Does Murdock own The Sun?
How to heat up racism
Roy Greenslade
Monday July 19, 2004
The Guardian
The Sun was unequivocal about the British National Party. Its front page boomed: "Bloody Nasty People". Its leading article spoke of the party as "a collection of evil, hate-filled moronic thugs ... wicked men ... criminals who should be locked up."
The following day, after the BBC's documentary had been screened, the Sun punched home its message in another leader urging the authorities to arrest BNP members who were secretly filmed spouting "racist bile".
Good stuff, eh? Britain's best-selling daily newspaper laying into the BNP in terms which any liberal could not but applaud. Hang on, though. This is the same Sun that is also responsible for publishing material, day after day, which feeds the prejudices of people who are recruited by, and increasingly vote for, the BNP.
In the past couple of years the Sun has run stories, some of them false, some far-fetched, many full of distortions, which are guaranteed to stimulate its readers' latent - and, all too often, manifest - racism. How else can the paper explain its extraordinary three-page "exclusive" a year ago about "callous" east European asylum seekers alleged to be stealing, killing and eating swans?
This story, which was sure to provide fodder for the bigots of the BNP, was founded on an unsubstantiated rumour started by an anonymous phone call to a swan sanctuary which appears to have been passed on to a police wildlife crime unit. There was not an iota of proof to back it up. It had not resulted, as the Sun claimed, in a police swoop, nor in "east Europeans" being caught "red-handed about to cook a pair of royal swans".
In almost every respect a story likely to inflame passions about a very sensitive issue was wholly wrong. Yet the Sun refused to apologise, eventually carrying a nonsensical "clarification" six months later, tucked away at the back of the paper. By then it had already published another unprovable, unsourced story claiming that asylum seekers were poaching "our fish".
Sound like any blogs we're familiar with?
These were not isolated examples. The Sun has been in the press vanguard in stoking up concern about Britain being "swamped" by asylum seekers, relying for its scare stories on dodgy figures supplied from unofficial sources. Even when the National Audit Office issued a report in May which concluded that the government's asylum data and statistics were "in most respects reliable", the Sun's news report accentuated the negative, beginning: "Ministers were slammed yesterday for putting out 'misleading' figures about asylum seekers".
Nor has the paper cared about delineating who it is talking about. For the Sun, there appears to be no difference between asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants. They are all the same: foreigners "our people" don't want. In other words, the paper has echoed the views of the BNP.
The Sun has taken every chance to attribute Britain's social problems on incomers, as a classic headline last November illustrated, "HIV soars 20%: Migrants blamed for rise". In fact, the report on which that story was based, by the Health Protection Agency, laid greater emphasis on the increase in HIV transmission by homosexual and bisexual men.
These were not isolated examples. The Sun has been in the press vanguard in stoking up concern about Britain being "swamped" by asylum seekers, relying for its scare stories on dodgy figures supplied from unofficial sources. Even when the National Audit Office issued a report in May which concluded that the government's asylum data and statistics were "in most respects reliable", the Sun's news report accentuated the negative, beginning: "Ministers were slammed yesterday for putting out 'misleading' figures about asylum seekers".
Nor has the paper cared about delineating who it is talking about. For the Sun, there appears to be no difference between asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants. They are all the same: foreigners "our people" don't want. In other words, the paper has echoed the views of the BNP.
The Sun has taken every chance to attribute Britain's social problems on incomers, as a classic headline last November illustrated, "HIV soars 20%: Migrants blamed for rise". In fact, the report on which that story was based, by the Health Protection Agency, laid greater emphasis on the increase in HIV transmission by homosexual and bisexual men.
