The Sun has blood on its hands

Tony Gallagher is an excellent newspaper editor. He oversaw the Telegraph‘s admirable scoop on the Westminster expenses scandal, a fine piece of investigative journalism which rightly saw MPs thrown in jail and forced to pay back their excesses gleaned at the expense of the taxpayer.

Gallagher’s reputation is as a trouble-making Fleet Street fox. Although he’s a supporter of the Conservatives, he has been openly critical of Prime Minister David Cameron over a number of issues, unlike the Murdoch clique at his new parent company, News UK, which has appointed Gallagher as editor of the Sun. In particular, the group’s newly appointed CEO, Rebekah Wade, is a personal friend of Cameron, whose adversarial abilities are better suited to Cotswolds horse riding competitions than the dirty arena of providing public accountability for Britons in office. When it comes to the refugee crisis, the Sun has blood on its hands, and on this count, it seems unlikely that Gallagher’s previous achievements in journalism will make much difference.

The Telegraph took an anti-refugee stance, and Gallagher himself has personally defended the work of Andrew Gilligan, whose “London” column seems to focus most of its energy on bashing various conservative Muslim groups.

Gallagher’s new newspaper is the rag which published a column by Katie Hopkins in which she called refugees fleeing from a vicious war “cockroaches” and has had headlines like “Halt the Asylum Tide Now” and “Draw a Red Line on Immigration or Else”. The Sun must, therefore, bear the brunt of the criticism of why the refugee crisis has gone on for so long. It is a newspaper that Cameron is extremely sensitive to. Without its support for taking in refugees, he has been under no pressure to act. He too ignored the hundreds of dead children that had gone before Alan Shenu, of whose deaths he was fully aware. (The Turkish media misreported Alan Kurdi’s name, by the way, and the Western media mainly didn’t bother to verify it. Alan is a popular Kurdish name meaning “flag-bearer”.)

A red line is entirely the right way to think about the Sun‘s approach to the refugee crisis. It was happy to tolerate a red line of blood around Europe, as refugees drowned in their thousands. It was also happy to publish Katie Hopkins’s weekly column on the very same day that it published the picture of the Kurdish boy washed up on Turkey’s shores on the front page, without a word of apology from Hopkins or the newspaper.

Hopkins had claimed in an earlier interview with the Guardian that she had used the word “cockroaches” in her Sun column as a term of admiration, to mean the refugees and economic migrants were tough and resilient. She proffered no explanation for why she had written, “I would use gunships to stop migrants” and “NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad.” Nor would the Sun apologise for calling her column “Brilliant”.

Instead, the newspaper had the temerity to launch a campaign: “Mr. Cameron, Summer Is Over… Now Deal With the Biggest Crisis Facing Europe Since WW2”.

Even the Daily Mail has changed its tune. The Mail’s approach to the refugee crisis is best encapsulated by its front page headline, “The Swarm on Britain’s Streets”. The prime minister has, oh so graciously, offered to take in twenty thousand refugees over five years, but assigned funding for only the next year, taken from the foreign aid budget. A mathematically-minded Twitter follower of mine pointed out yesterday that this amounted to half a dozen refugees taken in per Parliamentary constituency each year.

They will arrive in a country hardened to their fate by newspapers like the Sun, which has a readership of over six million, equivalent to more than one in seven adults in the UK; the Mail accounts for a further one in seven. Despite facing the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War, despite being a “Christian” country, despite claiming to have “a long tradition of welcoming refugees,” 57 per cent of Britons, according to a ComRes poll commissioned by the BBC over the weekend, are in favour of taking no more refugees from Syria or Iraq, or reducing the number to be taken. Forty per cent are in favour of taking more, roughly the same number who say that the German government is right to have taken the hundreds of thousands it has done.

The question is, why? Are Britons really that callous, or have they been grievously misinformed about the nature of the refugee crisis?

The Sun has led the charge in characterising conservative Muslims as potential terrorists (a claim that even the Mail backed off from after realising that many of the newsagents selling the newspaper are Muslims), and in demonising refugees as economic scroungers and potential criminals. It is the Sun which has turned Britain against refugees, and every death that has resulted must be laid, in part, at its door. This is the power of the media. The Sun should begin to see it as a responsibility.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.