13/06/2007

Creating scapegoats with the Daily Mail

I was very suspicious when I saw this headline in yesterday's Mail 'Illegal immigrant is quizzed over PC's knife murder'. So suspicious that I saved the page as an html file because I kind of knew it would disappear.

Here's a quote:
An illegal immigrant is being questioned over the death of a policeman in a high street knife rampage.
[...]
The Daily Mail can reveal the man is an "overstayer" who should have left Britain five years ago. Although his visa had expired, he was allowed to avoid deportation from the country.

The disclosure will embarrass the Government and bring further questions about the shambolic immigration system.

According to the Home Office, there are 570,000 illegal immigrants in Britain, including hundreds of thousands of over-stayers.
Wow! Hundres of thousands of overstayers and potential knife murderers! Are any of us safe while these visa overstayers are allowed to stay unchecked?

Now the article has vanished from the site and has been replaced.


You can still stick 'Illegal immigrant quizzed' into Google and get links to the Mail and thisislondon (at the time of this writing), but they point to a new version on the respective sites. The ones to the Mail now go to 'First picture of man accused of killing PC'. It includes this:
Police said last night that African-born Obih was in the UK legally, having been granted indefinite leave to stay.

Earlier reports had said, wrongly, that he had overstayed his visa and was due for deportation.
Yeah, earlier reports by you.

The Mail has form in this kind of thing. In December, I posted 'Strangler - must be a dirty foreigner - maybe even Polish! (Or the case of the mysterious disappearing articles)', covering how the paper reported that the Ipswich Strangler was Polish, before having to remove the mentions from the site when it turned out he wasn't.

Blaming a group of people the paper doesn't like for bad things without any evidence to make a cheap political point seems to happen now and again in the Mail.

Who knew!

1 comment:

septicisle said...

Reminiscent of two previous cases - the Sun after the murder of the policewoman whose name I'm not going to spell, which blamed asylum seekers, who were then hastily released, and of Jean Charles de Menezes who was similarly alleged to have outstayed his visa, as if it had anything to do with the fact he had been shot dead by bungling cops.