Target : Media racism, swamped by the Times

We know that media racism fans the flames of racist and police attacks on Black and Third World communities, that it plays its part in granting a veneer of credibility to stupid theories about genetic inferiority ("IQ") or Black criminality. In Britain, the gutter press revels in making racism sensational, and understood long ago that few combinations make for more impressive sales figures than race mixed with disease. Never more so since journalists "discovered" AIDS, not in the big cities of the United States where the disease first appeared but in the "Darkest Africa" of their racist imagination.

A few months ago, however, it was not the Sun or the Daily Express which fired a salvo of foul-smelling racism but the Sunday Times, that icon of bourgeois English decorum and respectability. And it was not the Third World but Ireland, and Irish people, who were in its line of sight. "HIV patients," screamed the headline, "flock to Britain for free housing." That these were to be Irish people was left out of the lead, but then hammered in by the rest of the story. "Hundreds of people" were said to be "moving to Britain to take advantage of better welfare benefits, free housing, and tax-free cars." The Times’ journalist, Valerie Hanley, then quoted an Irish man explaining that "it is easier to come to London and get social welfare here," repeating (in case we hadn’t gotten the subtext) that "financial gain is the principal incentive for Irish people diagnosed as HIV-positive to emigrate to the UK."

Anti-Irish racism in nothing new in Britain. What is significant about this case is that the group whose front-line research was twisted for the article, Positively Irish Action on AIDS (PIAA), struck back with not only the facts ("there is no evidence of the influx alluded to in the article") but also the reminder that, as citizens of the EU, Irish people have the same right to live and work in England as English people do in Ireland. Finally, PIAA’s complaint to the Press Complaints Commission forced the Times to admit, at least, that the use of "the world ’spiralled’ was wrong" and that the Times’s conclusion could not be drawn from PIAA’s research, cited by the article.

HIV workers fear the backlash from making the facts about HIV in ethnic minority communities public. PIAA’s director Siobhan Riordan, however, believes that "the benefits of a publicly visible community organization outweigh the disadvantages, including the potential for a negative backlash. And if there is a backlash, we can then deal with it, because it is about owning the issues which concern our community."