Trigger Warning: This piece discusses racism.
Ian Murray’s comments display shocking blindness to the blatant bigotry that is historically ingrained in the British media. Tabloids and mainstream outlets are institutionally complicit in the racist and xenophobic attitudes that abound in all aspects of British society. The former Head of the Society of Editors should be ashamed for trying to ignore this indisputable fact.
What he said
In a statement on 8th March, Murray definitively declared that “the press is most certainly not racist”. His initial statement was extremely defensive, calling the Oprah interview an “attack” on the British press, and labelling the Sussex’s statements about the press as “untrue”, “unacceptable” and made “without providing any supporting evidence.” His words seem deliberately obtuse, because several headlines were discussed by the Sussex’s throughout the interview.
Murray blusters that the UK media “will not be swayed from its vital role holding the rich and powerful to account” and “has never shied away from holding a spotlight up to those in positions of power, celebrity or influence”.
Ian Murray, I have some news for you. You can dislike the royals, you can hold them to account, and you can disapprove of their lifestyles and existence while simultaneously acknowledging the presence of bigotry in the British media. Because, let’s face it, this issue is a whole lot bigger than the drama of the rich elite. Certain sections of the press are a mouthpiece for hatred and prejudice which filters out into the rest of society.
A history of racism in media content and coverage
The British tabloids (owned by billionaires like Rupert Murdoch) use immigrants and minorities as a scapegoat for economic hardship, to distract from concerns of corrupt capitalism and class solidarity by breeding hatred and mistrust between races.
Of course, racism in Britain is not restricted to the tabloids. But these newspapers — and some broadsheets — are complicit in the racist and xenophobic attitudes that abound in all aspects of British society. They are the biggest peddlers of bigotry in our nation, which sometimes has harrowing effects.
UKIP’s rise was largely facilitated by right-wing press coverage of the 2015 EU migrant crisis. The media identified immigrants as a threat to culture and the welfare system; notorious racist Katie Hopkins referred to a “plague of feral humans” and “cockroaches.” In a UN report for the High Commission for Refugees, researchers found that within a selection of European countries “coverage in the United Kingdom was the most negative, and the most polarised. Amongst those countries surveyed, Britain’s right-wing media was uniquely aggressively in its campaigns against refugees and migrants”.
But is this research surprising, given that our current prime minister wrote several disgusting pieces for the Telegraph and the Spectator, expressing racism, islamophobia, misogyny and homophobia? Boris Johnson explicitly labelled black people “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” and compared Muslim women to “bank robbers” and “letterboxes”, whilst facing no serious consequences and going on to bag the most powerful occupation in the UK. Historical representations of immigrants and ethnic minorities as criminals, or less than human, have been ingrained in British society and are sustained and exacerbated by the British media.
Nowhere is this more visible than in media coverage of protests. The 1980s uprisings in Brixton and beyond were dubbed ‘race riots’, effectively characterising them as a cultural phenomenon rather than a political one. Media represented the disturbances as criminal actions of the ‘villainous’ Black community, while police were heroes and martyrs. Socio-economic explanations were absent, as were quotes or viewpoints from Black communities or their leaders. The media coverage depicted meaningless destruction, a fallacy that has been rolled out again for protests occurring after the deaths of Stephen Lawrence and Mark Duggan.
Murray claims that the British media holds the rich and famous “accountable”, but actually, the British media (and the rich and famous who own it) are the ones who need to be held to account.
Mainstream media and ‘debating’ racism
This is not just the tabloids and broadsheets, though; the mainstream media exhibits racism too. The practice of holding ‘debates’ about racism employs false equivalence and is extremely tiring for black journalists, who are effectively gaslit on national television, then exposed to online ‘trolling’ afterwards. Afua Hirsch, a celebrated and highly educated writer and journalist, was subject to blatant racism during a Sky News debate where she had critiqued the way in which British history is discussed. She was met with the question: “why do you stay in this country if you don’t like it?”. This is not something that would be asked of a white British journalist raising a valid point in a critical debate.
Afua rightly states racism is not an opinion, nor is it something that deserves a platform. So why then do media outlets continue to host such bigotry? Piers Morgan has been allowed to spew hatred through his platform on Good Morning Britain for years, but only recently has he stepped down. Why was he not pushed out? If the British media really has “a proud record of calling out racism and also being at the forefront of campaigns to support mental health awareness”, as Murray claims they do, why then has Morgan been allowed to continuously harass and eventually mock Megan Markle’s mental health struggles on national television for all to see?
When he was subjected to a detailed and educated grilling by Victoria Derbyshire, in the face of direct facts, Murray was in complete denial. She told him of the explicit contrast of coverage of Kate Middleton and Megan Markle; that in 2016 a European commission report found hate speech in British media continues to be a troubling problem; that the lack of diversity in newsrooms might contribute to racist coverage on occasion. Murray’s reply: “I think I’ve been in the industry long enough to know systemic racism throughout sections of the industry is simply not the case”.
Ian Murray should be ashamed. So too should the British media.
Caitlin Thomson
Caitlin’s journalist portfolio can be found here.
Featured image courtesy of Austin Distel via Unsplash. Image license found here. No changes have been made to this image
