Independent Press Standards Organization Issue Sharia Guidelines on Islam

The press has a duty to report the facts. That duty is now a crime under a sharia enforcing press corps. This is not exclusive to the UK: The Society of Professional Journalists: Why We Never Get the Straight Story on Islamic Jihad

Why is IPSO issuing guidance on Islam?

The press regular should not be telling journalists how to write about Muslims.

By Tom Wilson, Spiked, September 12, 2019:

Story continues below advertisement

The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), which regulates most of the UK’s national newspapers, announced in late 2018 that it had tasked an informal working group with drafting guidance for reporting on Islam and Muslims. Perhaps more questions should have been raised at the time about why a body like IPSO thought it appropriate to wade in on how journalists should write about matters of religion. A new Policy Exchange report warns of the dangers of the draft guidance. Everyone concerned about the free press should start paying attention.

The role of IPSO is to uphold the Editors’ Code and determine where newspapers have engaged in inaccurate reporting in breach of that code. But the draft guidance goes far beyond inaccuracies. It leans on journalists and editors in an effort to influence how they represent stories that touch on Islam and Muslims.

The draft guidance is laden with thinly veiled instructions for journalists. At one point, it lectures journalists on how ‘engaging with community organisations is a vital part of seeking input and reflecting the perspectives of readers’. It is not difficult to picture the kind of self-declared ‘community representatives’ and partisan activists who the authors have in mind. And that is just the beginning.

The same section of the IPSO guidance contains the following warning to editors:

‘A free press is responsive to many communities of readers and it is likely financially beneficial to the press to reach as wide a readership as possible. Producing accurate content which reflects the concerns of, and engages with, readers is key to reaching that broad readership.’

You might have thought it was the role of the press to inform readers, or perhaps even to challenge their beliefs from time to time. But according to IPSO’s guidance, you’d be wrong. Apparently, newspapers should be ‘responsive to’ – ie, pander to – readers’ pre-existing tastes, and avoid offending the beliefs of those making up these wide ‘communities of readers’. The guidance seems to tiptoe around saying it explicitly, but given that this document is about reporting on Muslims and Islam, it appears to be a less-than-subtle warning to editors that they better make sure their content ‘reflects the concerns’ of Muslim communities – or, rather, the self-appointed representatives of Muslim communities, several of whom helped to draft the guidance.

Perhaps the most troubling part of the document is a section that tacitly tells journalists that they are responsible for discrimination against Muslims. According to the guidance, journalists must be aware ‘that their content can have an impact on the wider community and on how minority communities are treated’, and that ‘insensitivities can damage communities’. Journalists are warned that they may ‘contribute to members of communities feeling divorced from, or misunderstood, by the media’ and that their reporting ‘can work to increase tension between communities, which can make harassment more likely’.

All of this seems to deny any agency on the part of readers. It is taken as a given that ordinary people are essentially unthinking and are prone to outbursts of bigotry. Apparently one poorly worded tabloid op-ed could be enough to unleash the mob. The implication of the IPSO guidance seems to be that perhaps it is better not to report the facts at all – most Brits are just too dim to be able to discern between a newspaper report about ISIS and the Muslim family living on their street. The report’s recommendations rest on the unsubstantiated claim that reading newspapers provokes ordinary people to commit acts of violence against Muslims. In reality, most British people consume the media every day and would be appalled by a Muslim person being mistreated because of their background.

The committee drafting the report includes a number of individuals of concern, not least Miqdaad Versi of the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) and the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) – governments have rightly shunned the latter since 2009. In response to the Spectator’s coverage of IPSO’s draft guidelines, Versi’s CfMM produced a thread of tweets criticising what it describes as the magazine’s ‘abysmal track record’ on Islamophobia. It concludes the thread by referencing the terror attacks on Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand and at the Finsbury Park mosque.

Is it seriously being suggested that Spectator readers are more likely to carry out anti-Muslim terrorist attacks because of what they read in the pages of that publication? You would think someone would produce some pretty conclusive evidence for such an accusation — demonstrating causality between the mainstream press and those who perpetrate attacks targeting Muslims — before using it as the basis for restricting the free press. Such an accusation would seem entirely to discount the fact that far-right assailants are generally avid readers of fringe and overtly racist books and websites. Is it not more plausible that it is these things that inform their worldview when they attack mosques and Muslims, rather than the newspapers and magazines that are widely read among the British public?

For some campaigners, the claim that the media causes racist attacks would appear to justify going further than issuing non-binding guidance. Rewriting IPSO’s Editors’ Code so as to effectively dictate what journalists can write about certain groups – rather than just individuals – would be the real prize for community activists. Yet even without that more substantial change, producing guidance on how the press should write about Islam and Muslims takes IPSO far beyond its remit of upholding standards on accuracy. It strays dangerously into the territory of lecturing on ‘sensitivities’. When community spokespeople label something as ‘insensitive’, they usually just mean ‘inconvenient’.

The press has a duty to report the facts, even if they are not convenient or comfortable for certain ‘communities of readers’. Those who value a genuinely free press need to start paying a lot more attention to what has been going on at IPSO.

Tom Wilson is a senior research fellow at Policy Exchange.

The Truth Must be Told

Your contribution supports independent journalism

Please take a moment to consider this. Now, more than ever, people are reading Geller Report for news they won't get anywhere else. But advertising revenues have all but disappeared. Google Adsense is the online advertising monopoly and they have banned us. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have blocked and shadow-banned our accounts. But we won't put up a paywall. Because never has the free world needed independent journalism more.

Everyone who reads our reporting knows the Geller Report covers the news the media won't. We cannot do our ground-breaking report without your support. We must continue to report on the global jihad and the left's war on freedom. Our readers’ contributions make that possible.

Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too.

Please contribute here.

or

Make a monthly commitment to support The Geller Report – choose the option that suits you best.

• $25.00 here
• $50.00 here
• $75.00 here
• $100.00 here
• $250.00 here

0 0 votes

Article Rating

5 Comments

Oldest

Newest Most Voted

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

ahem

4 years ago

I just realized that “Independent Organization” is an oxymoron.

0

MuhamMUDTheFakeProphet

4 years ago

The Nazis and Mafia could only dream of having such influence on the media, judiciary and law enforcement entities across the dying atheist West.

0

Dennis

4 years ago

A classic case of “political correctness” running amok. The
failure to avoid the reality of our times is no different than the three monkeys
who see no evil, hear no evil and speak not about evil. Our leaders and the
media who refuse to acknowledge the Islamic mentality that promotes domination
and subjugation and often actively promotes hate and violence is the reality of
our times, and those factors should be addressed by our leaders and media. To avoid
castigating and ostracizing those who speak that evil is like turning your back
to someone who seeks to harm you. That is inane, and never should be accepted.

0

John Acord

4 years ago

Has anyone looked at the guidelines used by eh AP, NYT , WaPo,McClatchy, et al in dealing with Muslims and Sharia law? If not, it would be an interesting and probably revealing study.

0

Cauc-Asian Patriot

4 years ago

THIS PAGE IS UNDER ATTACK WITH MY HAVING TO GO BACK TO IT THREE TIMES WHEN IT IS INTERRUPTED TO READ IT ALL. I WAS REDIRECTED TO A SITE THAT SAYS THAT THIS SITE IS TRYING TO HACK MY COMPUTER FOR CREDIT CARD INFO, ETC! SAD TRUTH IS YOU CAN SEE THE SUPPORT THE ISLAMICS ARE GETTING FROM THE GLOBALIST BANKING CLIQUE IN TRYING TO STIFLE THOSE VOICES THAT DARE SPEAK SOME TRUTH LIKE PAM GELLER DOES WHICH SHOWS IT SPEAKS THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH THAT THE MEDIA INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX DOES NOT WANT DISTRIBUTED!

0