08/06/2006
UNHCR's latest quarterly magazine REFUGEES has criticised UK tabloid press coverage of asylum and immigration in their article Victims of Intolerance! 'Asylum madness' in the UK, writes Adam Fullwood .
António Guterres UN High Commissioner for Refugee in the introduction says: ""In some countries, deliberate attempts to dehumanise asylum seekers are continuing, always presenting them as menacing statistics, as criminals and bringers of disease, or as some other form of generalised abstract aberration that is easy to hate."
"In an increasing number of countries, asylum seekers - and the refugees among them - have become a tool for political demagogues, or have been turned into faceless bogeymen by an unscrupulous popular press."
The report devotes two pages to the media in the UK:
"Ill-informed or sloppy journalists or editors are one thing: they can always be better informed. A media organization that deliberately pursues an agenda which is applied to all its contents - not just the editorials and opinion columns, but also the news coverage - is something altogether more deadly."
"Four out of the five national daily tabloid newspapers in the UK have been full of 'news' about asylum seekers that is often not really news at all, but anti-asylum spin...The mendacity of much tabloid coverage has poisoned public discourse about asylum issues".
Recent tactics employed by News of the World for an article published on 28th May 2006 ("We catch 2 bus loads of illegal immigrants") have been met with shock and indignation and in response to this we understand there will be a picket of the News of the World on Sunday 11th June 2006 at 11 am at 1 Virginia Street, London (nearest tube, Tower Hill).
by Adam Fullwood , Garden Court North Chambers.
> REFUGEES Number 142, Issue 1, 2006 - read article (pages 16 - 19) at http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/publ/opendoc.pdf?tbl=PUBL&id=44508c182