Pembroke Refugee Seminar: Xenophobia, Populism and the Media

On the 27th April, The Pembroke Refugee Seminar, in cooperation with the Masters's Seminar, Pembroke Papers & the Pembroke Politics Society presented a timely discussion on the Xenophobia, Populism, and the media.

As expressed by the Dean, who chaired the event, we are faced with both a genuine crisis and a new, emerging type of politics in which the media is central.  The Refugee seminar series is part of Pembroke’s attempt to understand the crisis from a multitude of perspectives and explore the political landscape in which it is taking place.

The speakers were the Master, Lord Chris Smith Baron of Finsbury; Jon Smith, who has reported from across the globe over 37 years as a journalist and was Political Editor of the Press Association; Kate Ironside, who was a political journalist for 26 years, and is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire and a member of the executive board of the Broadcast Journalism Training Council; and Léonie de Jonge, a PhD candidate at Pembroke studying right-wing populist parties in Europe.

Lord Smith began the evening by taking a broad view focused on the role of UK politics in enabling populism and a xenophobic media; a weak opposition and centre party, with a complacent governing party, has created a strong need for a revival of the quality and atmosphere of our politics.  The big themes of hope, progress and change that drive constructive politics seem, unfortunately, to be missing.

Jon Smith more explicitly pointed to media culture in explaining the rise of populism, citing an ethos lacking in decency and respect in which opinion and rumour are traded as fact and fear and mistrust are favoured over clear, accurate, and fair reporting.  Even where the intent of the journalist is not to harm, they should be aware of how headlines can be weaponised to fuel toxic dialogues.  Unfortunately, accurate and informed reporting is expensive, so part of the solution is finding a way to make fact and rigour pay.  Honest information is a powerful tool, and the next generation of journalists must be unafraid in wielding it.

Kate Ironside began with a chicken and egg question of where it was xenophobic public or xenophobic media that came first.  She then showed a series of headlines illustrating how genuine public interest stories can be twisted into a matter of immigration and xenophobia by focusing on crimes committed by foreign nationals that could – and in reality are – be committed by any British national just as easily, such as talking on a phone while driving a truck.  She also illustrated how an apparently harmless narrative about red and grey squirrels was turned to the populist agenda to the extent that the BNP used red squirrels as a symbol of nationalism in a cry to protect against foreign threats. The media responds to what they believe their audience wants; to what extent, therefore, must we the audience consider ourselves responsible for xenophobic reporting?  Microsoft’s chatbot took only 24 hours of learning from humans on the internet to become racist, misogynistic, and fascist.

Beyond all this, we must not forget that there is a genuine crisis of suffering people making a dangerous journey and arriving in places where public services are already under pressure from austerity. There are genuine public policy issues to be addressed.

Léonie, speaking about her research in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, illustrated some of the complex factors that govern the media’s relationship with populism.  As the Master had earlier pointed out, the UK has a particular problem with xenophobic media that is less apparent in, for example, the US, where journalists regularly seek to expose and fact-check the Trump administration. In Léonie’s geographical area of research the media landscape varies considerably from place to place, including within Belgium. Her research suggests that the media landscape is more accessible to the right wing in Flanders (i.e. the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) and the Netherlands, than in Wallonia (i.e. the southern, French-speaking part of Belgium) and Luxembourg.  Luxembourg, despite only being the size of Manchester in terms of population, has six daily newspapers. The surprisingly high number of media outlets can partly be explained by the fact that the government has issued a generous public funding scheme to protect media pluralism. There is no to-very little evidence of sensationalism in the Luxembourgish press. In comparison to other countries, it has a very moderate media landscape and issues like immigration are not very politicised. None of the newspapers are critical about immigration – a view that is not necessarily shared by the public.

In francophone Belgium (Wallonia), there is a formal agreement in place (a ‘cordon sanitaire’) not to give a voice to the far right; they will quote them but never feature them directly or without context.  Editors see themselves as educators.  However, it is worth noting that this continues without the presence of a strong right wing party that might challenge the media’s ability to avoid giving them a voice.  In Flanders, the main right wing party reached 20% of the vote in 2004 which made it difficult to uphold the cordon.  In the Netherlands, the media see themselves more as a platform for open debate, which means that taboos about certain political ideologies can’t be established.

Thank you to all speakers for an informative evening.