Wednesday’s front page of the Daily Star has been widely seen as an endorsement of the English Defence League. Roy Greenslade of the Guardian called it “a clear piece of propaganda on behalf of the EDL”, while the Independent‘s Ian Burrell asked, “Has the Daily Star decided to back the EDL?”
It’s just a coincidence, of course, that Richard Desmond should moot the EDL’s spiritual home of Luton as the base for his newspapers, but it couldn’t be better timing. Who knows? Maybe the EDL will hold a “Welcome to Luton” street party for Star hacks when they arrive at work for the first time in Bedfordshire.
My fellow media blogger Five Chinese Crackers expresses the view of many of us who viewed the Star as just a worthless comic and not worthy of serious criticism, saying: “I hardly ever looked at the Star, since it exists primarily as a vehicle for selling pictures of tits to stupid people,” but admits we’re going to have to start taking it seriously now.
This is, after all, a national newspaper – of which there are only ten – aligning itself with an organisation that many consider to be odious, hostile to freedom and deeply unpleasant. Of course, as many other bloggers have documented down the years, Daily Star headlines often bear little or no relation to the stories below, and it’s a similar case with this one. The EDL boss saying “We aren’t ruling it out” is alchemised into “EDL to become political party”. No matter. The Star has its story, and backs it up with a remarkably chummy editorial column.
It’s been coming for a while. Back in November, Hope Not Hate wrote politely to the Star asking the paper to tone down its coverage of Muslims. It came on the back of a Star poll which found that 98 per cent of readers feared Britain was becoming a Muslim state – the most recent poll found that 98 per cent of readers, perhaps not entirely unrelatedly, backed the policies of the EDL.
At the time, I looked at the reaction on nationalist and EDL message boards and blogs, and found it was highly positive. One blogger wrote, delightedly, “This is the first article I have read, from both the national and regional media, that hasn’t been critical of the EDL,” and hoped for more in the future. It would seem that wish has been granted.
It seems an odd decision, on the face of it, from the Star to be so matey with the EDL. Perhaps 98 per cent of Star readers really do support the EDL; and phone polls are entirely representative of a readership’s feelings on any particular subject. Perhaps there is a lot of latent support for the EDL from ordinary Brits who feel angry at what they see as the Islamification of their country, based on the kind of stories they read in the Star (and elsewhere, in slightly more complicated terms). Perhaps it’s just a way of targeting a narrow demographic as a way of tunnelling out of the general slump in newspaper sales, abandoning broad appeal in favour of a particular type of reader.
As I said last week, newspapers may be reflecting their readerships, but if they’re just confirming prejudices rather than reporting what’s actually going on, that erodes the credibility of all newspapers even more.
If you look back further, this was a newspaper that would have had a “Daily Fatwa” edition published, had it not been for a revolt by the newsroom’s union chapel. So, this isn’t a new flirtation, but perhaps rather a “coming out” by the Star, and perhaps is to be welcomed by the rest of us. At least we know what we’re dealing with now, and it’s out in the open. At least we know where they stand.
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