Richard Peppiatt is a man who knows the dark underbelly of the British media all too well. We meet in Soho Theatre’s noisy bar and, over a couple of pints of lager, Richard – now in his late twenties – recalls his childhood ambitions. He had always wanted to become a journalist but, as a working-class boy, thought that somewhere like The Guardian would be full of Oxbridge elitism and not for people like him. After a lucky break, he ended up at the Daily Star in 2008. It may not have been his newspaper of choice, but Peppiatt had manoeuvred his way past the barriers that kept the non-privileged out of the media world. He was in.
‘I just thought, well, **** it, I don’t really care anymore, it’s all about climbing up the ladder,’ he recalls. ‘And that’s what I did for the next two and half years: I worked at the Daily Star and I pretty much ignored any principles that I had and just went, “well, this is your job now, and you can believe what you want to believe in your own time, but while you’re at work, you can’t resist. This is what they want you to write: if you don’t write it, you get a bollocking.” ’
Working at the Daily Star could be fun. There were perks, like constant invites to showbiz parties with celebrities. But he gradually came to understand that he was part of a media campaign to direct readers’ anger at scapegoats. He would come into the newsroom and be asked to write a piece about ‘Muslims doing X, Y and Z. You’d look at the facts and go, “they didn’t actually do that though, did they?” ’ Asylum seekers were a favourite target: in one case, the Daily Star sent him to pursue a family who, having fled Somalia’s civil war, were being put up in a five-bedroom Chelsea town house. Peppiatt camped outside the house along with other journalists: ‘I remember going into the offices the next day and no one had come out of the house, and a news editor called me over and opened a copy of the Sun and went, “Look, they’ve got a quote off the father of the refugees saying ‘I don’t care, I’ll take what I can get.’ ” I said, “But he didn’t even leave the house, he never said that, I was there all day.” He said: “That’s not the point. You’ve got to be more canny.” ’
It became increasingly clear to Peppiatt that there was a pattern to such coverage. ‘Someone is always to blame for our social ills,’ he says, ‘and to me it stops you really questioning what the real causes of a lot of social ills are. You can just go, “Well it’s all the bloody immigrants, or it’s all the bloody Muslims.” They stop you questioning, “Well, is it really?” When actually, those readers should have more fundamental issues with the whole system we live in.’ The job became unbearable. He drowned his despair in alcohol. ‘I very much felt I’d sold myself down the river; I hated what I was doing.’
Newspapers routinely echo a mantra parroted by all political parties about social security: that taxpayers are subsidizing the feckless and bone-idle. In August 2010, three months after the Conservative-led coalition had assumed power, The Sun launched a campaign asking readers to ‘Help us Stop £1.5 Billion Benefits Scroungers’, featuring people on benefits – generally with multiple children – quoted as boasting about their state support. The Daily Mail featured a story about a couple demanding a bigger home for their children and pet python. ‘End the Something for Nothing Culture’, read one Sunday Times piece, which was accompanied by a picture of the fictional ‘scrounger’ pin-up Gallagher family from the comedy series Shameless, as though they somehow represented real life. It even included a quote from a Whitehall official describing the sort of regime that benefit claimants could now expect: ‘If we want them to tap dance, then they will tap dance.’
Such coverage leaves the electorate completely in the dark about the reality of the situation. A YouGov poll published in January 2013 found that, on average, people estimate that 27 per cent of social security is claimed fraudulently, as opposed to the true figure of 0.7 per cent; that 41 per cent of social security goes to unemployed people (the real figure is 3 per cent); that benefits are more generous than they actually are; and that people claim them for longer than they do.1 Another poll found that 29 per cent of people think more taxpayers’ money goes on Jobseeker’s Allowance than on pensions: in fact, the government spends fifteen times more on pensions than it does on benefits. Yet those who were best informed about the true figures are far less likely to support cuts to social security – which in turn shows just how much political capital can be gained by promoting ignorance and by airbrushing out reality.
Other polls have underscored the extent to which media coverage resulted in public perceptions that are completely detached from reality. Recently, an Ipsos MORI poll found that Britons thought teenage pregnancy was twenty-five times higher than official statistics revealed it to be; that 24 per cent of the UK population is Muslim, even though it is just 5 per cent in England and Wales; and that 31 per cent of the population are immigrants, when the real figure is somewhere between 13 and 15 per cent.
The media play a crucial role within Britain’s Establishment. By focusing their fire at those at the bottom – often with coverage based on distortions, myths and outright lies – they deflect scrutiny from the wealthy and powerful elite at the top of society. All of which is hardly a surprise, given that their owners are themselves part of that elite, ideologically committed to the status quo. Because of how and by whom they are run, much of the media today serves as a highly partisan defender of the interests of those with wealth and power.
