NDM 19

Sayeeda Warsi accuses UK press of hate speech and Islamophobia

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/14/sayeeda-warsi-accuses-uk-press-of-hate-speech-and-islamophobia

- The Guardian

Sayeeda Warsi believes that various newspapers are spreading hate speech and Islamaphobia, She gave examples from the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Times in her speech. She has been campaigning, giving her fifth annual Leveson lecture at an event hosted by the Hacked Off campaign, which wants greater regulation of the press.

• “In sections of our press, it is relentless and deliberate. Steadily and methodically using paper inches and columns to create, feed and ratchet up suspicions and hostilities in our society, driving communities apart and creating untold – and unnecessary – fear and distress."
• Hate speech in the press has become a plague, an epidemic. Ways of expression that I thought we had left behind with Enoch Powell in the 1960s are now the new normal.
• a front page headline from the Sun in 2015 – “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis” – as “shocking” and “encouraging a false and derogatory idea”.
• And this drip-drip approach has created a toxic environment where hate crime is the highest it has been since records began.”

In relation to what we have been learning recently with Marxist and Puluralist approach. You could argue that this strongly supports the view that the more powerful companies have a way of manipulating audience in the sense that they are technically a passive audience that take in information and that they accept what they are shown. The fact that she uses 'drip-drip approach' emphasises this point. However, The fact that she is able to express this view and that she is given a platform to do this can be argues to be more pluralist and that audience are having more of a less passive approach and influence on larger organisations. This is highlighted by the fact that News UK, the publisher of the Sun and the Times, declined to comment.