A TV programme last night reinforced my long held belief that nothing written in newspapers is worth reading, let alone paying to read.
Channel 4’s “Dispatches” programme focused on the issue of the demonisation of Islam in the UK since the 2005 suicide bombings in London and in particular the campaign of fiction presented as fact and the misrepresentation of minor issues to elevate them to a status of shock and horror, all with the intention of presenting Muslims in the UK as a threat to national security.
Reading the posts made on that comment blog after the programme was shown simply illustrates the extent to which the media have formed minds like plasticine, watching the presenter Peter Osbourne interview journalists from The Daily Express and The Sun was like listening to a party political broadcast on behalf of the BNP, I was truly shocked by the depth of their prejudice and hatred, all of it neatly parceled up in birthday wrapping paper, tied with ribbon to make it look pretty and presented as “merely the opinion of our great British readership” – you can see how great some of their readers are when you read the Dispatches comment blog.
I honestly didn’t think that newspapers had sunk so low as to become pure unfettered political rags, ok, I did, but I didn’t realise just how far they’d sunk until last night – The Express Group with its infatuation for the death of a white Christian ex-princess who dared to date a Muslim ten years ago, is on a par with the Nazi owned press barons of pre 1938 Germany.
And the great shame is that far too many believe the diatribes that they print as fact.
Peter Osborne illustrated and investigated many of their stories from the past twelve months – “Muslims spreading super-bugs in our hospitals” was one such Express head line, based on their “story” that Muslim staff in British hospitals were refusing to roll up their sleeves when washing their hands before and during their shifts on the wards, the story being credited to an anonymous member of staff at a Leicestershire teaching hospital. Staff at the hospital in question were asked if this was the case, including the chief medical officer – the truth of the “story” was that they had been asked, once, some years ago, by a Muslim woman whether or not she had to roll up her sleeves when she scrubbed up, she was told yes, she complied, to this day they have had no Muslim staff refuse to comply.
This “story” made front page headlines in The Express.
Three days later they printed a four line apology somewhere deep inside the newspaper admitting that they had no grounds to suggest that such a thing had ever happened.
Several other racially biased and racially aggravating front page headlines were exposed as shams by simple journalistic questioning by Peter Osbourne, the sort of simple journalistic questioning that you imagine had been undertaken by The Express and The Sun reporters, and you can only then start to imagine what happened when they returned to their editors with the news that the story about those unclean bastard Muslims was actually not a story at all but all made up – “run it anyway” can have been the only reaction, “and polish it up a bit, its not anti-Muslim enough yet”
As one Muslim cleric mentioned last night, “we are told that all terrorists are Muslims and therefore all Muslims are terrorists, but all rapists are men, does this mean that all men are rapists” a logic that has not yet found its way into the brains of some of our national newspaper editors.
Or as another commentator mentioned last night, “Prior to the London suicide bombings, the previous bombing campaign was perpetrated by a white Christian man with a hatred of gays, he managed to explode three bombs and kill three people, does this mean that all white Christians hate gays ?”
Strangely enough the national press did not run headlines to suggest so.
I half expected you to Blog the *Man with 20 Children* BBC1 10.30pm I’d try, BUT I swear far tooo much, and other words escape me right now.
I saw two minutes of “The Man With 20 Children” but couldn’t watch anymore, its good to get annoyed by TV programmes though.
the press are a bunch of bastards. My revelation came when I saw a picture of diana (queen of our hearts) that the newspaper had photoshoped to make it look like she was leaning in to kiss Dodie when the original was nothing of the kind.
They are the oppressors in this country, not the govenment.
I hope C4’s analysis of “Images of Islam in UK” will expand to cover the electronic media too. There are some news editors who are fond of sensationalists wishing to see their audience to live in what Jeanne Jordan, author of The Panic diaries, calls “a world of perpetual ‘duck and cover’, a world of terror alerts scrolling across the bottom of our television screens. A world, where evening news feeds our fear.”
The discourses of state agencies locate Islam and Muslim communities not simply as “problem communities” but as security concerns, notes Defence Studies scholar Katherine Brown. There is a need to watch out if certain contributors to this debate about minority communities wish to steer it from discussing ‘politics of difference’ to stirring up the ‘politics of fear’. We need to be wary of pundits who are unable or unwilling to offer alternate set of policies and positions. What we don’t deserve is another discussion that’s governed by fear and innuendo. What we don’t wish to hear from the pundits is the kind of discourse that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon – that sees opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize.
Thanks for the link Jeffrey, just in case anyone else is not aware, the Cardiff School of Journalism report which was the basis of last nights Channel 4 documentary can be accessed by clicked the link “Jeffrey” in the post above, haven’t read it all yet but I’m sure it’ll make fascinating reading.