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Resistance to Extinction Rebellion’s Press Protests Reveals Double Standards in the UK

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by Holly Barrow

Protestors block the entrance at Merseyside printing press (Image credit: Liverpool Echo)

On 5 September 2020, the global environmental movement, Extinction Rebellion, dominated headlines after blockading key printing sites in Merseyside and Hertfordshire, causing a significant disruption to the distribution of some of the UK’s leading national newspapers – including the Sun and The Times. Activists blocked exits to the print works, describing the protest as an attempt to hold these publications to account for their failure to report truthfully on the scale of the climate crisis and for ‘polluting national debate’ on a number of social issues, including migration.

Each of the newspapers affected by the blockade is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who has been openly criticised on numerous occasions for his climate change denialism – not least due to his personal interests in the fossil fuel industry. By no coincidence, Murdoch’s newspapers have become renowned for being littered with rife climate skepticism, both across Australia and the UK.

Yet, despite the well-known murky ethics and questionable practices surrounding Murdoch’s publications, Extinction Rebellion’s protests were met with an onslaught of accusations by the likes of the Sun which claimed the organisation’s protests were ‘trying to destroy our greatest democratic principle: freedom of speech’. The Prime Minister himself echoed such sentiments via social media, suggesting that it is ‘completely unacceptable to seek to limit the public’s access to news in this way’ and that a free press is ‘vital’ in ‘holding the government and other powerful institutions to account.’

Only, this assertion neglects to acknowledge the inherent biases within the UK’s mainstream media and how it notably fails in its apparent duty to hold the powerful to account. The responses to Extinction Rebellion’s protests have revealed a deeply ingrained double standard regarding what is and is not considered ‘democratic’. In a recent article for the Guardian, George Monbiot wrote that Extinction Rebellion’s protests served to expose and fight against the ‘shallowness of our theatrical democracy’, and the ‘blatant capture of ours by the power of money’. It’s almost laughable, then, to witness those arguing that the movement’s protests threaten our way of life – that they attack the ‘freedom of the press’ that is considered so crucial to a functioning democracy – with zero irony. This glorified notion of the UK’s so-called ‘free press’ is a far cry from reality. As a matter of fact, it has long been in decline.

The increasing corporatisation of the media is what ought to be recognised as the real threat to press freedom. The UK’s leading newspapers are owned by a handful of billionaires and giant corporations. This drastically hinders the workings of an actual ‘free press’. From Murdoch to the Barclay brothers – 85-year-old British billionaire twins whose business empire spans from luxury hotels to budget retail – their deceitful dedication to protecting vested interests and setting political agendas through the UK’s leading publications has become well-established.

Former chief political commentator of the Telegraph, Peter Oborne, resigned from the paper after coming to recognise the unethical collusion between their editorial and commercial arms. The publication – owned by the aforementioned Barclay brothers – allegedly sought to bury criticisms against HSBC in 2013. In response, Oborne wrote in an article for OpenDemocracy: “HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is ‘the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend.’” The media’s reliance on corporate advertising sees editors pandering to their whims.

What’s more, these billionaire-owners of the UK’s media and their publications are, unsurprisingly, right-leaning. The majority supported right-wing political parties in the 2019 general election, with a recent study by Loughborough University finding that the Labour Party was overwhelmingly targeted with negative coverage by national newspapers, while particular publications reserved positive stories almost exclusively for Johnson’s Conservative party. strong editorial support provided by the newspapers with the largest circulation (the Daily Mail and the Sun)

The political influence of the mainstream media is no new phenomenon. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair notoriously cosied-up to Murdoch in order to gain the backing of the Sun in the lead up to the 1997 general election – a move which many believe contributed to his landslide majority. In a recent BBC documentary on Murdoch’s media dynasty, former Sun deputy editor Neil Wallis told of how Murdoch played a crucial role in the paper’s drastic shift in support away from John Major’s Conservative party to Blair’s New Labour: “Rupert comes up and says ‘you’re getting this wrong. You’ve got this totally wrong. We are not just backing Tony Blair but we are going to back the Labour party and everything he does in this campaign 200%. You’ve got to get that right’.”

The relationship between Blair and Murdoch went on to be described as ‘incestuous’, with Murdoch’s decision to back him in 1997 allegedly arising as the two made a deal; Blair promised Murdoch he would not take the UK into the European currency without first having a referendum.

This relationship between media tycoons and leading politicians has been tirelessly scrutinised, with the 2012 Leveson inquiry revealing the extent of its impact, as editors admitted that Murdoch regularly interfered with content. Critics of Murdoch’s News Corp UK – which owns the Sun and The Times – have previously argued that ministers, chief constables, and regulators alike were unable to stand up to him due to the power of his company.

This enmeshing of media and commerce hardly screams the ‘pinnacle of democracy’ and press freedom. The insularity of the UK’s senior journalists only speaks further to a monolithic media – one which upholds the values, beliefs, and interests of a small section of society. A 2018 article by Jane Martinson described the UK media as ‘pale, male and posh’. Martinson – a British journalist and Professor of Financial Journalism at City University – broke down some extremely telling statistics regarding the background of some of the UK’s leading journalists: 51% are privately educated, as are 80% of editors. The journalism industry is 94% white with just 0.4% being Muslim. This inevitably plays a role in the way stories are reported, which stories are covered, and the interests of those reporting them.

Perhaps most embarrassingly, Johnson’s denouncement of Extinction Rebellion’s protests as a threat to Britain’s apparent free press is one riddled with hypocrisy. In December 2019, in the lead up to the general election, Johnson threatened to revoke Channel 4’s licence after they held a leaders’ debate on climate change – to which Johnson did not show. In his absence, Channel 4 placed a melting ice sculpture where Johnson would have stood; a symbol to mark the urgency of the crisis, with Johnson’s non-attendance speaking volumes. The Conservative party went on to launch a formal complaint with Ofcom, threatening to have Channel 4’s public broadcasting licence revoked.

Fast forward a few months and the Conservative government faced backlash again, this time for attempting to ban specific journalists – those most critical of the party – from attending a Downing Street briefing. Suffice to say, Johnson and the elite seem only to value the UK’s ‘free press’ when activists fight back against a heavily skewed media.

XR’s protests come at a time when the increased accessibility of social media helps to provide a necessary balance to the partisan traditional media. Twitter in particular has become key in challenging powerful political and social figures, succeeding where traditional media outlets often now fail. In July, Twitter fact-checked tweets made by Trump, after he incorrectly claimed that mail-in ballots would result in “a rigged election.” The platform then went on to flag any posts he had shared which included manipulated media.

The social media platform also caused a stir when it permanently banned the account of Katie Hopkins – notorious for espousing dangerous islamophobia and xenophobic rhetoric. Hopkins had previously been given a free pass to spout such views in the likes of the Sun. In refusing to provide a platform for such deeply hateful, divisive language, some – such as Trump – have denounced this as a form of censorship; a ‘policing of conservative voices’. However, this seems more like a balancing of power; no longer allowing for the dominant narrative to prevail unabated.

Holly Barrow is a features writer for the Immigration Advice Service – an organisation of OISC-accredited immigration lawyers providing assistance with Spouse Visas, British citizenship, and more

COVID-19, Immigration, and the Media in Britain

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by Harry Sanders

A long history of immigration runs through Britain’s healthcare sector (Image credit: Meager/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The coronavirus pandemic’s global impact has left few unaffected. Perhaps the only silver lining of this pandemic is its highlighting of the essential work of migrants in the NHS and other healthcare services. While for years migrants have been the scapegoat of the UK’s many problems and have been the subject of immense prejudice and abuse; the positive impact of their contributions to society has finally started to come to light. Though the gushing affection and appreciation for our migrant healthcare staff are abundant on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, it is important to consider if the same shift in tone has been present in our traditional media sources.

Prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus, the British press was notoriously – and at times unashamedly – opposed to immigration in its general stance. Following the election of David Cameron’s Conservative government in 2010, the number of news articles mentioning ‘migration’ or ‘immigration’ has been growing at a steady rate year-on-year, coinciding with Conservative immigration policy which aimed to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. Throughout all of these articles written between 2006 and 2015, the most common modifier used to describe immigration was ‘mass’, followed closely by ‘net’, ‘illegal’, and ‘European’. The vast majority of these articles have been crafted with the specific aim of colouring all migration with the brush of illegal immigration, thereby characterising entire nationalities as criminals and aliens.

This is even more unjust when one considers that many of the articles emphasising illegality are covering the plight of refugees; individuals whose right to be in the UK is enshrined in both national and international law. If the last decade of British politics is anything to go by, this narrative has been highly effective in influencing the opinions of their readership.

Anti-immigrant sentiment can still be seen in articles written immediately before the outbreak of coronavirus. This article from the Daily Mail, for example, reported on the Prime Minister’s pledge to restrict EU migrants earning less than £23,000 from entering the country and to move to an ‘Australian-style points-based immigration system’. The article’s discussion of ‘slashing’  the number of low skilled workers, and its quotation of a Downing Street spokesman as having heralded the ‘return [of] democratic control of immigration to the British people’, evokes a sense of pride and achievement at the prospect of losing half of Britain’s migrant workforce. ‘Slashing’ has a rhetorical effect here; its emphatic quality is designed to trigger an emotional response in the reader by highlighting the government’s merciless approach to cutting immigration. One must presume that the critical eye has wandered far from the details of this announcement, as little consideration is given to the economic implications of restricting any workers earning less than £23,000 – a salary far in excess of the national minimum wage.

Whilst it is important to recognise the clear ideological stance embedded into the article, it is perhaps unsurprising given the political affiliation of the publication. The Daily Mail is well-known as a right-wing newspaper, and as a result, an anti-immigration narrative can be seen as them simply catering to the views of their readership. By the same token, it would be unsurprising to see The Guardian taking a more tolerant view of immigration, in light of its left-leaning readership and left-wing editorial stance. The article discussed above is very much typical of the right-wing press’ pre-pandemic approach to migration; as a result, the key question concerns the extent to which the coronavirus has reconfigured the discourse. Has the public’s positive outlook on migrant healthcare staff influenced reportage, or is the enmity still very much present?

A ‘mixed bag’ would perhaps be the aptest description. Reporting on an asylum seeker’s ‘stabbing spree’ in Glasgow in June, the Daily Mail exhibited a surprising change in tone. Citing the asylum seeker’s mental state and the negative impact of lockdown in triggering post-traumatic stress, the Mail in this instance considered the socio-economic and psychological stresses which he faced and how they may have contributed to the incident. Remarkably the most noticeable used pejorative in the article, ‘hordes’ – so often reserved especially for immigrants – was instead used to describe the emergency services which responded to the incident. Rather than mindlessly painting a black and white picture of a man with a knife, a victim, and the heroic response of the police, fair consideration is given to the causes which led to the incident and – perhaps most importantly of all – it is framed as a wholly preventable event which was allowed to happen due to a lack of sufficient resources for social services.

A further immigration story to emerge during the coronavirus pandemic was the route to British citizenship offered to British National Overseas citizens in Hong Kong due to China’s imposition of a new security law. This prompted uncharacteristic coverage from a number of typically right-wing publications; the Daily Telegraph, for example, ran the headline ‘Giving British citizenship to 300,000 Hong Kongers will boost the economy’, a reversal of the cliched trope peddled in right-wing media that immigration leads to economic demise. Published in the midst of lockdown (29 May), it may be that this more balanced approach was borne out of the wider uptick in appreciation for what migrants contribute to the UK.

Immigration also entered the discourse when eastern Europeans were flown into the UK to help save the June harvest. This triggered media coverage verging on the satirical, with the Daily Mail- a publication with an entrenched opposition to Romanian migrants – running the headline ‘Romanians to the Rescue’. Given the travel restrictions that were in place at the time, a demonstration of support for immigration of any kind- let alone that of Romanian economic migrants- is hugely noteworthy; it communicates an awareness of how indispensably important immigration is to the UK.

Has the UK media U-turned on its deep-rooted prejudice against migrants and immigration? Not quite, though it is nevertheless important to note the positive impact which our migrant healthcare workers have had on public opinion and on the press. The Daily Mail is not the only publication guilty of such reporting as has been exhibited pre-lockdown, and sure enough in recent articles, the Daily Express has persisted in the trope of reporting the scale of immigration rather than its legality. It is also key to consider that many will see headlines such as ‘Gangs using coronavirus crisis to send migrants to the UK’ and share that information irrespective of the article’s content. Whether this article highlights the perceived threat of immigrants to the UK or the plight of the trafficked migrants is a moot point to anyone who will form an opinion before opening the link and preach their opinion on the issues as unchallenged gospel.

Whilst it is encouraging to see flickers of journalistic integrity return to the British press, our media, and the way in which we consume it, must change a great deal to begin reporting on political issues such as this in an unbiased and factual manner.  Recent weeks have made it impossible to dispute the fact that migrants do in fact contribute massively to the UK, and rather than inflicting harm upon public services, are actually a key cornerstone upon which our public services stand. Going forward, it should be facts, not polarised opinions, that form the basis of immigration coverage.

Harry Sanders is a content writer for the Immigration Advice Service, an organisation of immigration solicitors.