Opinion - News Analysis   

Race bias and the British media

Hasan Suroor

Police chief sparks a row by accusing the media of being "institutionally racist."

— Photo: AP

SPEAKING OUT: Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair, left, London Mayor Ken Livingstone, centre, and Los Angeles Chief of Police Bill Bratton speak to the media at the Hopscotch Asian Women's centre in north London. — Photo: AP

THE MEDIA have joined the growing list of British institutions that have been dubbed "racist" in recent years. Or rather "institutionally racist," which means that while individuals may not be racist the idea that what happens to non-whites is somehow less important than what affects the native whites is built into the system.

Significantly, the allegation has not come from the "usual suspects" such as the politically correct Commission for Racial Equality or the perpetually angry ethnic minority groups, but has been made by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair.

The outspoken Sir Ian, known as the "thinking man's cop" because of his Oxford background and a penchant for quoting literary texts, has caused a storm after he accused the media of a racist bias when reporting crime.

In a speech to fellow police officers last week, he said newspapers paid more attention to white victims of crime while the non-white victims such as Asians and Africans were relegated to "page 97." He cited a string of cases that, in his opinion, were not given enough prominence because the victims were non-white. These included two recent murders in London, one of a white lawyer and another of an Indian worker — both on the same day. The young white lawyer Tom Rhys Pryce was stabbed to death near his house in north-west London while Balbir Matharu fell victim to a gang of thieves in East London when he tried to prevent them from stealing his car stereo.

Sir Ian said that while both cases were equally tragic it was the murder of the white lawyer that got more media coverage. Barring exceptions, the non-white murder victims tended "not to interest the mainstream media," he added.

His verdict: "I actually believe the media is guilty of institutional racism in the way they report deaths."

Ironically, the term, "institutional racism," was first used against the police after widespread criticism of its handling of the racist murder of a black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993, and since then it has been hurled at a number of government agencies, but this is the first time someone in authority has so publicly attacked the media on the issue.

Sir Ian's remarks are in a different class altogether from the routine criticism of sections of the media, especially the tabloids, for the way they report race issues — and predictably enough there has been a strong reaction with newspaper editors saying that he has got it wrong.

Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality, called it a "blanket condemnation" of the media and said such generalisations were was not helpful though he also believed that newspapers could "do a great deal more to be even-handed."

One right-wing columnist demanded that Sir Ian be "sacked" describing him as a "disgrace" and attributing his outburst to the media's refusal to be "silenced about his ... unsuitability for the job." Another commentator, a former BBC "star" and now a Sunday Times writer, said Sir Ian was "obsessed by racism" and that his "obsession" was a danger to everyone — "black and white."

There is a sense even in more sober circles that Sir Ian's remarks were too sweeping. He is also said to have got his facts wrong, especially in the white lawyer-Indian worker case where statistical breakdown shows that the amount of words devoted to the two stories in the media was not significantly different.

Over the past few days, newspapers — consumed by self-righteous anger — have been reeling off cases of non-white victims of crime that got extensive media coverage. One critic dismissed Sir Ian's allegation, which incidentally he has not withdrawn despite the hostile reaction, as "institutional delusion."

There is nothing surprising about the way much of the media has reacted to Sir Ian's criticism. What is surprising, however, is that quite a few journalists have acknowledged that, yes, a sort of caste system does operate in determining the news value of a crime story.

Piers Morgan, former editor of Daily Mirror and not the one to accept blame easily, admitted that the police chief had "got a point." There was what he chose to call "subliminal racism" in the way newspapers selected crime stories.

"The media collectively for a long time have assessed five black or Asian youths dying in a car crash in a different way to the way they would have assessed five white youths (in similar circumstances). I wouldn't call it institutional racism. I would call it subliminal racism," he said.

Donald Trelford, a former editor of The Observer, said the perceived readers' interest played a part in the way certain stories were given prominence.

"News editors get excited by the stories they think their readers are likely to be excited by and since the country is preponderantly white (stories about white victims) are more likely to get extensive coverage," he told The Independent.

Which, he might have added, can be said about the media anywhere in the world.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Not fighting, for now
Death in the name of sport
The Constitution: who, if anybody, is supreme?
Hamas victory sparks debate in Kashmir
Race bias and the British media
Villages for sale, rural despair growing
Bad news just around the corner?
Ministry reshuffle
Demand recall
Karnataka affairs

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu