Can you believe what the Sun says about asylum seekers?

Much of the success of the BNP over the last few years comes from the irresponsible, xenophobic press. Indeed BNP leader Nick Griffin gives them recognition for doing the BNP's work.

The material below comes from an article by Roy Greenslade in The Guardian media section, 19.7.04 How to heat up racism .

In the past couple of years the Sun has run stories, some of them false, some far-fetched, many full of distortions, which are guaranteed to stimulate its readers' latent - and, all too often, manifest - racism. How else can the paper explain its extraordinary three-page "exclusive" a year ago about "callous" east European asylum seekers alleged to be stealing, killing and eating swans?

This story, which was sure to provide fodder for the bigots of the BNP, was founded on an unsubstantiated rumour started by an anonymous phone call to a swan sanctuary which appears to have been passed on to a police wildlife crime unit. There was not an iota of proof to back it up. It had not resulted, as the Sun claimed, in a police swoop, nor in "east Europeans" being caught "red-handed about to cook a pair of royal swans".

In almost every respect a story likely to inflame passions about a very sensitive issue was wholly wrong. Yet the Sun refused to apologise, eventually carrying a nonsensical "clarification" six months later, tucked away at the back of the paper. By then it had already published another unprovable, unsourced story claiming that asylum seekers were poaching "our fish".

These were not isolated examples. The Sun has been in the press vanguard in stoking up concern about Britain being "swamped" by asylum seekers, relying for its scare stories on dodgy figures supplied from unofficial sources. Even when the National Audit Office issued a report in May which concluded that the government's asylum data and statistics were "in most respects reliable", the Sun's news report accentuated the negative, beginning: "Ministers were slammed yesterday for putting out 'misleading' figures about asylum seekers".

Nor has the paper cared about delineating who it is talking about. For the Sun, there appears to be no difference between asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants. They are all the same: foreigners "our people" don't want. In other words, the paper has echoed the views of the BNP.

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