The Media' Racist Attitude Exposed

[parochial]

I saw this piece of information on the Daily Nation Newspaper today.It is interesting but not surprising.

Ownership changed media for the worse

Story by GERRY LOUGHRAN | Letter from London
Publication Date: 3/23/2008

A senior news reporter was telephoned early one morning and told to drive about 483 kilometres to cover the murder of a woman and her two children. An hour and a half into the journey, the news desk called him on his mobile and said, “Come back, they are black.” In other words, not worth a story.

This episode is recounted in a book I have been reading, Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, which has been hailed as “a landmark exposure of falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.” As a tiny role-player in the media circus for many years, I found the book deeply depressing and, in parts, shocking.

The incident above involved the Daily Mail, the most politically powerful and commercially successful newspaper in Britain, which has improved circulation and profits year after year while its competitors have succumbed to a worldwide trend of ever-dwindling sales.

Nick Davies, himself an insider as an award-winning reporter for the Guardian newspaper, found numerous instances of black people being excluded from the Mail.

A freelance reporter said that if he telephoned and offered the news desk a story, he would always be asked, “Are they our kind of people?” or “Are they white middle class?” or “Are they of the dusky hue?” And if they were of the dusky hue, the desk did not want the story.

Another Mail reporter said he was amazed by the open racism he found when he joined. “You would often hear people using the word ****** or nig-nog. I was really shocked. It’s the senior people who do it, the older ones. There is definitely a racist environment.”

Some black people did make it into the Mail’s pages with some frequency – criminals. Davies found that over a nine-month sample period, 64 per cent of black faces belonged to muggers, murderers and rapists, a figure that is hugely out of line with the population as a whole.

But as Davies points out, it’s not just racism -- the Mail feeds its readers with a world they want to believe in. “The Mail … is designed to be sold to lower middle class men and women. Its addiction is to them, and if in order to speak for their interests the Mail must attack, it will.

“Black people, poor people, liberals and all kinds of lefties, scroungers, druggies, homosexuals – they will all be attacked.”

One of that newspaper’s experienced writers remarked, “They don’t want a multicultural society, they want to go back to the 1950s.”

Which is where, it must be said, many of their readers live. And as the former editor of another national newspaper remarked, “The readers are never wrong – repulsive maybe, but never wrong.”

Davies’s book can be holier-than-thou and at times it fails to acknowledge the genuine difficulties that confront some newspapers and their staffs, but his analysis of the collapse in media standards over recent decades is deeply worrying.

Fundamentally, he blames a change in the ownership of news groups across the world, from regional publishing companies or civic-minded family dynasties that could no longer afford the huge costs of producing newspapers, to international commercial organisations interested only in the bottom line.

To cut costs and increase revenue, new technology was introduced in thousands of newspapers and staff numbers were slashed. Second-hand material from websites, PR handouts (many from government), blogs and local agencies, almost all unchecked, was repackaged by office-bound denizens of the news factory, once known as reporters. “Churnalism,” Davies calls it – “churning out trivia and cliché to fill space in the paper.”

It was this non-inquisitorial attitude, he argues, that made possible such huge media embarrassments as Iraq’s notorious Weapons of Mass Destruction, which turned out not to exist, and the Millennium Bug of January 1, 2000, which did not bring human life to an end after all.

Why should this worry Africans? Well, one of the first areas targeted for cutbacks by the media behemoths was global coverage, which the men in suits call “high-cost, low-return.”

The result has been a catastrophic decline in foreign bureaus. A 2006 study showed the entire US media, print and broadcast, supported only 141 foreign correspondents across the world – and you can be sure precious few of those are in Africa.

[elijah]

To be fair to the Brit media, there is a balance of opinions in some instances.

For instance, this article does not do the country any good, yet UK is a very tolerant country;

Britain is ‘a nation of cocaine-snorting bigots’ -http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/travel/

Binge-drinking, ready-meal gorging, obese, cocaine-snorting, self-deluded bigots that play sport very badly, love to moan, are addicted to television and only seem to talk about the weather (which is terrible by the way). Welcome to Britain. Have a nice day. This is the verdict of our lifestyle in Lonely Planet’s new guide to Great Britain.

OK, so there is some element of truth in the statements above, but the new guide is littered with sweeping generalisations, stereotypes and tired quips that both offend and bore, in equal measure.

Here are a few excerpts from its “Lifestyle” section:

On family: “Forty per cent of births in the UK are to unmarried couples¦ one in three marriages end in divorce.”

On race: “Bigotry can still lurk close to the surface¦ it’s not unusual to hear people openly discuss other races in quite unpleasant terms - in smart country pubs as much as a rough city bar.”

On health: “Currently over 60 per cent of the adult population is overweight¦ so while the Brits are pigging out on junk food at least they are not smoking as much.”

On so******ing: “Time to celebrate? Oh yes, with a big drink. Binge drinking among young people [is] a major concern¦ 70 per cent of women are drinking more than the recommended amount¦ cocaine use has doubled in the last decade.”

On food: “The [British] recipe for dinner is more likely to be something like this: open freezer, take out package, bung in microwave, ping, eat.”

On foreign perceptions: “Ask the French [about the British] and you might get a rather different list of attributes that includes stand-offishness, anti-intellectualism, public drunkenness and being **** at cooking.”

Britain for our next holiday? Hold me back.

I'm not so much questioning the veracity of what the main author, David Else, is saying, just the way it is being said. Of course, guidebooks should be honest and candid about the country people are planning to visit, but do we really need shock tactics that Lonely Planet’s recent press releases resort to.

Most people who buy travel guides are planning much-needed holidays to get away from it all, not to be hit with depressing figures on the state of our nation. Mr Else can find little that is positive to say about our lifestyle beyond the fact that we are smoking less.

Perhaps it is telling that our leading guidebook publishers need such controversy to drum up publicity rather than rely on the quality of the coverage. Lonely Planet may have sold some 90 million books, but they face ever-increasing competition from ****** guides accessed by ever more portable laptops, PDAs and electronic readers. Others, such as Footprint and Rough Guides are doing the same thing.

Sadly, much of what is very good about this comprehensive guide ranging from highlighting the overpriced attractions to the unexpected pleasures to be found in the Midlands “ has already been lost among the headlines generated such as those above.

Domestic tour operators and tourist board officials won't thank him for it. The decline in visitors to Britain this year has been alarming. Visitors from the US are down a staggering 21 per cent this year. Yet, with the weak pound, there has rarely been a better time to visit these shores.

But then again, with these Else-inspired headlines, no wonder they are heading elsewhere.




Selected reactions to the article.

A few observations:-

• France has an unwashed population and vile public loos. And they can’t make a decent pudding.
• Spain is overrun with pickpockets and paella.
• Italy is full of Lotharios (at every level, apparently), none of whom can drive properly.
• Portugal is impoverished and dull and you can’t eat anything but sardines.
• Germany is OK if you like sausage and cabbage and huge steins of lager while singing your head off.
• In Holland you have to ride a bike on cobbles and visit Ann Frank’s house and tulip fields.
• Switzerland has secret bank accounts, cuckoo clocks and chocolate.
• Austria was the birthplace of Hitler.
• Belgians live on chips with mayonnaise.
• Every Eastern European country is trying to recover from Communism, mostly unsuccessfully.
• Turkey is constantly under threat of earthquakes.
• In Greece you have to leave soiled toilet paper for collection as their sewers can’t cope.
• All Swedes are blonde, naked and sex mad.
• Finns are the most depressed population in the world and permanently drunk.
• They eat dogs in Korea.
• They eat anything they can get their hands on in China.
• All Americans are stupid.
• Canada is empty and either under 20 ft of snow or it’s Autumn.
• Australians are co**** and only have outdoor cooking facilities.
• New Zealand is still living in the 1950s.
• Everywhere else is dangerous, corrupt, draconian or melting.

There’s a lot more to countries than you’ll ever find listed in Lonely Planet guides. They’re a load of old tosh and only serve to reinforce perceived stereotypes and encourage prejudices. Hardly surprising, then, that their version of Britain sees nothing of any value.

Leave this trash on the bookshop shelves, save your money and put it towards the cost of discovering the truth for yourself. Even if you end up agreeing with them you will have discovered something about yourself along the way.

[Gizah]

This thread is spinning out of order. It has ran its course.