The media stoke up racism on purpose. It’s our duty to point that out
When Jo Cox was murdered, her killer shouted “Britain First” – the name of the political party formed by former BNP members, which has over 1.5m likes on Facebook. The Daily Mail buried the news of his conviction for murdering a sitting MP on page 30, almost as if the Mail thought it was somehow unimportant.
On Monday, a reported stabbing in Forest Hill tube station in London is said to have been preceded by anti-Muslim shouts. Our inability and unwillingness to acknowledge the role of our own culture in creating dangerous environments for minorities is insidious.
Ash Sarkar, a senior editor at Novara, spoke on Twitter after the alleged attack, saying: “These incidents are not a demonstration of violent rightwing politics invading the everyday, but a violent manifestation of the politics *of* the everyday.”
We’ve been worrying about the “normalisation” of far-right rhetoric but people such as the Dutch writer Flavia Dzodan have been patiently pointing out for years that this is normal, and that minorities have been hearing this their whole lives.
The Republican strategist Lee Atwater famously described the strategy of racially coding statements during the Reagan years, but it predates that. The British media respond to immigration with frothing apoplexy, wails of imminent civilisational collapse and the demonisation of some minority group or other as a matter of routine and tradition.
The propagandist press in this country understands well that its job is not the individual news stories but the accumulation of headlines, day in and day out, right in front of people when they go to buy groceries and petrol. Individual pieces can be exposed as lies, but fact-checking is already too late.