18/08/2008

The Daily Mail, race and knife crime

I'll start with a quick question.

You're involved with the online content of a national newspaper. You have to summarise a story with the headline 'Teenager stabbed to death by 'drunk racist' during bloody weekend that claimed two lives'. You only have space for one picture to illustrate the story on search results. Do you:

a. Use a picture of the victim of the racist attack, since he's the subject of the main thrust of the headline (and the one sentence summary: 'A boy of 17 was killed in a racist attack in the street, his friends claimed today')?

b. Use a picture of the victim of the other murder?

Now, two bits of extra information before you decide. Firstly, the national newspaper in question is the Daily Mail. Secondly, the victim of the allegedly racist murder is Asian, and the other victim is white. Answer below the fold:


Don't look for the comments. They've long gone

Naturally, it's the white guy in the picture. He's not the main subject of the headline and anyone who only sees this picture might think the victim of the racist murder is white, but there you go.

The story now has the headline 'Teenager stabbed to death by 'drunk racist' during bloody weekend that claimed three lives', and includes this sentence:
Some residents claimed Nilanthan was connected to Tamil street gangs but police said there was no reason to suspect the attack was gang-related.

Remember that - no reason to suspect the attack was gang-related. We'll come back to this later.

As well as the headline change from 'two' to 'three' lives claimied at the weekend, the article also completely replaces the original that appeared in the Mail on Sunday with the headline 'Knife Crime Britain claims another two teenage lives'(one URL that pops up in a Google search for that headline is:
www.mailonsunday.co.uk/.../Knife-crime-Britain-claims-teenage-lives-boys-aged-16-17-brutally-killed.html). It appeared in a spread across the top half of two pages in the dead tree version, which I've pictured below. But something's missing? What could it be?

What's missing from this picture?

Let's see. Big picture of victim - check. Big picture of scene - check. Close up of flowers at scene - check. Big picture of the non white victim - waitaminute! There's no picture of the victim who isn't white! There's space for a picture of the scene of the white kid's murder and a close up of flowers at the scene, and space for a picture of the white victim of another crime included under the headline although she's neither a teenager nor the victim of knife crime, but no space for a picture of the non-white victim. Why, anyone might think he's been deliberately left out.

Have a look again at the two page spread. See where the join of the two pages is? That's where the main coverage of the murder of the Asian kid starts. There looks to be roughly two and a half columns of text devoted to the white kid, plus a montage of pictures that makes the coverage total of around six columns. The Asian kid gets about one and a third, and two sentences in the story's introduction.

Remember the bit in the new version about there being no evidence the murder was gang related? Just over a third of the scant coverage of Nilathan Moorty's murder in the original article it taken up by attempts to link it with gang activity, starting with this in the intro:
The 17-year-old, Nilanthan Moorty, was stabbed to death in South London after apparently being caught up in a clash between rival gangs.
And later, this:
Croydon councillor Mike Selva said the victim was a member of a Sri Lankan gang known as the Tamil Boys. The owner of a local dry cleaning firm, who did not want to be named, added that a bloody turf war had been raging between rival Sri Lankan gangs in Croydon and nearby Tooting.

He said: ‘It’s non-stop. There are fights between them all the time – the police are always splitting them up.

‘There have been three or four murders in the past year around here but they never get reported. It’s like living in a war zone.’
You get the picture. A turf war between rival Sri Lankan gangs led to this murder (and a mysterious three or four other murders that somehow never got reported to the police), except as we know from the new version, no it didn't.

You might be tempted to give the paper the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe the bit about no evidence of gang involvement came later than this article and the two hacks involved had no idea who was involved and that was the most likely explanation at the time. But then, I've read the rest of the article and you probably haven't. It goes on to say:
Scotland Yard said in a statement: ‘ The suspect, described only as a white male, got out of the cab and was involved in an argument with the driver.
The suspect is a white male - which kind of implies that he isn't involved in a turf war between rival Sri Lankan gangs. And yet the only explanation we're offered for the murder is the turf war and rival Sri Lankan gangs. No wonder the story's been replaced on the website.

The Mail's main claim to being anti-, or at least not-racist rests on its coverage of the Stephen Lawrence murder. One of the most shocking aspects of that murder and the police's complete mishandling of the case, which led to the MacPherson Report and a massive shake-up in the way the police work, was the way that the police assumed that Lawrence must have been up to no good because he was black. Here, we have the Mail assuming that the Asian victim of a murder must have been the victim of a Sri Lankan gang turf war - even though the person accused was white.

The Mail's coverage of the Lawrence murder, which it still cites in its defence when being accused of racism, took place eleven years ago.

**UPDATE** The story no longer shows up in a search of the Mail site for 'Racist Murder' or any other term I can think of that should turn this article up at all. Could be that there'll be better coverage in tomorrow's paper to make up for this, since Moorty's picture didn't turn up in the Standard until today. Could be I've jumped the gun a bit. I hope I have.

6 comments:

Tom said...

I think, from a glance earlier, that the newsprint edition had an Asian on the front.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

Hi Tom,

Both print versions have pictures of the weekend's Olymic medal winners. Nilathan Moorty's pic is on the front of the Standard though.

Tom said...

Ah, must have got my Associated Newspapers muddled up. You'll forgive me for not wanting to get closer. The Mail, now I remember it, actually had a positive headline about how great it was to be British. No wonder I was confused, I thought we were going to hell in a handcart.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

Sorry to remove the last comment, but it was spam, the link took ages to download and wasn't in English so I don't really know what it was saying. I don't want to have to do this, and I don't mean anything personal by the removal, but if you want to make a point about the post above, please do. I have no problem with you including a link with the point you make, but just a link on its own when I can't really tell what the link says is a bit of a stretch.

Pete said...

Here is the difficulty now for Associated Newspapers Ltd., publishers of the Daily Mail.

In July 2001 the newspaper published the front page headline "Knives are out for Gordon Brown" - on the very day that the 'softly softly' approach to cannabis was pioneered in North Lambeth, London.

This headline acted, and subsequently continued to act when used within the inner pages of the newspaper, as a warped catalyst to people who are sick mentally.

Well, a couple of months ago, I attempted to buy a back copy of the issue from 2001 for about £30 from a company called Historic Newspapers Ltd. But for the day of that headline, no copies were available and the company offered me a refund.

However I have other archived Daily Mail headlines, kept, such as "Now they will stab him in the front" - a political story about Charles Kennedy, former Liberal leader, and "Who will wield the knife?" - to talk about Tony Blair.

The difficulty for the Mail is not just that there might be a link between these headlines and subsequent murders, but that the link has been evidently proven - and generally speaking, just read the newspaper a few days later.

The difficulty encompasses the entire newspaper group. For the sake of all, I hope the entire perverted affair is now offer. The instance that upset me most was the day 'The Evening Standard' - London's quality newspaper, printed the small headline "Knives come out for Michael Grade", and then I knew that someone would be murdered. The paper subsequently reported a few days later in an article of a similar size:- "Man stabbed to death in Hackney"

So I'm actually very pissed off and I am very pleased that stumbled upon this website, and the article's excellent detailed investigation. Add my thoughts, and you soon see there could even be a case for the Editor of the newspaper to be arrested. I have already had two discussions with my local police station about the newspaper.

Pete said...

Firstly, I made a typo in the last post, I'm sorry about that. "I hope the entire perverted affair is offer" it should have said "is over".

Also to report, that a few days after posting, late evening weekend, 10.02pm, I heard someone threatening to stab someone right outside my house.

So I opened my bedroom window wide and shouted "What the f*** is going on?"

It then quietened down, and a few minutes later I heard someone bragging about how he wanted to stab this person record it and upload it to the internet where people could view the video and download it.

I opened the window, and shouted something which ended in "mother****ers" - I hate having to use this kind of language, and I saw some poor tall guy running away at high speed from this group of about 7, and the group of 7 went away in the opposite direction.

I then phoned the police and told them about the incident.

What a ghastly business ! I phoned the Daily Mail switchboard 0207 938 6000 apologised to the telephonist and advised that my comments were not meant at him personally, and advised that the paper could expect to go bankrupt if they printed anything like "knives come out" as a headline just one single time more. I would love to say let's hope they don't, but with Paul Dacre as editor, god knows what the agenda is, he may try to publish this headline again.