Press freedom: and the Politics it drives

Press freedom: is that the right to make up stories about asylum seekers?

The Daily Mail's attacks on Ed Miliband are just the thin of the wedge, the tabloids usually target groups that can't fight back

Aditya Chakrabortty

"That's the fun of it, isn't it? Having a little smidgen of power," Rupert Murdoch to his biographer, William Shawcross

In January 2004, the press regulator received a complaint about theDaily Express. Nothing unusual there; except this one was from the Express's own journalists. Reporters protested that bosses were putting them "under pressure to write anti-Gypsy articles". Days before, Richard Desmond's paper had led with "1.6 million Gypsies set to flood in". The illustration was a map of Europe, with five red arrows steaming towards a lone union flag. It was titled "The Great Invasion 2004". A couple of days later came this front-page claim: "A massive invasion of poverty-stricken Gypsies from eastern Europe could lead to economic disaster, ministers fear." Meanwhile, Express readers were encouraged to take part in a phone poll: "Should we let Gypsies invade Britain?"

Begged to step in, the Press Complaints Commission sat on its hands. Christopher Meyer, the then-chair, sent a short note saying he was satisfied no staff members were being leaned on to write anything inaccurate or unethical.

For all the fuss over the Daily Mail's assault on Ed Miliband, it is nothing compared with the decades of attacks regularly made by that paper, the Express and the Sun on far weaker groups, such as the Roma. Miliband-gate is a hit-job that went wrong. The nominal target (a dead father) was ill-judged, the tool (a teenage diary entry) wasn't up to the task and the follow-up blows (that editorial bawling, "We won't apologise") were little more than flailing about. No wonder polls show even a majority of Mail readers reckon Paul Dacre should say sorry. In its very bungling, the affair has focused attention on how tabloid dons mould the political agenda: picking off targets, setting their newsroom hounds on people, and doing it again and again, until nonsense comes to seem like common sense. Except they usually go after people who can't fight back as easily as Miliband – and so get away with it. The result is that media storms turn into disastrous poll ratings, which alchemise into panicky policymaking.

Take asylum seekers, another favourite punch bag for the Tory tabs. Over one 31‑day period in 2003, the Express ran 22 front-page splashes on a supposed flood of would-be refugees. At about the same time, the Sun launched a campaign called "Stop asylum madness". Reviewing the two papers along with the Daily Mail, one human-rights charity noted constant use of abusive terms such as "parasites" and "scroungers". Its report observed the Sun "rarely called the group anything other than 'asylum cheats' or 'illegals', even when referring to them coming with the full approval of the government".

And always, always they were coming in droves. More people did seek refuge in Britain in the early part of the last decade, as wars raged in Afghanistan and Iraq (the top countries of origin for asylum applicants). But they weren't coming here in the numbers the press pretended; nor would their main draw have been £37.50 a week in cash and vouchers. Yet the tabloids, by constantly repeating their lies, managed to make their fantasy appear as reality: a poll from 2003 showed the British public believed the UK was taking 23% of the world's refugees; the true proportion was 2%.

And these invaders were so vicious! The Daily Star claimed they were eating donkeys – and had to issue a retraction. The Sun ran an infamous front page about "callous asylum seekers" eating the Queen's swans. Police said the entire story was untrue, but it still took five months for Murdoch's employees to run a 60-word "clarification" deep on page 41. This time, the PCC conceded that the paper was unable to provide any evidence for its yarn, but ruled that the tiny correction "constituted sufficient remedial action".

Faced with these front pages, Tony Blair couldn't help joining in. Between 2001 and 2004, no other subject apart from the Iraq war took up so much of his time: 50 meetings, some lasting three hours, over two years; and six asylum laws passed over his 10 years as PM.

Asylum is the most egregious example of a section of the press peddling lies that governments are forced to act on, but plenty of others are collected by my former Guardian colleague Malcolm Dean in his book Democracy Under Attack. The Tory press obsess over crime so that even when crime is falling, the public believe it is rising. Tabloid editors harp on about the evil of drugs, in effect forcing ministers to ignore the scientists and judges and keep cannabis as a class B drug that could land users in prison for five years.

We could keep going. A recent analysis for the charity Turn2us of more than 6,000 newspaper articles on welfare published between 1995 and 2011 found that 37% of articles in the Mail and the Express and 39% in the Sun concerned benefit fraud. Yet whichever benefit you're talking about, fraud is never more than 3% of cases.

This is Britain as seen by Tory tabloid editors: the poor are always on the rob, unionised workers like nothing better than to swing the lead and the darkies are forever sneaking into the country. It is a fantasy, fostered by a lazy and self-serving system of press regulation and indulged by nervous politicians. It turns Labour governments into tenants in a Tory Britain and grants Conservatives ever more freedom to run rightwards. This is the much-fabled press freedom that's apparently at risk this wee

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/press-freedom-asylum-seekers-ed-miliband