I just hinted that bias is likely to permeate down through all levels of an organisation that is happy to print the kind of ridiculous drivel Clarkson wrote about Meghan Markle.
So, considering how we saw Clarkson appears to have been influenced into a complete about-turn on his feelings about Markle, aren’t we all likely being influenced and manipulated into believing the views and opinions that our regular media sources push onto us?
We are easily influenced whether we want to admit it or not.
In his book Contagious, Jonah Berger describes a concept he calls triggers and one way he illustrates the idea is with the story of the resurgence Kit-Kat had in the US after running a simple ad campaign. The biscuit brand had been in decline for some years when in 2007 an attempt was made to turn things around, but with minimal resources. Colleen Chorak who was given this task created ads for different media that all highlighted people taking a coffee break and a Kit-Kat at the same time. In 12 months sales increased by a third.
What Chorak did was make coffee a trigger for Kit-Kats, so when someone grabs a coffee and wants a snack, Kit-Kat comes to mind more readily than other options. It’s a simple idea, but the figures show us it’s also a very effective technique.
A few days ago, the England soccer team did what they do best, lost to Iceland. The following day, a number of newspapers apparently used photos of the same player, Bukayo Saka, to illustrate that lead story on their back pages. Saka is a young black player and a big name in the sport, but just one of many big names in the England team. In addition, he was only on the pitch for the last 25 minutes or so and the only goal was scored early in the first half, so it seems difficult to pinpoint him as being significantly responsible for the loss. Surely others could have been more obvious choices to illustrate the story.
Might not the goalkeeper who conceded the goal, the captain, the manager or a photo showing a handful or so of the players have been more obvious choices?
I must acknowledge that there are arguably some reasons for the editorial selection of the photos of him throwing a paper plane and being prone on the ground, so I’m not claiming that the choices in this case were racially motivated, though we’ll see shortly that racial bias is almost certainly polluting at least some parts of the British media. Regardless of the motivation, in making these choices, the journalists involved are in effect tying Saka or black players in general to the idea of defeat in the same way Kit-Kats were so effectively tied to coffee.
We know that as in life in general, racism does persist in soccer and other sports, made clear by the fact that year after year we get more stories of fans abusing players racially. It may not be as prevalent as it was, but it seemingly refuses to die altogether. So do you think it’s unreasonable to expect journalists to give more thought and consideration to how their choices could have unforeseen effects and potentially help to persist biases?
Within the last year, the black Brazilian and Real Madrid forward Vinicius Junior has talked about how he’s found himself thinking about walking away from soccer because of the racist abuse he’s faced in multiple Spanish stadiums.
It’s crazy. Do sports fans want to lose great players like Saka and Vinicius Junior because their love of the sport no longer outweighs the negativity of the racist biases that they experience?
As long as the media continue to give out mixed messages on racism, racism is going to remain a problem.
When I was a kid, we never expected too much in the way of social commentary from our footballers. Basically, depending on the result of their last game, they were either over the moon or sick as a parrot.1 So it made for a refreshing change when the young black player Raheem Sterling pointed out the difference in the way a British newspaper reported on a white 18-year-old player and a black 20-year-old player each buying an expensive house for their respective mothers.2
In the case of the white player, Phil Foden, the Daily Mail’s headline “Manchester City starlet Phil Foden buys new £2m home for his mum” puts a very positive shine on the story of a young man repaying his mum for his upbringing.
Compare that with the the same newspaper’s headline reporting how the black player Tosin Adarabioyo bought a house for his mum, which ran as “Young Manchester City footballer, 20, on £25,000 a week splashes out on mansion on market for £2.25m despite having never started a Premier League match.” Firstly there’s no mention of the fact that this purchase was to give his mother a house, which was the main gist of the headline in Foden’s case. The cost of the house in each case was largely similar, but the language is very different, “home” vs “mansion”.
Do you possibly think that they were trying to highlight a difference between Adarabioyo and the average person, as only the rich buy mansions while normal people buy homes?
The last part of that headline focuses on the fact he’d not played in the Premier League, though he had played in both the Champions League and League Cup. At the point in time of the Foden headline, he’d only featured as a substitute in eight premier league games for about 75 minutes in total, not including added time. So if we’re to judge their work rate on just first-team playing time, Foden wasn’t exactly working all hours, but of course, most of the work of professional sportspeople is in the training and preparation.
So does that feel to you like they were trying to make the reader feel that Adarabioyo didn’t deserve to be in his position because he hadn’t worked for it?
These were two stories of dedicated and hardworking young men who had both used their talent to achieve great success at a young age and both then showed their love and gratitude for their mother by buying her a home. They should both be feel-good and aspirational stories about two responsible young men supporting their family at a time when lots of us enjoying their success would be wasting money on supercars and dating (screwing) supermodels3. Yet the language used to headline basically the same story was very different and will have led to many readers having very different perceptions of the two men without even realising it.
Why do you think the two headlines were so different?
Can you think of any valid reasons for the very different approaches? It’s worth noting that I’ve never read the two stories, just the headlines, so it’s possible the stories were more similar. Also, the different reporters on each story may not be a factor as a writer’s headline suggestion may be completely ignored at an editorial level. And the anonymity of sub-editors may be a factor in how headlines like this come about too.
When Is A Crime Only An Alleged Crime?
Sterling was no doubt motivated to comment on the situation as by the end of 2018 he’d personally already experienced several years of negative press reporting and it seems to have continued after too. You can look into it yourself if you want more details, but I do want to share what struck me as a truly bizarre turn of phrase from a 2023 article4 relating to a burglary at Sterling’s home during the 2022 World Cup finals. At the time there was some confusion in the media about the story, with it being described as an armed robbery with family members in the house and also as a burglary with family members absent, with some in the media highlighting seemingly confused timelines. The police have been treating it as a burglary.
This is the quote from The Sun on 22 September 2023 – “The Prem star’s £7million home in Oxshott, Surrey was allegedly burgled while Sterling was on international duty in Qatar.”
Does any part of that sentence seem odd to you?
It’s probably the most bizarre sentence I’ve ever read in a newspaper and, for some perspective, I used to read the Sunday Sport back in the late 80s. The “newspaper” that birthed such famously bizarre headlines as “World War 2 Bomber Found On Moon” and “3 Inch Dog Ate My Missus”.
Normally when it comes to reporting of crimes, the word “allegedly” would be used in reference to someone who has been accused of a crime, but not convicted. Someone is innocent until proven guilty and so this turn of phrase protects those who haven’t been proven guilty.
In that sentence above, taken from The Sun’s website, doesn’t it suggest that there may not have been a burglary? I’m sure The Sun would characterise that as an innocent and clumsy piece of writing, but we’ve considered before how the media can use innuendo to guide the thinking of their audiences.
Anyway, just taking in the presentation of Bukayo Saka, the two different headlines and Sterling’s own experiences, can we really say that parts of the media are racist? Even if we throw in the treatment of Meghan Markle at the hands of prominent men in the media, I’m not entirely sure it would be the right thing to say.
Because I think the bigotry apparent in some parts of the media goes a long way beyond just racism.
Muslims seem to be another group considered fair game by the media. The Sun features again, in late 2015 running a front page with the headline “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis” which received many complaints. Following an adjudication that found the report had not been accurate, the paper was required to run a report of the adjudication in print and online.5
Based on the summary from the IPSO site, the particular detail that seems to most clearly indicate bias is the fact that the article compared the results of the poll to earlier polls, but did not show that in some earlier polls, non-Muslims had also been questioned and their responses were reportedly similar to Muslim respondents. If non-Muslims expressed similar sentiments to Muslims, it would have meant a non-story, so it just wasn’t considered.
Contempt for Muslims in the media isn’t limited to just the UK and it’s likely the concept of triggers plays a part in this too. Practicing Muslims are quite easily recognisable by their appearance and with many terrorist atrocities widely reported from around the world in the last few decades, that appearance may connect Muslims to terrorism, but it’s clearly unreasonable to characterise or treat all Muslims as terrorists. However, after the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015, multiple newspapers and websites around the world republished the cartoon of the prophet Mohammed.
Such actions only hurt the faithful, not the terrorists that they’re aimed at. I don’t believe for one second that the Kouachi brothers who killed 12 people in the Charlie Hebdo attack were really Muslims. Like the vast majority of people who joined Islamic State as they tried to build their own nation, the Kouachis were just a pair of psychopathic thugs who saw tying themselves to the Islamic cause as the justification for them to live out their obscene fantasies.
Sure, we live in free democratic societies and our right to free speech mean the media are absolutely free to publish the cartoons, but just because we’re free to say something, it doesn’t mean we always have to say something, does it?
The media never seem to associate other killers so closely with their religion when that religion isn’t Islam. Timothy McVeigh was raised as a Roman Catholic and took the last rites shortly before his death. His death was the result of a lethal injection as he’d been sentenced to death for the murder of 168 people, including 19 children, when he bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City.6 I don’t recall him ever being described as a Roman Catholic terrorist.
In 1999 Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams, described as fundamentalist Christians, murdered a gay couple in California because of their sexual orientation.7 There was no shocked and disgusted media response to the horrors of the Christian faith in response to the killings.
The shooters in New Zealand’s Christchurch mosque shootings and the US’s Poway synagogue and Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shootings all used Christian-based justifications, among others, for their attacks, but again Christian terrorists weren’t held responsible for these horrific attacks.
Migrants are another group that the media love to hate. We’ve already discussed the issue of migrants and we know that it is an issue that needs reassessing within the context of the modern world. It’s an important debate for many societies to have, but it can be done calmly and with respect.
Here’s a coincidence, we’re back to The Sun newspaper again. In 2015 a piece penned by their columnist Katie Hopkins unsurprisingly drew many complaints due to some of the inflammatory language used.8 I guess it makes for a refreshing change that the writer is an angry shouty woman, instead of the normal angry shouty man.
Anyway, she described migrants as “feral” and “like cockroaches”, both phrases that seem to me intended to stoke hatred. Maybe I’m just overly sensitive. Like all people, she should be free to debate what is such an important subject to so many people, but using language that dehumanises people in such vicious terms is just unnecessary. Yet The Sun saw no reason to moderate the language of the article.
The fixation on the gender of strangers has crossed our desk before and the case of the primary school teacher Lucy Meadows9 is a tragic example of the difficulties faced in the modern world by people who just want to live their life in the way that feels right to them. Meadows had undergone gender reassignment surgery and returned to her job as a primary school teacher. This story was picked up by both local and national media and she spent a couple of weeks being pursued by journalists and photographers. In the Daily Mail newspaper, the writer Richard Littlejohn wrote a piece titled “He’s not only in the wrong body… he’s in the wrong job”.10
That harassment occurred at the turn of 2012 into 2013 and on 19 March 2023, Lucy Meadows took her own life. A note she left behind placed no blame for her actions on the media11, though I still personally have difficulty believing their pursuit of her months earlier didn’t impact her state of mind. Her note also said she wasn’t “depressed or mentally ill”, but anosognosia is common in people with mental illness, meaning they’re unaware of their own illness.
Following the suicide, a petition calling for Littlejohn to be sacked reportedly gained more than 100,000 signatures12 and other parts of the media attacked him for his article.
If you read the article, what do you think about the calls to sack him and effectively cancel him?
Personally, I disagree with his conclusion and think kids are a lot more adaptable and understanding than he gives them credit for. I also think he could have balanced the comment from a parent whose views aligned with Littlejohn with a parent who was supportive of Meadows (other reporting shows there were also supportive parents). Overall though, while somewhat insensitive and overly indignant in my view, I’m not convinced it qualified as a case of dog-whistle reporting to rouse the villagers with their pitchforks.
If we support free speech, shouldn’t he have the freedom to express his point of view?
It feels like Littlejohn was made the poster child because his article was a convenient rallying point. Monstering is a term used to describe how the media represent people they don’t like as monsters. Do you think perhaps that approach was applied to some degree to Littlejohn in this case?
What concerns me is that by focusing on that one article, many who read it may feel the kickback is an overreaction and the media are being unfairly accused of acting unfairly.
At least some British newspapers are clearly transphobic and fighting the wrong fight may weaken the overall fight against a media industry that plays a key role in keeping society divided. Trans Media Watch’s submission to the Leveson Inquiry13 shares numerous examples of how newspapers including The Sun and the Daily Mail have dehumanised and publicly humiliated people who have committed no crime. The stories highlighted in the report are pure and simple examples of the media bullying those who are weaker than them.
Bigoted media using their platform to make their audience feel and think a certain way is obviously damaging to society, but liberal media reporting on an article in an unbalanced way to deliberately make their audience feel and think a certain way is equally damaging. Both sides are driving division.
That sums up pretty well everything that biased media does. It divides societies by taking the view that anyone who isn’t with us is against us. It’s possible for people to have very different views and still work together, or at least it used to be. Now it seems we’re all encouraged pick a side and see everyone else as our enemy, but we’re expected to pick an enemy who’s across from us, not look up and target the real enemy.
A poor person who has right-leaning views has much more in common with a poor person with left-leaning views than they do with a heffalump with billions in the bank and a newspaper or TV channel. The media is working hard to ensure we don’t all reach that realisation.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vuW6tQ0218 ↩︎
- https://www.instagram.com/p/BrKYvF3gH9e/?img_index=1 ↩︎
- GET IN! I am the new Donald Trump and if that doesn’t make any sense to you, you’ll want to head back to read Don’t They Serve The People? ↩︎
- https://web.archive.org/web/20231003001751/https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/24079296/manhunt-three-men-raheem-sterling-burglary-300k/ ↩︎
- https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/ruling/?id=09324-15 ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Gary_Matson_and_Winfield_Mowder ↩︎
- The Sun’s website no longer hosts the original article, so I’ve linked a copy of it https://www.gc.soton.ac.uk/files/2015/01/hopkins-17april-2015.pdf ↩︎
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/transgender-primary-school-teacher-who-took-own-life-had-sought-protection-from-media-hounding-before-her-death-8546468.html ↩︎
- http://web.archive.org/web/20121221195332/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2251347/Nathan-Uptons-wrong-body–hes-wrong-job.html ↩︎
- https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/10448625.tragic-suicide-note-left-accrington-transgender-teacher-lucy-meadows/ ↩︎
- https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/5623-petitions-sack-richard-littlejohn ↩︎
- https://transmediawatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Publishable-Trans-Media-Watch-Submission.pdf ↩︎