Who is Julie Moult?

Remember that story about Muslim yobs trying to kick our brave boys from their new home in Windsor that turned out to be dirty monkey cack? You know, the one where it wasn't Muslims at all that did the intimidating, but probably locals moaning about the effect on house prices?

It was written by Julie Moult. Also responsible for some nonsense about Nazi raccoons.

And you know what? It is my considered opinion that Julie Moult is an idiot.

In my opinion, of course. Not objectively. Oh no.

Not just because she is responsible for one of the most atrocious bits of tabloid anti-Muslim bullshit in recent memory, but also because she has no idea of how Googlebombing works. Well, she does, because Google told her what it is, but she went ahead and wrote an article calling something Googlebombing when it wasn't anyway, because that would make a better story.

Like how Muslims hounding soldeirs out of their house would make a better story than disgruntled house owners.

More at Bloggerheads.

White shite

On one of the menu bars on the right, there is a list of topic labels I give posts to make it easier to find things on the same subject. Look at it. Gaze upon its superfluous beauty.

One topic is 'Deja Vu', which covers most of the stories we have seen before. I'm not just talking about the stories that fit the overarching tabloid narratives, but stories that get recycled every now and again, ususally when new sets of virtually identical figures get released every three months. One story that pops up a lot in this category is the one of how loads of people are leaving the UK as loads are coming in - the implication being that people are leaving because these people are coming in.

Here's one from May this year: 'Over 200,000 Britons fleeing the UK each year as record 160,000 foreigners are granted citizenship'

Here's one from November last year: 'Half a million migrants pour into Britain in a year, but 200,000 leave'

Here's one from this time last year: '196,000 out, 574,000 in: Record numbers leaving Britain for new life abroad - as immigration to UK soars'

On Friday, I posted (with a crappy link, natch - sorry people) about Anton Vowl's coverage in 'Prove it, you lying racist bastards' of the latest incarnation of the story, ''White flight' as more than 400,000 Britons head for a new life abroad'

'Wha...?' you might think, doing a comedy double take (maybe gobbing out a bit of tea or something - whatever floats your boat), 'but that means the number of white people leaving the country is more than double the total number of people who left last year!'

Except, as anyone who read Anton's take will realise, no.

Whereas the paper's technique last year was to only count the number of British citizens leaving the country for a year or more, while counting the total number of people arriving (including returning British citizens) to make it look as though there's a horrible flood of swarthy people, the technique this year is to count every single person leaving the country for a year or more and pretending that all of them are white. Something that it only dared to imply by using figures for British citizens last year.

That's quite something. Last year, not a single mention of the fact that there were 189,000 non-UK citizens leaving the country, but this year they're counted as 'British residents' to lend some weight to the bullshit claim of 'white flight'.

And that's not the only change in tack over the last year. It seems that the paper's previously masterful use of innuendo to say things without saying them is on its way out.

Last year, the paper managed to imply that nice, smiley white people were leaving while swarthy foreigners were arriving with brick-subtle juxtaposition of pictures. It also only alluded to 'white flight', being incredibly careful to qualify the usage, by saying:

The middle class are increasingly moving out of towns and cities in southern England in a phenomenon known in Whitehall as 'churn'.

The relocation to suburbs and rural areas is similar to the 'white flight' that emptied American cities in the 1960s.

However, the exodus here includes successful ethnic minority families anxious to escape the growing tensions of life in big towns.

See. Not white flight, but similar. It involves successful ethnic minority families. We're not racist, but look at these pictures.

This year, we're not just talking about a localised issue of people leaving urban areas that's a bit like white flight, we're connecting the dots for you and calling the number of people leaving the country 'white flight', even though quite a large number of the people leaving are not white. But we're still not racist. Here's an article about how black people stab white people.

I'm pretty sure the Mail has been getting more brazen recently, relying less on its readers to join dots. Comparing '196,000 out...' with 'White flight...' shows this pretty clearly. While the first version gives the paper the opportunity to claim that it's only addressing the problem of numbers of people and race isn't an issue, the current version makes this far more difficult. The paper is actively drawing the attention of the reader of the race of the people leaving the country, and pretending lots of people who aren't the race the Mail wants us to think they are actually are, but that's familiar Mail territory.

Last month, the Mail published a set of figures that showed that the vast majority of young victims of knife crime are of unknown ethnic origin in 'Over half of young knife suspects are black, Scotland Yard figures reveal' with the words:

Yet in the overwhelming majority of reported cases of knife crime involving young people, the victims are white.

The figures were 222 for white, but 292 for 'not stated'. The only explanation the paper offered for this is that the victims were black gang members who didn't want to be identified.

Last week, the Mail on Sunday reported about the murder of teenager Nilanthan Murddi, making as much as it could of the possibility of the murder being related to a turf war between Sri Lankan gangs. The suspect, as the paper revealed in the story, was white.

It subsequently emerged that Murddi was alleged to be the victim of a racist crime, rather than Sri Lankan gang violence. I've blogged about this a couple of times, but the upshot is that the paper hasn't bothered to report this development in the paper version. It has updated the version of the article on the website, but, bizarrely had made it impossible to find in searches a reader might commonly use to find it, such as the victim's full name, or the words 'racist murder'.

It seems that this non-white knife murder victim is not worthy of space in the dead tree version of the paper when he can't be connected to gang violence. And, remember, black victims don't state their ethnicity because they're gang members.

This apparent ditching of the paper's more subtle approach is great for the BNP. Assembly Member Richard Barnbrook has included the Mail's table from the black knife crime story on his blog. The party has been using the infamous Mail picture from immigration stories like 'Half a million migrants pour into Britain in a year, but 200,000 leave' on their website. Today, Barnbrook has a video on his blog quoting from the London County Council's book of remembrance about how those in the 1914-18 war stood firm in the agressor's path to attack the inclusion of a statue and words of Nelson Mandela in the Assembly Hall (connecting him somehow with WWI Germans), and to attack a statue remembering the abolition of slavery. (Who are the aggressors here, black people? Lefties? We're not told, but probably a combination). Mandela, obviously is not a literal aggressor against Britain. But then, immigrants aren't literal invaders, either. Which didn't stop last Friday's headline in the Express, a paper that will shunt rightward with the Mail in its attempts to out-Mail it, whatever the paper does.

Will things get any better under the inevitable years of tory rule in front of us, as the papers try desperately to attack the government for not being right wing enough?

Doubt it.

The Express, the Mail and a new low

Sometimes I wonder if it's childish to refer to the Express as 'Der Sturmer'. Not today.

Just a quick post today, since I'm off on a stag do this afternoon, but Anton Vowl over at the Enemies of Reason has some great stuff about an incredible low point in the coverage of immigration in the Mail, and especially the Express. (See 'Prove it, you lying racist bastards.' and 'Invade, vb.') It had been such a long time since a proper immigration scare, I thought the papers had started to soften after the Mail had to print a letter criticising its attacking of the Polish.

How wrong was I? Jesus. (No change in the Mail's coverage of Nilanthan Murddi's murder, by the way)

With headlines like the Express', is it any wonder that there's a BNP representative in the London Assembly?

Incidentally, dust up in the comments of Barnbrook's dodgy blog, in which readers try to argue that discrimination against other races isn't actually racism.

Can the Mail really be this bad?

**Correction** In this post, I managed to miss that while the original Mail on Sunday version of this story did mention that the suspect was white, it put him in his twenties rather than thirties. Apologies for any confusion - but it doesn't much alter the thrust of the post.

Nick Davies in Flat Earth News:

I spoke to a man who had worked for the Daily Mail for some years as a senior news reporter. He said: 'They phoned me early one morning and told me to drive about three hundred miles to cover a murder. It was a woman and two children who'd been killed. I got an hour and a half into the journey, and the news desk called me on my mobile and said, "Come back." I said, "Why's that?" They said, "They're black."

Sometimes I jump the gun when I write this blog. I suppose it's the nature of a medium that's so given over to instant reaction that sometimes we can say things that given a little bit of time will prove to be a bit hasty.

I hope I'm being hasty today, because I really don't want to believe that even the Mail can be as offhandedly nasty as I think it's being.


On Monday, I looked at the Mail's coverage of the apparently racist murder of a Sri Lankan teenager, Nilanthan Murddi. It was a bit of a sprawling 'on the fly' post, but the jist of it was:

1. the Mail used the picture of a white kid, Connor Black, who was also murdered over the weekend but not the main subject of the article's headline ('Teenager stabbed to death by 'drunk racist' during bloody weekend that claimed two lives') to illustrate search results for the story

2. the original print version of the story, headlined 'Knife crime claims another two teenage lives' had a great amount of space devoted to pictures of Connor Black, the scene of his murder, flowers left at the scene and a picture of the victim of another crime included under the headline despite her not being a teenager, not being the victim of knife crime and not having her life 'claimed' - but no picture of the Asian victim

3. the original print version of the story tried incredibly hard to link the murder to turf wars between rival Sri Lankan gangs, despite the man arrested for the murder being a white 31 year old.

The online version of the story puts some of these things right. It includes a couple of pictures of Nilathan Murddi. The headline's changed to reflect the possible racist motive for the crime. The attempts to link the murder with a Sri Lankan gang turf war have been cut back to saying just that some locals thought he was a member of a gang (scaling back considerably the original claim that a local Councillor said that - which casts doubt on whether he actually did).

The search result picture, however, has disappeared. Not because it's been replaced with a picture of Nilathan Murddi, but because the story doesn't appear in search results for it on the Mail website.

Searching for the headline doesn't return any results. Searching for 'racist murder' doesn't return a result for this story. Searching for 'Nilanthan Murddi' doesn't return a result for this story, but does for another one about David Beckham and knife crime. The only result I can get for this story is by searching only for 'nilanthan' or the original misspelling of his name in the story 'nilanthan moorty', both of which return a result for the new story, with the old version of the headline 'Knife crime Britain claims two more teenage lives as boys aged 16 and 17 are brutally killed'.

Last night, searching for 'connor black' returned the same result (old headline, new version of the story), along with what must be a much earlier incarnation, 'Boys aged 16 and 17 stabbed to death in latest Blade Britain tragedies'('Britain's knife culture claims more victims as two teenage boys are stabbed to death' in the search result) that doesn't include much information about Nilanthan Murddi's murder - probably because not much was known at the time it was written. This morning, searching for 'connor black' only returns the second, older story.

It looks very much like the paper is removing keywords from the new version of the article to make it as difficult as possible to find in a search of the site, while making changes to the version of the story online so that anyone who might follow a link to it doesn't find any material that might be legally sensitive. Whoever's responsible for the site's content has just managed to miss the older misspelling and Nilanthan's forename on its own.

I'm hoping that this is because the paper is preparing much larger coverage of the story. This is not completely unlikely - it would allow the paper to flex its 'we're not racist' muscles, and from a tabloid editor's point of view it won't hurt matters that he has some very photogenic relatives to interview. There's been nothing in the dead tree version of the paper so far - but the original dodgy version was in the Mail on Sunday so we might have to wait until the weekend to see it.

If we don't (as I suspect), then the paper is not allowing its print readers to find out that Murddi is not actually the victim of a turf war between Sri Lankan gangs and that the real likely motive of his murder is racist. It's also making it as difficult as it can for its actual online readers to find that information, while keeping it there to please the lawyers. That would go beyond confirming my worst expectations of the Mail, and they're very low to start with.

Either way, it doesn't change the fact that the paper's initial reaction to news of the stabbing of an Asian kid - with a white man in his thirties as the arrested suspect - was that he must have been the victim of a Sri Lankan gang turf war.

Like I said - that coverage of Stephen Lawrence was over a decade ago.

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.

What a difference a year makes II

Last week, I posted 'What a difference a year makes' - a rather rambling examination of how the tabloids have managed to push their usual storylines through two very separate frenzies of sensationalised coverage of two particular events.

The train of thought that led me to posting it started with me wondering exactly what the tabloids were focusing on last year, since figures suggest that knife crime was actually higher then. Of course, I remembered the Maddie story and realised why all bets were off.

But today, I've been trawling through my archives of Political Correctness Gone Mad stories because of the Anthony Browne thing. I came across this: 'Let's make up some nonsense about PC with the Sun', which referred to this Sun article: 'Why kids need to learn APCs'.*

The Sun randomly chops the end off archived articles for some reason so this A to Z ends at E, but I managed to put all the letters in my post about it. These two entries are the ones I'm on about today (below the fold):

K is for KNIVES. Schools now have the power to introduce metal detectors to search pupils for hidden weapons.

X is for X-RAY. See K is for Knives.

So, last year - tough measures to stop kids carrying knives? It's Political Correctness Gone Mad!

This year? 'Britain on alert for deadly new knife that freezes victims' organs'**.

* Hur hur, geddit? APCs! Just in case the actual Sun readers didn't geddit, the original had the PC in a red font. In a way that reminds me of being nudged in the ribs by some wag telling a funny, thus making me want to nudge them in the fucking kidneys.

** Love that 'deadly new knife'. Old knives aren't deadly. No sir. They can't freeze your spleen!

The Express want suggestions for polls

I just got an email from the Express asking for suggestions for 'Have Your Say' polls. Seriously! While 'The Express is a threat to Britain' was still the top story on this blog, I got this in my inbox:


After informing me that:

Gordon Brown broke his promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, so we decided to give you, our loyal readers, a chance to have your democratic say on www.express.co.uk

The email reveals a staggering 95% of online readers voted we should quite the EU! Of course, it doesn't reveal how many actual people voted, but there you go. Fancy that eh? 95% of Express online readers want to quit the EU. I wonder what they think of immigration. They never get asked their thoughts on that.

Anyhoo, the paper followed up with:

And now we want YOU to decide what our next major reader poll should be about.

Excellent news. My suggestion below the fold.

Here's my suggestion for a poll:

Thank you for your email requesting suggestions for future Daily Express polls.

How about:

"Should formerly respectable mid-market tabloids distort the truth and ask loaded questions of their readers in order to advance thinly-veiled racist agendas that bear a striking resemblance to BNP talking points?"

That'd be a good one.

Thanks,

5cc

You never know, eh?

Suggestions should be sent to web.help@express.co.uk, apparently.

The camera never lies - but tabloid hacks do

I'm a massive cynic about the tabloid press. Hey, you noticed! But I do still fall for the occasional bit of rubbish here and there. Especially if there are pictures involved. It can be very difficult sometimes to disassociate what you see in a picture with what someone else has told you it shows, especially at first glance. You might believe a quite obviously decomposed swan has been stripped of its meat for food by Polish people, for instance.

But even I was taken in by this one 'Pictured: The moment a man punched a girl off her feet during a Facebook water fight'. It looks pretty clear, right - the guy's just socked her off her feet with his right hand.

Sweep the leg!

Except no.

Manic at Bloggerheads has the scoop, and opened my eyes to this particular bit of tabloid arsery - so head on over there to read the rest. Go on. He explains it better than me.

It appears the guy pulled the girl's hair with his left hand, while sweeping her legs out from under her with his left leg. He's not even making a proper fist with his right hand. Sure, it's still violent, sure it's still assault - but it's not as brutal or vicious as a punch in the face.

I've been playfighting with nephews for years. One of the few things you can do without hurting someone weaker is sweep their legs and place them on the floor. This guy was clearly more violent than that with his hair pull, but he still seems to have chosen to do something considerably gentler than a smack in the face that took her off her feet.

Sounds niggly. You might want to say, "Hey 5cc, that's niggly. Pulling someone over by their hair is just as bad as a punch in the face." And I would say to you - tell that to the tabloid journos. They're the ones that pretended one was the other for MAXIMUM OUTRAGE at how Britain is BROKEN and kids have knives that can FREEZE OUR SPLEEN.