Your daily dose: racism and The Sun 0950889776

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campaign for PREss @ BROADCASTING FREEDOM

Chris Searle

PROfE&$!ONAL RESOURCE^ bungIoneduca^ion library sirvi INSBURY VI

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ur daily dose:

campaign for press © BROADCASTING FREEDOM

Your daily dose:

Chris Searle

ISLINGTON EDUCATION LIBRAE! Your daily dose: racism and The Sun First published in this form 1989 by Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom 9 Poland Street London W1V 3DG ©CPBF ISBN 0 9508897 7 6 Printed by Blackrose Press Typeset by Spencers Cover photographs by Janet Cable Designed by Peter Brawne

Contents Foreword

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Introduction

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1 The Sun rising

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2 The Sun’s jingoism 3 The Sun on Africa

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4 On Arabs and Asians 5 The Sun on Britain

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6 The Sun on education

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US

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7 Conclusion: the Murdoch curriculum

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Appendix one: Repatriation — reinforcing the message Appendix two: A poem

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Foreword ‘For committed black j ournalists there is no such thing as an objective impartial viewpoint. We should start from the assumption that the establishment press propagates establishment views and it is our duty to propagate the views of the people, first and foremost black people but also the working masses at large ... Committed black journalism to be worthy of its name, should seek out and expose, every example of injustice against our people.’ Kofi Buenor Hadjor, editor, Third World Book Review

In the main, the media are hostile to the labour movement in general and to black people they can cast as ‘extremist’ or ‘militant’ in particular. Many black campaigns and individuals like Sharon Atkin, Bernie Grant, Linda Bellos and myself have all experienced the media at its worst. More significantly, black people as a whole recognize that we have very few friends in the media. Not many black people actually seek redress for libel through the courts because of the crippling costs, and there is no statutory right to reply. As a result, racist papers like The Sun are able to stereotype black people as muggers, scroungers, rioters/looters and illegal immigrants with impunity. The historical contribution of black people in Britain has been bleached from the record. Our faces are invisible unless a news report can cast us as a ‘problem’. This includes coverage of black countries where the root causes of our plight — white colonialism and imperialism — are never explained. Instead we are shown as helpless recipients of ‘aid’ with ‘incompetent’ or ‘corrupt’ rulers. My real involvement with the media began three years after the disturbances that shook Bristol in 1980 and reverberated around the country in the years that followed. v An inquiry into the disturbances concluded that the black population of Bristol had been ignored and their surroundings neglected with unemployment at its highest for many years. There was an urgent need for the authorities to be seen to be doing something. Both Avon and Bristol county councils were under extreme pressure, hence the decision to provide the community with a community centre. The centre was to be a showpiece reflecting a vision of the local authorities’ dream for gaining political kudos as opposed to addressing key issues prevalent in the black communities. With no thought of consulting the black community a white dominated 7

community association was established and the project moved quickly on. It cost £550,000 and proved to be totally unsuitable, and lacked such basic amenities as a kitchen! It was too expensive for the community association to run and the crypt was always under water. When I was elected chairperson of the association in early 1983 I declared that we were unwilling to take on the centre without a further injection of funds under our control. The media rushed in like a pack of wolves. The issues about the lack of consultation and our misgivings about the centre through its poor design were overlooked. The media were more interested in concentrating on me as an individual. The revelation of my past criminal convictions brought widespread condemnation of me and the black community from outside of the St Pauls area, and shortly after I became known as ‘The petrol bomber who became a politico.’ Nationally, the patterns largely remained the same. The Sun was quick to point out that I was a ‘Rasta bomb rat.’ The Daily Star said I was ‘The rasta big mouth of Bristol.’ The Daily Mail announced ‘Crisis talks over bomber.’ Any way you look at it the media certainly weren’t interested in putting across the genuine arguments that still remained about the centre. The community association fed the media with press releases explaining the issues about the centre and our refusal to take it on but they never picked this up. They were only keen to uncover what they hoped would be a promiscuous and embarrass¬ ing past. At the same time they were encouraging me to feed them with juicy, sensational one-liners about the possibilities of future riots! These factors hindered the promotion of good race relations and increased the tension and hostility between the black and white communities. Neighbouring communities were whipped into almost mass hysteria and paranoia about black people, in particular our refusal to take on the centre. Many community group representatives publicly said ‘those people ought to be grateful.’ Whilst all parties in the councils were adamant that there would be ‘not a penny more!’ By carrying many letters that reflected this widening gap the local press appeared to encourage such hostility. This had an effect on me personally. I began to receive my first batch of hate mail and letters threatening my life if I continued voicing the views and aspirations of the shaken but unbowed community. The continuing saga of the community centre kept me con¬ stantly in the public eye and it wasn’t long before the media crowned me the ‘Community Leader of St Pauls.’ I continued to be very outspoken on issues affecting black people, and it wasn’t long before the media began to publicly dethrone me from a 8

pedestal of their own making. It all came to a head in September 1986 when the police, in a bid to tackle the rise in drug peddling, prostitution and associated crimes (so they said) mounted an operation the likes that modern Bristol had not witnessed since the riots back in the nineteenth century. The real and essential issues at the root cause of the distur¬ bance following Operation Delivery were never really aired. There was no journalistic investigation. Not satisfied with pic¬ tures of blazing police cars and anything else on fire, the media wasted no time whipping up more racial hatred through their reports of the disturbances. Before long the whole black commun¬ ity had been tarred with the same brush. Overnight, St Pauls became known as the ‘riot torn city.’ The police officer who had led the raid suffered a heart attack almost immediately after the Operation; some would say because of the pressure he came under after failing to substantiate its validity. Whatever the reason, it soon became clear it had provided the media with a new angle on the story, an angle which they pursued zealously with headlines worthy of an Oscar! The Western Daily Press were the first to print the com¬ ments I was allegedly supposed to have made about the heart condition of assistant chief constable Malcolm Popperwell. According to their paper I was ‘The Mr Nasty of St Pauls’, who after hearing about this man’s condition had said ‘I hope the bastard dies!’. Overnight the rest of Fleet Street put together one of the best pieces of press assassination since the uproar over state¬ ments made by Bernie Grant concerning Broadwater Farm and Sharon Atkins’ remarks about the racism within the Labour Party. Led by The Sun the general public were warned ... ‘Beware of this man!’ The Sun also forecast that there would be ‘better and bigger race riots’ whilst I was employed in a government spon¬ sored scheme, predicting ‘Marijuana on the rates!’ Not satisfied with such blatant racist remarks The Sun offered to pay £667.00 for- a one way ticket to Zimbabwe, as long as I gave a signed promise never ever to come back! The Mirror contemplated the situation for a while before declaring on their front page that... ‘This man is a disgrace to his colour’. Mine was the ‘Face of hate.’ The Star reporting from somewhere down in ‘Riot City’ also declared on their front page that I was a ‘Rasta Ratbag’ and a ‘nasty’ one too! As if this wasn’t enough I was soon to learn that I was to study ‘IRA power’ simply because I had accepted an invitation from the Labour Party Black Sections to take part in a delegation visit to the catholic community in the north of Ireland. During the 9

visit I was to experience a ‘Firebombers moment of truth’ according to the Daily Mail. I was pictured being questioned by the occupying armed forces at a road block. The media demanded that the Tory government remove me from my position in the local development agency, claiming I was unfit to hold office. Soon after Tory MPs were clamouring for my dismissal. The effect on the white community of the coverage I was getting was very significant. A steady flow of hate mail came through my letter box from every part of the country. Sometimes I received up to ten letters a day. Letters addressed to ‘Chief Nigger, Monkeyville, Bristol’ found their way to me thanks to the diligence of the Post Office. The contents rarely differed. I was encouraged to go back to the jungle and swing up and down in the trees where I came from. Others threatened my life and that of my family. Some letters contained excrement or razor blades ingeniously fixed to the envelope to ensure you took the tip off your finger when opening it. The mood of hostility that developed towards me over that period of time was a direct result of the media hype. The powerful enemies I had gained with the encouragement of the press moved quickly to remove me from my post in the local development agency. At that point The Star decided it was in the ‘public interest’ not only to remove me from my post but also to print my address in full, under the celebrated banner of‘Balogun gets the boot.’ The Star also told its readers ‘I was not fit enough to lead a community of rats.’ My eventual removal from the post at the local development agency showed clearly the potent way in which the mass media helped to determine the white ministerial response to one parti¬ cular black man’s presence in Britain. The media were reflecting and reinforcing the prejudices of a white Britain. The media also had a direct impact upon my personal life. Funny though it may seem, many people I have met for the first time express their complete surprise at discovering that I am only five feet five inches tall. Judging by the reports in the media they quite genuinely say ‘I thought you were taller that that!’ Even the experienced journalists at the NUJ conference in Sheffield were surprised to discover how tall I actually was. These journalists were also sickened by the quantity and vitriol contained in the hate mail I had received. Despite all this there is no legal redress. Not being in a financial position to meet crippling court costs, I made represen¬ tations to the ethics council of the National Union of Journalists. Over a year later and after much correspondence they had failed even to find out the names of the journalists responsible for such articles. The Guardian summed it up beautifully when it said ... 10

‘If Mr Kuomba Balogun hadn’t existed then you can be sure someone would have had to invent him.’ I believe my own personal experience adds strength to the Labour Party Black Sections paper on the media which states ... ‘We must bring to the media debate the need for a twin-track strategy — a democratic ‘main stream’, which properly reflects black people both in employment and in output, and a vibrant independent black media capable of informing the ‘main stream.’ ‘While we welcome efforts to get more black people employed in the ‘main stream’ we condemn tokenistic ‘equal opportunities’ policies ... black people themselves must set the agenda by self-organizing for change inside and outside the media. We will do that by ‘occupation’ as technicians, production staff and journalists, or consumers determined to get our voice heard when an injustice against black people has been perpetrated by the media. But it cannot be enough solely to have journalists and production staff ‘who happen to be black.’ They must be con¬ scious.’ Kuomba Balogun

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Introduction The Blinding Sun I believe that blacks are bad The left is loony God is bad This government is the best we’ve had Yes I read The Sun. I believe Britain is great And other countries imitate I am friendly with the State Yes, I read The Sun. Gooks, I don’t like foreign ones But I don’t mind some foreign bums, Jungle bunnies play tom-toms So why not read The Sun? Man, I don’t like Russian spies We don’t have none I love lies I really do love Princess Di, And yes, I read The Sun. Black people rob Women should cook Every poet is a crook I’m told, See I don’t need to look, I just read The Sun. Hippies? Well they all have nits And every Englishman loves tits I like page 3 And other bits And yes, I read The Sun. I like playing Bingo games And witch hunting To shame a name, But all newspapers are the same So why not read The Sun?

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Don’t give me truth Just give me gossip And skeletons from people’s closets I want to be normal And millions buy it — I am blinded by The Sun. Benjamin Zephaniah A SHORTENED VERSION of this study was published in Race and Class, the journal of the Institute of Race Relations, in July 1987. I had decided to monitor The Sun for a specific period, studying it particularly for what seemed to me to be an intensified and more thematic expression of racism than hitherto, both towards black British people and black people in other parts of the world. It was during this period when its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, was moving more deeply into the US multi-national ‘news’ arena, that The Sun made its union-breaking move to Wapping with Mur¬ doch’s other newspapers. This was also the time of the run-up to the June 1987 general election. I found it a repugnant task, but one I thought was necessary. It would have been an easier alternative to turn my back to The Sun, curse it or ignore it. But as a teacher I could not see this as an educative alternative. Many of my students and their parents read The Sun regularly. Thus I felt it was necessary to study it, know it, in order to better engage with it. While doing this I was constantly encouraged by the struggle of the sacked printworkers picketing The Sun’s new plant in Wapping, who were taking every opportunity — often through their own strike paper, the Wapping Post — to expose the base ideology and content of the newspaper. What finally prompted me to sit down and compile this account, were the implications behind The Sun’s response to the Press Council’s decision about the Brent / Cuba exchange story that begins the first chapter. On being judged ‘provocative and racially divisive’ for printing what was a pack of untruths, The Sun’s dismissive answer was: ‘There are certain subjects, such as the loony left coun¬ cils, racial themes and the Royal Family on which it is now considered entirely legitimate for reporters to make up their stories’.1 How are the readers to know which of the stories are ‘made up’ and which have any basis of truth? How many and which of the stories with ‘racial themes’ are pure speculation, bigotry or falsehood? The Sun has particular victims and demons, and anyone wanting to study how the paper mistreats its targets could have concentrated on its hostile reportage of trade union75

ists and prominent socialists, its contempt for women, its obsess¬ ive verbal violence towards gay people (in one particular period between October 1987 and May 1988 there was a continuous stream of stories about ‘poofter’ vicars, MPs and teachers) or its racist attitude towards black people. I decided to concentrate on the latter because it seemed to me to have wide domestic and international implications and because it was entirely consistent, not only with the imperial attitudes of Thatcher’s neoVictorianism, but with the global aggression, much of it against black people in Africa and elsewhere, of the Reagan presidency. One other point. When the original Race and Class article was published, it was reviewed in The Journalist, the newspaper of the National Union of Journalists. The reviewer, Sally Gilbert, recommended that the article ‘should be widely read and consi¬ dered by NUJ members ... Like it or not much of what appears in The Sun is still written by our members. Do they agree or even have anything to say about this analysis of their writing?1 2 Hers is a fair question which I hope Sun journalists will consider again — along with Sun printworkers, compositors, graphic designers and the rest of its workforce in Wapping. How are we to interpret their compliance in the daily manufacture of such lies and viciousness?

1 Quoted in African Times: 30 October 1987

2 The Journalist:

U

November 1987

The Sun rising In the letters COLUMN of the Caribbean Times of 10 April 1987 there was a letter from a group of young people from the north London borough of Brent involved in organising an exchange visit to Cuba. They write replying to an article in The Sun newspaper of 26 February, headlined ‘Freebie trip for blacks, but white kids must pay’, and systematically refute the series of lies and distortions contained within it. They reveal, point by point, a list of grotesque inaccuracies, pointing out that this is not a councilfunded visit, how the youth themselves are raising their own funds for the trip; that they are merely a group of unwaged or low-paid young people who are certainly not, as The Sun sug¬ gests, ‘rehabilitating after being convicted’ of un-named crimes; that it is a multi-racial group; that there are no ‘free tickets’ and that the newspaper’s quoted informant, ‘youth worker Shirley Williams’, who is reported to have said that ‘blacks are getting the subsidised places because we only really want to take them’, does not exist. Their letter is a courageous attempt to beat back a form of racist journalism that is growing more and more intense in Britain as black people continue to make challenges across all areas of its social, political and economic life. For the Murdoch curriculum is there every morning to give British working people (in the words of printworker Mike Hicks, who was imprisoned while organising pickets against The Sun’s new union-breaking premises) their ‘daily dose’ of anti-black, anti-woman and anti¬ working class propaganda. As for the Brent story, it was proven to be a series of outright lies after a research project at London University’s Goldsmith’s College had uncovered the distortions behind this report and many others in The Sun. The Council was not directly responsible for the Cuban exchange project at all. It had been organised by a group calling themselves ‘Caribbean Exchange’, who aimed to r^ise the expenses of the trip by a number of fund-raising events. The group prided itself on its multi-racial approaches, and gave no particular favouritism towards the young blacks. ‘Shirley Williams’, The Sun’s mysterious character, was exposed as a complete invention. ‘Nothing can. stop your Wapping great Sun, folks!’, pro¬ claimed its page two on 30 January 1987 as the pickets continued their vigil outside the paper’s razor-wire fence compound in Wapping, east London, despite frequent attacks by truncheon¬ bearing, mounted police and by Tory politicians like Norman Tebbit who likened the printworkers (not, of course, the police) 15

to ‘nazi-style thugs’. The article continued by claiming that over 12 million readers saw the paper on a daily basis and that it had sold an average of over four million copies every day between July and September 1986, nearly a million more than the ‘Daily Muckswell’ (Daily Mirror), its closest competitor, proving to its own satisfaction that it is ‘Britain’s best paper with the best staff and without the traditional print unions’. But what the paper does not claim is that, since Rupert Murdoch moved The Sun, The Times the News of the World and The Sunday Times to the new Wapping plant with its concentration camp surroundings (sack¬ ing 5500 printworkers in the process and staffing the new works with docile labour), The Sun’s racism has become more and more concentrated and thematic.

A page of The Sun On Thursday morning, 14 July 1988, on what was not an untypical day, page six of The Sun was redolent with racist stories and inter-relating themes. The main ‘news’ feature was entitled ‘Is Neil out on a Limpopo?’ and subtitled ‘Kinnock’s in Jungleland at vote time’ It purported to be an account of the leader of the Labour Party’s visit to Southern Africa, in particu¬ lar Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique. There is the customary tone to the article which The Sun adopts when writing about Africa: that it is a joke continent, that an official visit by a Labour politician is only ‘a jaunt to darkest Africa’, that to be in Africa must necessarily put you in the back of beyond — even the by-line claims that the journalist, Simon Walters, is ‘in the Kalahari Desert’ — with Kinnock himself being referred to as ‘explorer Neil’, and that this ‘Jungleland’ is ‘far more remote than Walt Disney’s Californian fun palace’. Of course, the editorial posture of the paper is utterly contemptuous towards Kinnock’s support for the positions of the governments of the front line states and reports how he ‘is in seventh heaven embracing guerrilla leaders and condemning ‘racist’ South Africa.’ The objective of the report is to pour scorn on his visit, giving more attention to his clothing (‘casual attire’) and early romance with his wife (they ‘fell in love at college as anti-apartheid campaigners’) than giving any exposition of the murderous at¬ tacks being made on black neighbouring states by the South African government. The flippant invocation of the Limpopo in the title of the article, an area of Mozambique whose people have suffered from horrifying flooding, famine and continuous brutal attacks from gangs of South African bankrolled hoodlums and mercenaries over the last decade, only reinforces a jingoistic savagery against the people of Africa that recalls the worst era of 16

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British imperialism. To the immediate right of this story on the same page is The Sun’s editorial column. From Africa the paper turns directly to Ireland, Britain’s oldest colony in order to dismiss its people in just four warped sentences. The editorial summarises its atti¬ tudes towards people of Irish origin in Britain in an item called ‘Home truth’: ‘A quarter of the homeless in London are from the Irish Republic. A report calls for even more of your money to help them. Why not just pay their fare back to the Emerald Isle? The pavements of Dublin are no less comfortable 17

than London’s.’ Now Africa and Ireland have been dismissed, we move to black people living in Britain, and The Sun’s championing of the parents of Dewsbury, Yorkshire, who refused to send their children to a school in the city which had a large number of black children. As the Kirklees Education Authority caved in and the parents won their case in court, The Sun proclaims: ‘Parent power has scored an important victory in Dewsbury ... Parents worried about the racial balance of some schools have won the right to educate THEIR children where THEY choose’. However, adds the leader article, ‘Their victory must not be seen as a triumph for racism’, but as a declaration of ‘Equality for ALL’ — hardly the usual criterion by which The Sun judges good or bad. Finally, in the other quarter of the page there is Franklin’s cartoon, which may appear innocent enough. It is based on a report in the previous day’s edition that tropical spiders had been found amongst bunches of bananas in a well-known supermarket chain. As a man sits in his armchair reading his newspaper the front door opens and his wife, trussed up on a cocoon and sitting in a supermarket trolley, is pushed inside by a huge and monstrous black, hairy spider, an alien creature indeed. Thus in one single page of The Sun the accumulative message about the threat of strangeness, of non-Englishness, of blackness and of danger is repeated and reinforced by a network of themes and associations in every part of the page, and there are also additional short editorial additions attacking Arthur Scargill, the National Union of Mineworkers and the Labour Party. This is how The Sun wears down any sensitivity or sparks of reason in its readership: by relentless repetition and journalistic patterning of its blatant racist and anti-working class message.

Murdoch’s new empire

There is a strange irony to the history of The Sun, which at the present time is the only British national newspaper that makes a profit on its sales alone. Originally launched by the Mirror Group as a replacement for the Daily Herald, a once popular Labour Party newspaper which failed to keep up with the need to attract consumer advertising, it flopped in its attempts to attract a working class and ‘socially radical’ middle class readership. Rather than seriously develop The Sun as a rival to the Daily Mirror, the Mirror Group sold it to Rupert Murdoch’s News International in 1969. The Sun’s editorial of 3 July 1987 describes the takeover in this way: ‘At that time there was a weakly child called The Sun 18

which was basically bankrupt and its owners could do nothing more to it. Rupert Murdoch bought it, worked at it and today its sales are over four million a day and it makes a healthy profit.’ Since his acquisition of The Sun, Murdoch has been expanding his media empire over the last decade to huge effect. He owns major holdings in an estimated 75 companies, 90 newspapers and TV stations, an Australian airline, the giant sheep and cattle farming concern F S Falkiner, a computer software company, the Hong Kong-based Regent International hotel chain, a recording compa¬ ny and the infamous TNT international transport concern that was used to break through the Wapping picket (running down a pedestrian as it did so*) and distribute his scab newspapers throughout Britain (it has recently announced a 40% increase in profits worldwide). His empire is the world’s largest consumer of newsprint. Murdoch’s latest sortie is into the US television industry, launching Fox TV, a £1.4 billion competitor to the established moguls CBS, ABC and NBC. It is the substantial profits accruing from advertising revenue and sales of The Sun, and thus from the pockets of British working people, that are paying for this mammoth media enterprise, which will make Murdoch into one of the most powerful peddlars of the US imperial message across the world. This message will gain even greater power as Murdoch moves into the era of direct-broadcast satellites (DBS). In June 1987 at a spectacular space-age inauguration, he announced that he was to put four new television channels onto his ‘Astra’ satellite. His ‘partner’, the boss of the computer firm Amstrad, Alan Sugar, also declared that his firm would be manufacturing the ‘dish’ necessary for the reception of the channels, which would sell in high-street electronics shops, like Dixon’s, for £199. In The Sun of 11 June 1988, under the headline ‘Great Dash for the Dish’, the readers are told that ‘The giant Dixon’s chain has been beseiged with inquiries since pledging to take the first 500,000 units from the makers’, and Sugar is quoted as saying: ‘The enthusiasm from retailers and suppliers is beyond anything we have experienced’. Murdoch, surrounded by his multi-million pound gadgetry, with his reporters from The Sun, Today and The Times at his feet, boasted: ‘We are seeing the dawn of an age of freedom for viewing and freedom for advertising’. The scope of this ‘freedom’ reveals its true breadth every morning in the pages of The Sun.

* On 21 April 1987, an inquest jury decided that 19 year-old Michael Delaney had been ‘unlawfully killed’ by a TNT lorry as it sped away past pickets from Murdoch’s Wapping plant on 10 January 1987. In 1988 TNT successfully appealed to the High Court to have the inquest verdict overturned.

19

2

The Sun’s jingoism of The Sun has a particular backcloth. It is the sharpened form of national jingoism which was brought into populist fullness during the war in the Malvinas, and has deve¬ loped almost to the level — even to The Sun’s most persuaded readers — of self-parody. There was the anti-French campaign (including free badges to its readers declaring ‘Hop off, you Frogs’) following the strike of French lorry drivers in 1984. This intensified during the students’ campaign (of December 1986) against the threatened restricted entry to universities, when the Sun’s resident Professor John Vincent used his column to cry ‘no French tears’ for this ‘old fashioned people’ with a ‘reactionary’ revolutionary tradition. His sentiments were underlined by an editorial in the same issue (10 December 1986) which boldly affirmed that ‘The Sun, as regular readers will know, has never liked the French’. This violent and unabashed chauvinism was also stoked up against the Argentinians during the soccer World Cup in Mexico in June 1986. Banner headlines claiming ‘It’s War Senor!’ (next to smiling, reassuring portraits of two female ‘royals’), appeared above subtitles like ‘Troops on alert for Argie battle: Gunships and tanks stand by’, while a cartoon (26 June) depicted a British tank firing a football into the stomach of a stunned (and unshaven) Argentinian goalkeeper, with the British tank commander radio¬ ing out: ‘First goal to us, chaps!’ In April 1987 a campaign against German tourists in Majorca, who had allegedly made prior morning claims on beach chairs before the British arrive, was waged through the columns of The Sun. References to the ‘Hun’ and Hitleresque comparisons with ordinary German holiday¬ makers abounded, and the newspaper’s attempts to galvanise anti-German and anti-European sentiments played upon the deep prejudices to be found in the psyche of The Sun’s British readers: ‘Vot makes Krauts holiday louts?’, asked an article in the issue of 6 April 1987. Five days later the paper’s front page was devoted to a spoof invasion of Germany by a ‘Wapping Task Force to teach the Krauts holiday manners’, composed of‘Page Three girls’ such as Samantha Fox, and the loyal Sun journalists. ‘The Sun Invades Germany’, bellows the headline, and the readers are told that this is a response to the German press, who have branded ‘fun-loving’ British tourists in Majorca as ‘drunken louts’. There is, of course, no serious attempt to report, investigate or criticise the yobbish behaviour of young Britons on the island. Such stories may appear unserious, but they serve to inflame national chauvinism The strident racism

rSWAR SENOR!

20

and pour scorn on everything that is German.

Where ‘foreign’ is an insult

What do The Sun’s readers ever learn about people other than the English (except acceptable American ‘heroes’ like Ro¬ nald Reagan or Oliver North)? They learn, for example, that the Spanish are ‘a selfish bunch of bull-baiting senors’ (2 July 1987). An editorial writer pronounces ‘we are not over fond of the Spaniards ... we are glad we scuppered their Armada and the right country sits on The Rock’. Then in addition to huge headlines about the ‘Iranian rats’, the ‘Arab pigs’ and the ‘Syrian swine’, and the rag bag of racist reporting about black people in England, Sun-buyers can read about the parlous economic per¬ formance of the ‘poor Frogs’ of France and how ‘a few years ago the Frogs were kings of the frog pond, far outstripping Britain ... How the poor frogs must be wishing that they had a Madame Thatcher!’ (25 June 1987.) We will also be warned that ‘you can’t trust’ the ‘Craven French’. They care only for themselves and ‘crawl at the feet of the scum’ like the ‘pro-Iranian Hezbollah fanatics’ (6 May 1988). The repetition, morning after morning after morning, of the use of such hate-laden words like ‘frog’ and 21

‘kraut’, refuels old conflicts and stokes up such jingoism and a terrifying poverty of knowledge and lack of openness to new ideas, that the mind of the vulnerable reader is battered and rendered senseless. Thus we have huge front page headlines proclaiming such trivia as ‘Sour Kraut’ (23 June 1988) after tennis player Boris Becker refused to pay £5.00 car park fee. ‘Beaches are overkrauted,’ declared the Sun (6 May 1988) when it was announced that common market tourism ministers had agreed that the French, Belgian and German peoples would have their main holidays in August. Then we read about the ‘garlic-smelling Frogs’ who are imposing instant bans on speeding drivers (27 June 1988); we are warned about the ‘Frogs hopping in’ to buy the HP Sauce company (7 July 1988); if the Foreign Office give the French a two-finger salute, we are advised ‘there would hardly be another croak out of the Frogs’ (3 February 1988) and when a French driver in north London was involved in an altercation with a policeman, the incident is reported under the headline: ‘Alio Alio! Frog hops it with cop on car bonnet’. During the run-up to the general election of June 1987, Sun readers were presented with a large front-page caricature of a supposed Red Army soldier armed with a giant missile and his enormous boot on the belly of Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock

(called in another issue ‘a garrulous Welsh piper’). He is holding a catapult and saying: ‘One more step and I’ll shoot!’ (29 May 1987). On election day itself Sun readers would have seen another Franklin cartoon of an English couple sitting in deck chairs on an English beach with children building sandcastles, confronted with an open landing-craft full of heavily armed Soviet soldiers, with the man saying to the woman: ‘They must be hoping Labour win’ (11 June 1987). The accumulated power of such stories in word and image offers Sun readers (in the main British working people and their families) a reinforcement of xenophobia, fear and repugnance towards anything not simply English; and this as a part of a much larger political design to stave off an election victory for the Labour Party, which has often shown itself unsympathetic to Murdoch’s commercial interests. Yet while managing this, the Sun’s bigotry also prevents a much more humane and internationalist consciousness developing amongst its own British readers.

Ireland This resurgent chauvinism expressed so fiercely in the pages of The Sun finds another target in the people of Ireland. For behind the paper’s apoplectic responses to the IRA, there is no principled opposition to individual acts of terrorist violence or indiscriminate sectarian murders. It is a much more political position of opposition to the aspirations, not only of a united Ireland and those who live in the Republic, but to basic human and civil rights for the Catholic population of Northern Ireland. The newspaper takes up a clearly sectarian position in favour of the loyalist cause and the politicians who represent it. On 25 April 1988, the leader column declared: ‘The truth is that everything possible has been done to appease the Catholics of Ulster’ — a statement so far from ‘the truth’, that it could only be The Sun’s version of it. The readers are informed that ‘they (the Ulster Catholics) are protected by law against discrimination. Hundreds of thousands of them live on social security provided by the British taxpayer. They can come and go across the Irish sea or walk across the border into the Republic and stay there’. If the regular Sun-buyer has heard echoes of these words before, they would have been used to describe and caricature the position of the black people of Britain. For in The Sun’s eyes, being Irish and being black amounts to something very similar: it means you are foreign, unwelcome, extra to establishment, generally a nuisance and a suitable case for repatriation. And if you presume to utter a word of criticism about British institu23

tions — particularly the law — then you are likely to receive forthright abuse from the Sun leader writers. Writing of Father Joe Taaffe, a Catholic priest, who is convinced that those Irish¬ men convicted for the Birmingham bombings were innocent — The Sun reminded its readers through its leader column: ‘He is Irish born. Has he ever thought of going home?’ (27 April 1988). There is no room here for the views of thousands of others, including many eminent lawyers, who share Father Taaffe’s misgivings about the verdict. The Sun is very touchy about such protests from Irish people. When they come from the Irish in Ireland, then they are merely ‘Blarney’ (12 February 1988) and not to be taken seriously. The Irish, we are told ‘grumbled for centuries about British imperialism, well we do not want Irish imperialism’ — which apparently comes in the form of a ‘flood of accusations from Dublin’, the home of that ‘treacherous government’ (12 April 1988).

Violent caricatures Such attitudes to the Irish people are the foundation to all The Sun’s reporting on Ireland. Its cartoons relive and repeat the

21*

virulent anti-Irish racism of nineteenth century British journal¬ ism, with all the vicious caricaturing of an entire people. On 17 June 1988, after six British soldiers were killed at Lisburn whilst taking part in a charity run, Ireland was portrayed as a hooded skeleton, with a scythe dripping blood, running an ‘Irish horror marathon’, between tombstones, with the caption ‘on and on and on and on and on and on On 21 March 1988, under the headline ‘Scum of the Earth’, there is a cartoon, depicting a group of hooded figures armed with staves in a cemetery, standing over a shrouded, bleeding corpse, with the caption below: ‘The Scarlet Isle’— an implicit attack on the entire Irish nation and people. There is, however, one section of the Irish population who continually receive The Sun’s blessing and who are not grouped along with the ‘scum of the earth’, the ‘wild beasts’ (21 March 1988) or the ‘savages’ (22 March 1988). They are certainly not the ‘Catholics’. In the 21 June editorial column calling for the reintro¬ duction of internment, Irish Catholics are described in this way: ‘Their hands may not be stained with blood. But they share the guilt’. For the Sun, the acceptable faces of Ireland are ‘the loyal people of Ulster’. In a leader article headlined ‘Cage ’em’ (17 June 1988) we read: ‘We have to use every possible weapon to protect our soldiers, the police and the loyal people of Ulster’. The same phrase had been passionately invoked before (On 21 March), following the deaths of two British soldiers in plain clothes who drove into the funeral cortege of the IRA member Kevin Brady. In this editorial the totality of The Sun’s ‘final solution’ to Ireland comes tumbling out: ‘The Sun has urged that the only final solution to the Irish tragedy is to incorporate Ulster fully into Britain... Those Catholics in Ulster who do not wish to live under our flag always have a choice. They can ask the Republic to allow them to emigrate South. This much is certain. After 20 years of misery and bloodshed the loyal people of Ulster have had enough’. The defence of ‘loyalism’ is the standpoint from which The Sun surveys the whole of Ireland. ‘Catholics’ anywhere in Ire¬ land, whether south or north, must accept the British and Protestant hegemony.

The Gibraltar killings The newspaper’s view of the Irish, and its hostility to the people of Europe generally (except the British) merged into one after the SAS hit-squad had shot dead three IRA members on active service in Gibraltar. During the This Week television 25

programme, screened on the night of 28 April 1988 a Gibraltarian witness to the killings, Carmen Proetta, was interviewed. She stated that she saw SAS marksman shoot Maired Farrell and Daniel McCann after they had put up their hands, and that the third victim, Sean Savage, was shot in the back after running off. Two days later, The Sun ran a front page story on Ms Proetta with large banner headlines proclaiming her simply as ‘The Tart’, defaming and insulting her, and trying to undermine her testi¬ mony, not by contradicting her evidence but by condemning her character. The real reason for their contempt soon becomes very clear. Ms Proetta, we are informed, ‘has never spoken a good word about Britain’ and she was one of only 44 Gibraltarians ‘who voted for the Rock to become Spanish in a 1967 referendum’. That, of course, is enough for The Sun to pass sentence, and the

26

report appears to be quite satisfied, almost enthusiastic, that she received her just desserts for this shameful act: ‘Her anti-British opinions landed her in trouble with other islanders. Her car was daubed in red, white and blue paint and she was once beaten up’ — treatment not unknown, of course, to the black people of Britain, who belong in The Sun’s eyes, alongside Ms Proetta. As a tailpiece to these events, The Sun also condemned the ‘TV and unbelievably mischievious newspapers’ that gave space and time to investigating the deaths of the IRA members. They are, declares The Sun, nothing but a ‘menace’, a ‘fifth column’ that are threatening the very safety of the state. The paper then goes on to make its most extraordinary claim: ‘The Sun is an investigative, crusading newspaper’, but adds, very sharply, for all its victims, black, non-English (particularly Irish) and all those who seek the truth through journalism: ‘But we do not campaign against the interests and security of our country and people’.

27

3

The Sun on Africa A USEFUL place to begin to consider The Sun’s position towards black people, both nationally and internationally, and its untram¬ melled promotion of racism is to analyse its attitude towards Africa and Africans. This is overtly brandished in its cartoons. The archetypal colonial image of African with spear, bonethrough-nose and loin-cloth standing outside his mud-hut, con¬ fronting cork-hatted British explorers holding out a casket of beads, forms the theme of two cartoons (22 September 1984) which the readers are asked to examine in order to spot the slight differences between them. They are then invited to send their answers to The Sun and the first ten to arrive will receive Sharp video-recorders. Under the cartoons the captions quote the white man’s words: ‘Never mind about the beads, they want a video’. Thus media multi-national supports an electronics multi-national — well known for its contribution to the US nuclear arms industry — and uses racism as its vehicle to reach the younger readers and consumers of The Sun, eager to acquire a video¬ recorder, and, while acquiring this, acquiring more racist reinfor¬ cement too.

■

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Similarly grotesque cartoon caricatures of the African people were drawn for the issue of 12 June 1986 showing two pitch-black, identical figures with grass skirts and rolling eyes being ins¬ tructed by Bob Geldof to carry Jonathan King (a television presenter who criticised Geldof’s Knighthood) on a pole towards a lake of crocodiles. Another, (4 August 1986) shows a group of African and Commonwealth prime ministers, all whites-of-eyes gleaming, receiving the two-finger salute from Margaret 28

Thatcher over the issue of trade sanctions against South Africa. What gives greater significance to the cartoons in both cases, however, are the articles carefully placed directly below them. Under the Geldof cartoon is a story asserting that the Live Aid contributions are being used by African ‘killers’ of the govern¬ ment of Ethiopia, and under Thatcher’s two fingers her gesture is reinforced by an insultingly racist attack upon Shridath Ramphal, the Commonwealth secretary-general. The journalistic device of juxtaposition feeds the racist message of both word and image backwards and forwards from printed word to visual image, and all for the greater deception of the duped reader.

Vincent’s view of Africa The coverage given to the South African sanctions issue in The Sun predictably gave full support to the Reagan-Thatcher position, but added some characteristic vitriol of its own. An editorial (13 June 1986) praised Thatcher, saying that all there would be left of South Africa after sanctions ‘would be a clappedout economy with millions on the edge of starvation’. A day later the newspaper had found a black South African Pentecostal bishop called Isaac Mokoena to back up this argument. Beneath 29

the headline, ‘Is Moscow behind the South African bloodbath?’, the bishop is quoted as saying: ‘We are in London to give a word of encouragement to Mrs Thatcher in her stand against sanctions. Sanctions will give the radicals exactly what they want’. Open support for the South African regime has been gath¬ ering confidence and strength in The Sun and this has been underpinned by assertions in Professor Vincent’s column that the only people in Africa who can organise an economy are white people or African governments pulled on strings by western governments. The ‘few star performers’ on the continent, he declares in Vincent’s View (9 July 1986), ‘have strong Western links. Kenya has white farmers. Malawi has close ties with South Africa, the Ivory Coast is run by thriving businessmen’. He had, previously, condemned those who ‘continue to advocate black supremacy in South Africa as though it would bring human rights and democracy’ (4 September 1985). Perhaps if Vincent had done his homework, he would know that the African National Congress of South Africa does not struggle for ‘black supremacy’, but a society built upon equal rights for all South Africans. Sun readers, of course, are not told that. ‘Black supremacy’ is more frightening to a predominantly white working-class readership, so The Sun and Dr Vincent will use it as the preferred term whether it is valid or not. Vincent’s ‘respectable’ musings constantly gain editorial support to such an extent that there seems to be a single voice speaking, with the professorial note being used to add a bogus legitimacy to the bald prejudice of the editorials, and with Vincent’s column and the editorials neatly juxtaposed on the same page. In a typical passage (25 October 1986), following the Barclay’s Bank withdrawal from South Africa (or, more accu¬ rately, the internal shifting of its assets), the leader writer complained bitterly about ‘picking on’ South Africa while coun¬ tries like Zimbabwe (a ‘ramshackle country’ with its ‘Marxist dictatorship’) and Ghana (‘a ramshackle state where human life is held as cheap as a handful of maize’) do not appear to tickle the ‘delicate conscience of do-gooders’. In fact the only good thing The Sun is on record as writing about Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president, is that he allowed both a criticism of Neil Kinnock whilst on a visit to the country, and a reference to Margaret Thatcher as ‘Empress Maggie’ in a newspaper controlled by his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). ‘Mr Mugabe obviously knows Kinnock only too well’, gloated the leader article of 15 July 1988.

SO

A parade of ignorance Apart from white South Africa it seems to the Sun that, ‘democracy in the rest of Africa is as rare as a snowdrop in the Sahara’, (13 July 1988), and Zimbabwe, the lost jewel of British Africa, is the main target of its post-imperial venom. For, in the newspaper’s indignant leader of 20 May 1988, we read that ‘Zimbabwe’s Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe is steadily remov¬ ing all British names from streets and squares in Harare’. The Sun adds: ‘But if Cecil Rhodes and other British pioneers had not tamed the wilderness there would be no Zimbabwe and no towns. And Mr Mugabe would not be sitting in state dressed in a smart western suit. He would be roaming the veldt in a loin cloth and carrying a spear. There ain’t no gratitude’. This crass parading of ignorance about Africa, in line with imperialist versions of British history, is an integral part of The Sun’s attitude to Africa and its people. When one of The Sun’s favourite people, the ex-chairman of the Conservative Party, Norman Tebbit, insults Africa and gives a boost to both South Africa and British racism by stating that the apartheid regime has ‘higher standards of law and justice’ than the front line states, and that those who condemn apartheid ‘have hardly had the time to complete the journey from Heathrow to Hounslow West before claiming British rights’ — The Sun is there to cheer and applaud. ‘Norm’s right’, bleated the editorial column of 22 April 1988, as the leader writer condemned ‘the brutal racism of a whole pack of African dictatorships’, (excluding South Africa, of course). The article continues to compare Tebbit’s political style with that of foreign secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, who should adopt some of the ‘Tebbit Style’ approach: ‘For years the foreign secretary has fawned on Kaunda and Mugabe and the Nigerian generals’. All are ‘Hypocrites with bloody hands’, according to the headline of page six on 14 October 1987, and with such company, continues the editorial column, ‘Is there any point at all in Britain staying in the Commonwealth?’ Declaring a blanket condemnation of almost all Common¬ wealth African countries and their governments is a common position of The Sun. On 29 March 1988 we are told that these states (and the comparison aping Tebbit is inevitably with South Africa) ‘have not the remotest concept of equality or decency’. And on 2 December 1987, an editorial article under the headline ‘War on Won’t: (They won’t do anything for themselves)’, railed against the Ethiopian government, with The Sun calling upon its readers to refrain from supporting relief for the people of Ethiopia in the midst of drought and famine. Such relief is only ‘an exercise in futility ... our food parcels are saving a pitiless tyrant from the justice he deserves’. The real answer, suggests The Sun 31

is to teach ‘ignorant peasantry methods of birth control’, not send food relief to a country led by ‘Blood-stained Marxists’ and populated by people who cannot help themselves and solve their own problems. Again the myths of the helplessness, dependency and endemic corruption of all of black Africa are spread to millions of The Sun’s British readers. But there is one exception, and The Sun is generous in its glowing praise, even offering a free advertisement to the glories of the Gambia. For to be a good and commendable African nation, you must support the British government, and pretend to be a colony, even though you are a nominally independent. So this is how The Sun extolled the exemplary African nation and friend of Britain on 21 November 1987, under the heading of‘Our Thanks to Gambia’. ‘This morning The Sun salutes a true friend of Britain. The tiny West African country of the Gambia. Last year only Sri Lanka, Belize and Oman supported us at the United Nations over the Falklands. This time the Gam¬ bia rallied to our support. When you are planning your next holiday forget about Spain. Put the Gambia top of your list. It has sunshine, beautiful beaches and, best of all, people who actually like us.’

South Africa and apartheid Since March 1987 The Sun has taken to a blatant advocacy of the present South African regime. In a full-page article, called ‘Why we must give South Africa the chance to get it right’, by visiting Sun journalist Ronald Spark, we read about the successes of black millionaires like Richard Maponya (who is shown leading his successful race horse immediately juxtaposed below a picture of rebellious Soweto youth), of a multi-racial, harmonious society where ‘step by step the machinery of discri¬ mination is being dismantled’ and where, ‘apart from the odd incident, the whole country seems peaceful’. As a visitor, Spark comments, ‘I found every reason for hope’. Responding to The Sun’s invitation for readers to comment upon the article, the issue of 13 March claimed that ‘nine to one’ approved of his conclusions that ‘the country is trying to bring about change and should be given every chance to achieve it’. The lead letter from a so-called ‘Cape coloured’ agreed that conditions were fine, and an Englishman from Gateshead who had recently worked in the country added that the Africans were ‘quite content’, even though ‘the blacks are not yet ready to handle their land’. The blacks want ‘everything given to them on a plate’, writes Rajendra Kotaria from Leicester. Thus a batch of publ32

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Sun, ‘barmy’. (The paper ran a ‘Golden Two Finger Award’ for the ‘Barmiest Council’ in 1986.) This is a favourite device and almost every issue of the paper presents an example, large or small, and a hook to hang a racist message on — usually employing crude and populist humour as well as distortion and inaccuracy. A report from the University of London, Goldsmiths College, published in May 1987, clearly attested to this. On such stories as Hackney banning sexist manholes, Haringey proscrib¬ ing black bin liners, Brent and Islington banning the children’s rhyme ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ and Haringey spending £500,000 on ‘superloos’ for travellers, the report commented that ‘not one of these stories is accurate’. Some were ‘conjured out of thin air’, with the rest having ‘important details wrong’ and being ‘mislea¬ ding’ — the ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ story having been started as a ‘rumour in a pub’. In September 1985, when Hackney Council proposed to rename Britannia Walk after the Indian nationalist Shaheed-eAzam Bhagot Singh, there was the characteristic pun in The Sun’s headline: ‘Lefties start a singh and dance in the street’, and another attempt to panic white readers into thoughts of being ‘swamped’ by blacks. ‘Local cockneys’, goes the story, ‘who are likely to be OUTNUMBERED (the capitals are The Sun’s) by immigrants within ten years — are furious’, and one Rose Delgarno, whom we are told has lived in the area all her life, is quoted as saying, ‘they’re making us foreigners in our own fm sm

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