Conflating the Voice

Oh, hey. Been a while..

I'd like to thank the Daily Mail (I know, what?) for giving me an easy ride back into blogging. I stopped writing here a while ago for a variety of reasons but recently I've noticed a lack of incision regarding press dynamics where there used to be sharp teeth in abundance. Thankfully, this story is particularly easy to get your teeth into once you realise what the Mail are trying to achieve.

The story I'm on about is one which appears on the Daily Mail's website as White working class Britons 'don't get a fair deal compared with ethnic minorities'. As soon as I read the headline, I thought to myself: I wonder what their sources are, asserting such a thing! Perhaps there has been a controlled study into the treatment of whites and non-whites. But no. Despite the presentation of the headline as a statement of fact, the Mail's justification for the story is a survey of the public. So it should really read:

White working class Britons 'don't feel like they get a fair deal compared with ethnic minorities'

And that survey? Carried out in Birmingham, Coventry and London, three of the most racially diverse areas of the country.

Heh.

But whilst the article is full of dogwhistle racism like this:

However, the white working classes remain proud of their identity and the values they stand for.

These include working hard, looking after each other and having pride in their community.

the real issue is the device that the Mail are employing here, which serves to perpetuate the opinions they choose to hold and to present those as fact to their (bewilderingly) large readership. I'm not, as ever, interested in the real dynamics of the housing queue; I leave those things to other people, who have the time to do real research into those areas. What this blog cares about is how the media and the press are capable of twisting things, and here, the Daily Mail achieve this by following a certain formula:

1: present and promote the idea that the white working classes are losing out because of ethnic minorities

This is done on a daily basis and is rooted in every piece of subtly racist journalism the newspaper has ever printed. Stories about the housing queue and the continued conflation of "immigrant" and "asylum seeker" contribute greatly, but so do stories about English-speaking doctors and the likes. This narrative plays on people's fears and their insecurities; it gives people a group of people to blame for the things in their lives that might not have gone to plan (your life sucks? immigrants' fault!) and it plays of fear of people different to yourself.

2: ask the people most likely to have absorbed your rhetoric on issue X what they feel about issue X

This is a key point. Granted, the survey in question wasn't carried out by the Daily Mail but it's fitting that the paper chose that survey given the places in the UK upon which it focused.

3: present those people's feelings about issue X in such a way as to return to step 1, thereby contributing even further to the sense of injustice

Most people won't get anywhere close to reading/caring about the true source of the assertion made in the headline, and the Mail know that, so they print a headline and an opening 3 paragraphs to the story that make those things sound like almost-undisputed facts. This adds to the narrative.

This whole thing smacks of a similar phenomenon to the first post I ever wrote here regarding the public's perception of Kate Middleton, which was pretty much solely determined by how she was portrayed in the media. This is similar, in that the Mail advocates a certain angle on a story, finds a survey that's almost bound to agree with them, presents that survey as a study, and presents that study not as a bunch of their mates' opinions, but as truth.

It's the equivalent of telling your mate something 20 times, waiting until they bring it up in their own conversation, and then going to the pub with a different group of friends and using your mate's words to prove your own point.

And it sucks.