Tuesday 16 June 2009

Boris attacked in the Mail (again)

As an example of fantastically biased journalism, the Daily Mail's article today headlined 'Senior Tories rubbish Boris Johnson's proposal to allow illegal immigrants to work in UK' can hardly be improved on.

Rather than inform us that Boris commissioned the report from the LSE, it tries to claim (initially, anyway) that the mayor himself published the report. Presumably this is because not even the Mail can pretend the LSE is not one of the country's most respectable academic institutions.

And rather than tell the reader what the report actually says, it repeats the MigrationWatch canards that it would be expensive and unpopular.

It's important to remember that the Mail is a carefully packaged product which attempts to reinforce the prejudices of its readers. It is not, in that sense, journalism at all.

1 comment:

  1. In my opinion a would be Earned Citizenship may become harder and harder to come if the matter is being put to public more frequently. The reason is simply because immigration is a very controversial issue(unfortunately) and pretty much every single person tends to use them as some sort of scapegoat or in the best senario they basically can see no good coming from immigrants(wrongly though). The evidence(comments made at the end of all articles about a possible regularisation in the media) shows this fact and one can say almost easily that all commentors are against it. Why the public is opposed to it might have various reasons but not knowing the kind of limbo and life that those irregulars have gone through during all those long years could be one of them. It is hard for someone who has no experience of this situation to know exactly what does it mean to be dependent on friends and acquaintances, to be destitude but trying to keep your dignity, to see years of your life going by but to no avail what so ever,etc. So I guess perhaps government or the media need to realize that going to the public to debate this issue not only would help but it will make the matter more sensitive and bring about tensions(interestingly the LSE report also indicates "tensions" as a possible problem if an amnesty is introduced). This neither means that the matter should not be talked about nor should be kept away from public. But the authorities might be interested in finding a better way to deal with this, like so many of other important decisions that are taken from time to time within the government. I am sure they'll be able to come across with a solution if they want to ofcourse.
    Thank you.

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