than a supposedly idyllic English country town?
As for Sir Ian's charge of institutional racism in the press, commentators reacted as though he had accused the Pope of paganism.
"Sir Ian is wrong," declared Vicki Woods in the Saturday issue of the Daily Telegraph. "Very wrong", she added for good measure, but failed to elaborate. So how many ethnic minority faces appeared on the Telegraph home news pages that day? Er, zero, unless you count a dusky carnival dancer helping to welcome a white tourist to Rio, and a blurred Afghan (recruited through a language school) helping the British army prepare for the subjugation of his disorderly fellow countrymen. How many non-white faces were among the picture bylines that, in the Telegraph as in all papers, have spread like ground elder? Er, zero again, and I looked through all 12 sections.
Let's be fair. The Telegraph has at least two ethnic minority columnists but they didn't happen to write that day. Moreover, in a children's fashion spread in the Weekend section, one child out of the seven pictured was light brown and another Far Eastern in origin. And nobody can avoid putting non-white faces on foreign, sport and popular music pages. But whole areas of the Saturday Telegraph - the Money, Property and Motoring sections, for example - appear to be whites-only zones.
It is in their softer sections that the papers reveal themselves. The Daily Mail, for example, can score highly for non-whites on its news pages - at least it did in the wake of Sir Ian's comments, when it was perhaps trying to make a point. It even included the stabbing of a 23-year-old Asian that I didn't see reported elsewhere. But in the four January issues of its acclaimed Thursday Femail section I counted 143 white faces and 20 pairs of white legs. Just three non-white faces appeared, two of them belonging to Constance Briscoe, the black judge whose memoirs of childhood brutality were bought up by the Mail.
Mention the Mail and institutional racism, particularly in relation to crime reporting, and you are immediately reminded of Stephen Lawrence. It is sometimes forgotten that it was not until three years after the murder of the black London teenager that the case began to receive front-page treatment, and that the initial low levels of media attention contrasted sharply with the extensive coverage of the murder of his near-namesake, the white London headmaster Philip Lawrence, who was stabbed to death at his school gates. Even the Mail's brave campaign (it risked legal action by calling the chief suspects in the Stephen Lawrence case murderers, when a private prosecution against them had failed) was based on substituting one frame of prejudice for another. Stephen was a respectable lad who eschewed drugs, did his homework and wanted to go to university. In other words, he was white middle-class or respectable working-class in lifestyle, aspirations and pretty well everything except skin colour. His white alleged killers, by contrast, were yobs who had defied white justice and threatened the safety of all respectable folk.
I do not know whether all this makes newspapers guilty of institutional racism, institutional classism or both. Much of it can be explained by 90 per cent of the country being white and the press preferring to feature people with whom its readers can easily identify. Sometimes, intense media coverage is explained by nothing more sinister than the lack of other big stories, as tends to be the case in August, which was when the Soham murders occurred. So perhaps Sir Ian is, as Vicki Woods states but does not demonstrate, wrong. But I do not see how she can call him very wrong.
