The Press and immigration: reporting the news or fanning the flames of hatred?

For a couple of days last year, the cacophony subsided. For five years the noise had been growing in intensity to the point where it was almost unbearable. Then a photograph of a small boy's body and a Turkish soldier almost silenced it.
Suddenly the snarling was replaced with compassion. Suddenly the "cockroach" was a child.
Aylan (or Alan as he is styled now) Kurdi drowned with his brother and mother on September 2 last year after his Syrian father paid people traffickers to ferry them from Turkey to Kos. Their boat capsized within five minutes of setting sail and Aylan's body was washed up on the beach.
The next day the Independent ran a photograph of the child's body on the shore. Others used the picture of the soldier carrying him up the beach. Newspapers not known for their sympathy for African refugees or their dangerous voyages across the Mediterranean demanded action.

The Sun September 3, 4,5

The Sun launched an appeal and within two days was hailing its readers as heroes for raising £350,000 to help children like Aylan; families put up their hands to say they would offer foster homes to the young refugees. David Cameron, who two days earlier had said that Europe's migration crisis would not be solved "by taking more and more refugees", apparently promised to admit thousands, prompting headlines such as "Britain opens its arms to refugees". Fifteen, twenty thousand people would be admitted to Britain, foreign aid money would be diverted to help asylum seekers, "Refugees welcome" banners appeared across the country.

But then there was a new season of Strictly and X Factor and another twist in the VIP child abuse inquiry saga - and the tabloids lost interest. 

By the end of the following week, Cameron had ordered a drone to kill a pair of Britons fighting as jihadis in Syria, the Queen had become the country's longest reigning monarch and Paula Radcliffe had been accused (falsely) of being a drugs cheat. Who had time for the boat people now?

Autumn was here, the political machine was cranking up after the summer break and for the newspapers it was time to return to the usual news mix. And, as far as migrants/refugees/asylum seekers were concerned, to return to the usual mix of hand-wringing and hostility.

Daily Mirror September 3, 4 and 14

The Daily Mirror, the one paper that has shunned front-page stories about migration, broke step for three days to cover the Kurdi story and the deaths of four more refugee babies two weeks later.  It had not led on any aspect of migration in the previous eight months and has not returned to it since.

The Daily Express, the paper that has been most vociferous in its rejection of immigrants in any circumstances, did not break step. It did not publish the Aylan photograph either on its front or inside, but instead spent a couple of days berating the EU for the human catastrophe unfolding on its borders before resuming normal service with a diabetes breakthrough.

Daily Express, September 3,4 and 5 last year

As the rest of Fleet Street finally recognised that the "swarm" of refugees was actually a collection of individuals with individual stories, Leo McKinstry kept his eyes focused on the issues that mattered: the trains running on time.

As the immigration crisis deepens, a mood of anarchy is descending across Europe. Our once well-ordered civilisation is sliding towards chaos in the face of the unprecedented, colossal influx of foreign arrivals. The signs of dislocation are all around us.Only yesterday the Eurostar service from Paris to London suffered massive delays because of a major security alert sparked by migrants climbing on to tracks and trains.

Against the Mirror's three migration splashes last year and this, the Express has managed 90.

Promises were easy to make the day after that photograph appeared

The fifteen or twenty thousand have not, of course, reached our shores. And by April this year Cameron was denying entry to three thousand unaccompanied children on the grounds that they were already "safe" in Europe. 

For this he was taken to task by the Daily Mail, which has the sophistication to differentiate between the vulnerable and those it deems to be unworthy, even if its readers haven't. It also has the chutzpah to take credit where it may not be due and so when Cameron did an about-turn, the paper that vilifies economic migrants and foreign nurses hailed its "victory for compassion". 

Ever watchful for hypocrisy in others, the Mail acknowledged that it was "robust" in its opposition to mass migration and took a quick dig at the "liberal elite" who enjoy the services of cheap plumbers, nannies and cleaners, as it tried to square the circle of its demand that children who may be uncomfortable but who were not in danger should be allowed into the country while those who might contribute to the economy should not.

The three thousand haven't got here either. And what hope is there for them doing so when 178 children with an absolute legal right to come to Britain - because they are alone in Europe and have family here - can't cross the red tape?

If it's business as usual for the Press, politicians are just as recalcitrant.

The Sun pages 1, 2 and 5 on August 31

It is not only the Mail that can differentiate between "good" and "undesirable" migrants. Last Saturday, Arkadiusz Jozwik was kicked to death by a gang of teenagers in a small shopping arcade in Harlow, Essex, apparently because he was speaking Polish. The crime was shocking and the Sun was one of only two national papers to recognise its newsworthiness. It splashed on the story - and then, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, published a set of statistics on page 2 about hundreds of thousands of "hidden" EU migrants.
So on page 1, the paper mourns a solid family man who came to Britain thanks to his homeland's membership of the EU, and on the very next page decries the fact that anyone should be able to enter the country on those terms.

Oh yes, and a little further back there was a spread that likened the Calais Jungle to a festival site, describing a "booming micro-economy" with shops, restaurants, churches, mosques, two musical halls, a nightclub and a boxing gym. An accompanying single says that one "illegal" is stopped every hour in the UK.

The Sun pages 8-9 on the day it reported the murder of Arkadiusz Jozwik

The paper might rightly argue that once here, anyone should be safe from murderous gangs, but might it not also pause to consider whether the rhetoric coming from Fleet Street is inflaming the situation?

Only a few days earlier, the paper's first instinct on learning that five young men had been drowned on Camber Sands was to ask if they were illegal immigrants - on the basis that they were not white and had been wearing shorts. They turned out to be a group of friends on a day trip from London.

The Leave campaign in the EU referendum and its newspaper supporters made great play of immigration and of how leaving the community would give Britain back control of its borders - and there has been strong evidence of a rise in racist or "hate" crimes since the vote in June.
A certain section of our society appears to have believed that the moment the votes had been counted, all foreigners would be put on the next boat and that any who remained were fair game. It is frightening.
Going through the Sun's coverage of the issue so far this year, SubScribe had collated 120 almost entirely negative news reports and opinion pieces when this one from June 28 turned up:

This spread, from June 28, was The Sun's 121st "migrant" story of the year

The Mail and the Sun may be able to tell the difference between refugees from war zones and Romanian car-washers, but how often do they bother - and can their readers? And why be so nasty about anyone wherever they come from?

People are, sadly, mugged at cashpoints all over the country every day, but if the perpetrator is a Romanian,  it's national news. And if the crime is more serious - rape or murder - it's worth a page lead at least.

For the Daily Express, all foreigners are a problem and everything is Europe's fault. Since the Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010, the paper has splashed on migration issues on 179 occasions - including today - with a marked acceleration since the run-up to January 2014, when Romanians and Bulgarians were given full access to the UK. And that's not taking into account all the puffs at the top of the page when advice on living longer or rising house prices take centre stage.

Why? The paper has yet to respond to SubScribe's inquiries, but it may be supposed that if one were forthcoming, the answer would be "because it is what most concerns readers". 

In that it would have corroboration from Ipsos-Mori's monthly "issues" polls. Since that 2010 election, immigration has regularly emerged as the subject most frequently mentioned by voters. Fair enough, but another such topic is the health service and yet - miracle cures apart - the state of the NHS has bothered the Express's splash headline writers on only a handful of occasions over the past six years.
[The Mail, which - with 122 - comes second to the Express on the number of migration splashes since May 2010, is constantly on the case of the NHS, GPs and junior doctors.]

But do these papers reflect or feed public fears about immigration?

SubScribe has been monitoring front pages for some years and it's actually quite hard to determine what should be included in these "migration" charts and the composites @gameoldgirl routinely posts on Twitter.
There's a lot of complaining about the proportion of the national budget spent on foreign aid (0.3%), how it should be diverted and the dodgy places that it is sent to (with some justification). These sorts of stories have been excluded.
So, too, have been stories about benefits going abroad to expats, those about Muslims who may not have integrated into UK society quite as the Mail or Express might wish, and all terror-related splashes.
It should also be pointed out that the "heavies" - the Telegraph in particular - are perhaps under-represented, since they often have immigration stories on their fronts, but these are only included on the #chartofshame if they are the lead to the paper.

That still leaves rather a lot.

As mentioned before, the Mirror does not lead on migration. The Sun and Star see footballers and reality TV stars as better sellers, but are generally hostile. The Telegraph is not quite as fevered as the white-top tabloids, but shares their outlook. The Guardian, i and Independent are all generally sympathetic, while the Times tries to steer a middle course.

The chart above relates to print editions, since the papers are collated on the basis that they are what people see in the supermarkets and on television, and so have a greater impact than their circulations alone might imply.
The Independent figure therefore runs only to the end of March, when it ceased publishing in print. Since then, it has continued to produce and share "front pages" of its digital edition and nine of these were devoted to immigration - most of them neutral or sympathetic.

The same cannot be said of the Express, Mail or Sun. And there is a groundswell of opinion that something needs to happen to stop this dangerous drip-feed of negative headlines.

How can that be achieved?

My tweets are widely shared and common responses are "don't buy that rag" or "it should be shut down". Well, it's not a good idea to shut down a newspaper just because you disagree with it - and 60 million people don't buy any of those three papers, so "not buying" doesn't seem to be having any effect at the moment. 

Now at least two groups are mobilising to try to affect change.

CitizensUK is an organisation that seeks to help to settle immigrants into the community and it is particularly concerned about Britain's slowness in helping refugees and about the recent rise in "hate" crime.

Yesterday it organised a "memorial" service for Aylan Kurdi outside the Home Office, urging politicians and officials to act speedily to admit those 178 children who have an absolute right to be here and a further 209 who could come under Alf Dubs's amendment to the immigration bill. That seeks to help the most vulnerable, who may not have relatives in the UK, but have "valid claims for protection".  Next week the group will host a "Refugees welcome" summit in Birmingham to assess progress since last year and consider further action. 

The Aylan memorial outside the Home Office. Photo: Ana Ferreira

In the meantime, some of its members are looking at ideas to try to persuade newspapers to tone down their language, including an approach to the Press regulator Ipso.

SubScribe asked Ipso if it was comfortable with coverage as it stood and whether there was any way it could tackle the cumulative effect of stories that might not individually contravene the editors' code. Its director of external affairs Niall Duffy confirmed that the regulator considered stories on a case-by-case basis, but pointed out that it did have the power to instigate an investigation of its own without any complaint if it considered the issue serious enough. It did, indeed, do exactly that with the Brooks Newmark sting a couple of years back. SubScribe is still awaiting a reply to the question of whether the immigration coverage might qualify.

The signs are not auspicious, however, given the ruling - in the face of an intervention from the UN high commissioner for human rights -  that Katie Hopkins's notorious "cockroach" column did not breach its guidelines on discrimination.

There are those who believe that Ipso cannot be an effective regulator because it is still in the pay of the big newspaper publishers. The putative rival regulator, Impress, recently started consultation on its own draft code of conduct. 

Policy and complaints officer Brigit Morris was hopeful that the end product would be strong enough to tackle such drip effects, describing them as a very important and challenging area for regulation. Morris said that the code committee had considered the issue and that Impress's discrimination provision set a high bar for publishers, including an obligation not to incite hatred against a group.

While the draft code does not specifically address cumulative discrimination as this is very difficult to enforce in a regulatory sense, Impress believes that the draft provision would generate a better culture at news publications when it comes to running stories that discriminate against individuals or groups on the basis of their protected characteristics

She added, however, that - like Ipso - complaints could not be advanced based on a collection of articles, but that the Impress board - again like Ipso - would have the power to start its own investigations in serious circumstances "where there is evidence of systematic wrongdoing".
In other words, it's pretty much the same - and no national publisher has yet signed up to be regulated by this organisation.
Not encouraging.

Another approach is to try to convince advertisers not to spend with newspapers that paint a relentlessly negative portrait of foreign nationals coming to our country or in need of our support. Step forward Richard Wilson.

Sixteen years ago, Wilson's elder sister was among the victims of a massacre in Burundi. What happened next coloured his view of life and the Press. A Daily Mail reporter approached his mother - who had taught English to refugees from a slew of conflicts - to tell her story. She gently showed him the door, explaining that she had lost count of the number of newspaper articles - many from the Mail - that she had seen portraying refugees as liars, cheats, frauds, “bogus” people.
 

My mother had seen the effect of these stories on government policy, and she’d seen the effect of those increasingly harsh policies on her students. She would feel she was betraying them now if she had anything to do with the Daily Mail... Just three days after suffering one of the worst blows of her life, faced with a representative of an organisation that she and most of her colleagues regarded as something close to “hate media”, she’d shown a calmness and dignity that I found quite extraordinary.

When Wilson saw Katie Hopkins's column in the Sun describing Mediterranean boat people as cockroaches, it struck a chord. It was the very simile used by "hate radio" stations to explain the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A year later, the tide of anti-immigration coverage before the referendum spurred him to set up a Facebook page called Stop Funding Hate and a petition aimed at persuading Virgin to stop advertising in the Express, Mail and Sun. A big target, but a well-chosen one, since Branson himself had advocated the power of petitions in his own blog a few years back.
Virgin is still advertising with the target tabloids, but the Facebook page has had more than five million views, attracted 78,000 "likes" and the petition has more than 41,000 signatures.
Wilson says:

Our aim is to shift the balance of incentives so that running hate campaigns costs newspapers more money through lost advertising than it makes them in sales.
We hope that this will contribute to a long-term improvement in the quality and tone of Sun, Mail and Express coverage about the groups that they have previously demonised.
I hope that we can also contribute to a wider debate about the extent of demonisation and hate speech across the board. It clearly isn't just about the right-wing press. It also seems endemic in left wing discourse and everywhere in between. Somehow describing human beings as "vermin", "traitors", "cockroaches" and "monsters" seems to have become normalised. And these words have consequences.

So what's the strategy?

  

We are building a team of volunteers to carry out more in-depth research - to identify and track advertisers in the Sun, Express and Daily Mail more systematically - especially where there seems to be a strong clash with the company's brand values and/or with the values of the advertiser's target customer base. This research will then inform the development of the campaign as we start to widen it out.
We've already found some quite surprising cases - for example this week Waitrose, Iceland and M&S were all running adverts in the Daily Express. What's striking is that companies that might shy away from supporting other types of socially harmful activity don't yet seem to make the connection when it comes to media hate campaigns. We're hoping that strong consumer pressure might start to change this. Obviously the first company that does pull their advertising will be showing that they're ahead of the curve in responding to the deep public concern around this issue, so there are some positive incentives too.

It'll be a difficult trick to pull off. The whole essence of an independent Press is that it shouldn't be influenced by people with power or money in their pockets, so do we really want advertisers dictating or censoring editorial content? [SubScribe admits it supports Stop Funding Hate's ambition, but is hesitating about signing its petition for this very reason.] Wilson recognises the delicate balance he must achieve with his campaign, saying the objective is to modify behaviour, not to censor.
And is it not unreasonable for companies to decide that it's not good for their image to be associated with a particular brand or organisation? Look at what happened to Maria Sharapova's sponsorship deals after her failed drug test.
The extreme example of this is the closure of the News of the World when advertisers deserted after the Milly Dowler phone-hacking story. But if Rupert Murdoch hadn't actually wanted to close the NotW, he would have brazened it out.
The campaigners are taking on hugely powerful players who can be guaranteed to deploy their big guns if they feel their challengers are gaining traction. It's not surprising that both groups are turning their attention first to the Express rather than Dacre or Murdoch.

So, finally, what are these groups fighting?
Here are some of the composites, the stats, that SubScribe has collated over the past couple of years, the accumulation of venom and bile coming from an honourable trade that is supposed to hold authorities to account, to defend the oppressed and inform the people.  The language and mood are ugly.
The freedom of the Press is an essential element of democracy, but surely we need to find a mechanism that can both protect that and stop this:

Sometimes a story is so beguiling that it can be regurgitated several times over a few years. See this old blog post and look at the pictures below illustrating Express stories from 2010 and March this year (a follow-up to a Sun spread the day before). Doesn't the house and its interior look familiar?

The drip-feed effect

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

...and it's not just the splashes (of which more will follow next week). There are the puffs:

...and the columnists:

All of which send just one message:

Photograph: Getty Images

Further reading

The whitetops and immigration: the inside story of 2016

By the end of the year, our paid-for national newspapers had led on migration a total of 277 times, with more than half coming from the Mail and Express. This follow-up post looks at what they put on the inside pages.

Regulation, regulation, regulation

Hugo Rifkind wrote a thoughtful piece in The Times this morning in response to the exclusion of Channel 4's Michael Crick from a Vote Leave rally.
We should worry, he said, when the Press is excluded from such events. The headline writer took the point further: "If the media is being gagged, start worrying".
Apart from the singular verb with a plural noun, fair enough. It is a given that a free Press is a key element of a functioning democracy.
Rifkind's article also cites Donald Trump, President Erdogan - for his persecution of Turkish journalists and for his attempts to pursue a German comedian who poked fun at him - and Jeremy Corbyn for smirking when Labour activists booed BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg. Rifkind concludes:

"This is what demagoguery is. It needn't start with jackboots and jails. It can start, as easily, with a smirk and a wink while a majority thinks "At last". Exclude the jokers, exclude the Press, exclude the experts, silence anyone who won't sing along. It is the pursuit of a clear-eyed narrative, clear of irritant grit. Watch out for it. Even if you are irritated too."

He's right.
So are all those people pointing to the death of Jo Cox and urging politicians to tone down their rhetoric.

But isn't there another group that needs to look to itself? A group that has indulged in a festival of smirking and winking, silencing and excluding, not to mention mocking and insulting? The very group that sees it as its right and duty to police those in the public eye?

No sensible person wants to muzzle or gag or stifle the Press, to licence it or bring it under state control. Regulator Sir Alan Moses said in his early days at the head of Ipso that we need a rumbustious, irreverent Press.  We want our newspapers to be as entertaining as they are informative, to look out for us and ask awkward questions that put those in power on the spot.

What happens, though, when they peddle half-truths and downright lies? What happens when they put only one side of the story? And when they do so again and again and again?

 Editors are supposed to abide by a code that demands accuracy and a clear distinction between fact, conjecture and comment.
The accuracy bit is easy in a campaign such as the one we're living through. There's always someone to express the view you want to put across and, unlike broadcasters, newspapers are not under any obligation to put the other side. Fred Bloggs says all Americans are gun-toting rednecks. He said it, we report it. It's accurate. But it's not the truth.

Indeed, when a newspaper declares that something is"the truth" or that it is "nailing lies", in most cases it is neither.

The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph have never made a secret of their dislike of the EU, so their support of the Leave campaign is unsurprising.
But the way they have shown it is as worrying as Boris Johnson's exclusion of Michael Crick from that rally.
When George Osborne says leaving the EU would cost families thousands of pounds, it is part of "Project Fear". When Boris Johnson says we'll have to pay an extra £2.4bn to Brussels if we stay in, it is further evidence of the need to vote Out.
When Ian Botham backs Brexit, it's a "good old Beefy" picture story. When Professor Stephen Hawking backs Remain, it's a blob par at the foot of the page.

The "Project Fear" bandwagon started rolling early in the campaign, when the focus was squarely on the economy.
But then a much gaudier wagon came over the hill and, beguiled by the giant glittery letters IMMIGRATION over the driver's bench, our fab four couldn't wait to scramble aboard.

Turks, Romanians, Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, Albanians: millions of them apparently want to abandon their homelands and settle in the English countryside - and only leaving the EU will stop them.
No claim was too preposterous, no figure too huge to print. And when our intrepid reporters were caught in the 120pt splash caps lie? Just put a par of 8pt on page two under "corrections and clarifications" and a bit on the bottom of the story on  the website.

This all matters. These four papers have a combined readership of  somewhere between 10 and 12 million, but beyond that, their front pages are seen by millions more when people go to the supermarket, to buy sweets or cigarettes in the newsagents, to pay for petrol at the service station. They are shown on the late-night news bulletins and discussed on radio and television.
The front pages thus have an influence way beyond the rest of the paper. Passers-by who saw the "We're from Europe, let us in" or "12m Turks want to come to Britain" headings won't have seen the corrections published inside much later. The stories have had their impact, the false message has reached its target.

On May 23, I decided to start monitoring every paid-for mainstream national newspaper's referendum coverage for the final month of the campaign (you can see the results by clicking on any of the front pages on this webpage). Had I had half an idea how draining the exercise would prove, I would never have embarked upon it. But the imbalance in the rightwing papers and the relative ambivalence of the left-leaning Mirror and Guardian made me gasp.

In masochistic mood, I then resolved to look at everything one paper - the Mail - had written about the referendum since the date was set in February. The cynicism was even more breathtaking. You can see how the battle lines were drawn on this blog post.

The fact that I focused on the Mail does not mean it was the only - or even the worst - sinner.
The Express has failed to put the Remain case anywhere, other than to report "outrage" and "fury" over its arguments. Over the past week or so it has run a daily back-of-the-book spread labelled "Why I'm voting Leave". No counter-view has been countenanced.
The Sun was rebuked by Ipso for its "Queen supports Brexit" front page. It carried the obligatory correction,  but the editor promptly said he stood by what he'd published -  knocking for six any hope that the new regulator would be seen as strong enough to restrain the Press and so save it from its detractors.

For the past four months our two best-selling newspapers have poured buckets of manure over the Prime Minister they moved heaven and earth to get re-elected. They have played fast and loose with facts (which are inevitably thin on the ground, since no one can predict what will happen next week). They have discounted the opinion of every politician financier, economist, businessman, scientist or academic who counsels caution - and God help any "luvvie" who dares to open their mouth. "Shove it in your cakehole", as the Sun so charmingly put it.

These are the very two papers that shouted loudest when the Supreme Court ruled that they couldn't publish the name of a celebrity whose sexual antics had been touted around the street. A privacy law by the back door?
They were right.
Yes, anyone who cared knew by that stage who the fuss was all about and, yes, the whole legal challenge started out of prurience. But it was a dangerous precedent.

There is nothing wrong with (and much to admire about) a Press that cocks a snook at authority, that refuses to be cowed. But if you want to be admitted into people's homes, to persuade the reader that you are their trusty friend, you have to be responsible and trustworthy.

The lead letter in this morning's Daily Express describes the paper as a "beacon of truth".  Social media may mock the hypochondriac weather-obsessed Express, but there are people who rely on it. They may be having their prejudices reinforced, but there are half a million buyers out there who really think hordes of undesirable johnny foreigners are waiting on the other side of the Channel to board a fleet of coracles to "sneak" into Britain.

Goodness knows what these papers will do on Friday if there is a vote to stay in the EU - or, indeed, if there is a vote to leave and it turns out that they have helped to bring down the Government they were so keen to elect last year. #
Do they have half an idea of what is likely to happen next? Or even know what they want? An administration led by Boris Johnson? Another general election that Labour - under a new leader - might win?
They rubbish Osborne and Darling's warnings about the need for an emergency budget in the event of a Leave vote.Yet (in company with pro-Remain papers) they blithely publish a Leave "manifesto" that promises Bills not only to get out of Europe but also to abolish VAT on domestic energy and other fantasy measures as though Gove and Johnson are an official opposition in a conventional general election. How will these Bills be put before Parliament?
In all their huffing and puffing about "the facts" and "the truth",  papers that claim to be "on our side" and "looking out for ordinary people" have failed to ask the simplest questions or give their readers any clear picture of the sequence of events that is likely to follow the vote on Thursday.

What's the solution?
Ipso has the power to fine a recalcitrant paper £1m - but we all know it won't use it. Even if it did, papers that passionately believe that the EU is a Bad Thing - and that the end of getting out justifies almost any means -  would probably consider half of Paul Dacre's annual income a price worth paying.
So retrospective punishment is unlikely to be meted out and would in any event be ineffective. It's too late. The damage has been done - to the reputation of the Press, and possibly to democracy itself.
Licensing is beyond the pale. So is any form of state regulation, however "triple locked" it may be.
Some call for Leveson 2, but that is supposed to deal with relations between the police and the Press and is hardly likely to result in a more effective form of regulation.

I really wish I had an answer.
Maybe Hugo Rifkind can offer one. What do we do when it's the "muzzled" Press that's wearing the jackboots?