The right-wing mainstream media are clouding the readers’ judgement
The row that has erupted between Boris Johnson and the niqab this week has been at the forefront of all news headlines. Muslim women are dehumanised by a popular parliamentarian who has made a mockery of Brexit and our multicultural nation. Johnson’s buffoonery has spread into populist politics, with many speculating the comparisons he made between Muslim women and letter-boxes is a ploy to shift the Conservatives further right.
The atrocity doesn’t stop there. Boris Johnson has a comical image he adheres to. The press laps it up and splash it across their front pages. Whilst the row continued, a clip circled around news websites showing Johnson offering tea to the exhaustive press who had been waiting tirelessly outside his home for an apology. He deemed the press “heroic”, whilst his tea-making gesture was self-proclaimed as “humanitarian”. This was another saga where the mainstream media acted as apologists to Johnson’s race-based narrative. There were plausible social media posts circulating alleging Johnson was rude and used expletives towards the pool of reporters camped outside his home. Of course, this was ostracised from the pages of the red top tabloids and right-wing broadsheets.
The devastation surrounding Boris Johnson and his endless use of racist tropes has not stopped his popularity remaining steady. His cartoonish reputation has a profound effect on his supporters. They empathise and admire his ability to falter as if humiliating blunders are a sign of successful leadership. But how can the electorate find hope in an Etonian halfwit who has lolloped his way through political power? The right-wing press are highly responsible for this.
The Johnson saga and the right’s alignment with him is only one saga in a litany of others that expose the mainstream media as bias. Through recent campaign periods, particularly Brexit and the snap election, the press’ endemic assaults towards the left were made extremely clear. The Daily Mail and The Sun were shrouded in deceit when they used cantankerous headlines to attract the swing voter. “CRUSH THE SABOTEURS” was an infamous title during last year’s election used by the Mail. The dictator-esque slogan was widely condemned but still helped to keep a tumbling Tory party afloat. A Corbyn-led Labour party did better than expected, but the emphatic attacks against him meant the readership deemed him hopeless from the outset.
The press targets their readers by catastrophising issues through stories. They avoid all statistics but make the reader seethe through anti-migrant and illiberal rhetoric. The cornered left-wing media use statistics and facts to base their news. Unfortunately, avid news readers prefer headlines than figures when taking in news. An example, benefit fraud is considered to be twenty times higher than it factually is due to attention-grabbing headlines. This is dangerous and insulting to a welfare state that a number of people rely on heavily.
One scaremongering headline that stayed with me was one by the Sun recently. The headline was as follows; “Transgender lag ‘sexually abused four female prisoners’ days after arriving at West Yorkshire jail”. Although this incident was utterly contemptuous, it was also incendiary to the trans community’s push for equality. It has been proven numerous times that a trans individual is more likely to be the victim than a perpetrator of any crime. The Sun have been ignorant on the difficulties trans people face in every day society, but jump at the chance to report on an incident that a trans person was the abuser. If the mainstream media was fair and apolitical on certain topics, the headline itself would have been less hurtful.
The media are under siege and the protection of our press freedom is more critical than ever. The British media specifically are mostly run by a multimedia mogul, Rupert Murdoch, who has never shied away from expressing conservative values. So, to make the press freer, dismantling media corporations and creating more equal regulation would be beneficial. Without the press as an independent and mostly apolitical source, the reader will continue to be scapegoated.
