By Dominic Taylor-
Oprah Winfrey’s interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, included misleading and distorted headlines which portrayed British press coverage of the couple as racist.
Headlines flashed on the screen during the controversial interview with the US chat show host, were manipulated to back up the couple’s assertion that they were the victims of bigoted coverage.
The revelation detracts from the integrity of Harpo productions, who were bent on showing the UK press to have been racist against Meghan Markle, but themselves fell foul of the objectivity standards they were showing the British press to have violated.
A war of words over racism in the British press has been in full swing, with the former head of the Society of Editors stepping down over the weekend for rejecting claims of racism in the UK press. Several editors have expressed their protests against those disputing charges of racism in the press, by withdrawing from its annual awards in March.
Prominent black leaders in the UK like Diane Abbott and Trisha Goddard spoke out against racism in the UK press last week, with Goddard calling for a all round education of the press on matters of racism. The news showing the producers manipulating the portrayal of media articles, wouldn’t have helped it’s course.
Distortion
Producers of the programme opted to exclude the newspaper’s headline about the ‘Vile Racist Attack’, instead choosing to use a small part of a MailOnline headline which quoted one of the woman’s vile messages, but omitted the rest of the headline. The omission gave a distorted context of the articles highlighted.
An ITV spokesman said it would remove three manipulated Daily Mail, MailOnline and Mail on Sunday headlines, plus a headline wrongly attributed to the Guardian which were flashed on the screen during the controversial interview with the US chat show host were manipulated to back up the couple’s assertion that they were the victims of bigoted coverage
It also demanded that ITV remove the “misleading and inaccurate headlines” from the programme, which remains available on its ITV Hub catch-up service, according to MailOnline.
In a complaint to CBS, Liz Hartley, editorial legal director at Associated Newspapers, said: “Many of the headlines have been either taken out of context or deliberately edited and displayed as supporting evidence for the programme’s claim that the Duchess of Sussex was subjected to racist coverage by the British press.”
She added: “This editing was not made apparent to viewers and, as a result, this section of the programme is both seriously inaccurate and misleading”.
The programme showed a headline from The Daily Telegraph that read: ‘The real problem with Meghan Markle: she just doesn’t speak our language.’
However, isolating that headline from the second line of the headline, gave an incomplete picture of the article’s message. which was not shown. The article was not mocking the Duchess’s ethnicity, but her habit of using “hippie corporate management speak”.
Another example, from January 2018, involved a story in The Mail on Sunday which revealed how the girlfriend of the then Ukip leader Henry Bolton had made racist remarks about Meghan.
Producers excluded the newspaper’s headline about the ‘Vile Racist Attack’ but instead used a small part of a MailOnline headline which quoted one of the woman’s vile messages – but omitted the rest of the headline.
An ITV spokesman said it would remove three manipulated Daily Mail, MailOnline and Mail on Sunday headlines, plus a headline wrongly attributed to the Guardian.
Distortion Of Facts
Conservative MP Giles Watling, a member of the Commons Media Select Committee, said: “Any future broadcasts of this interview should come with a health warning for viewers.
“People need to know that what they are watching is not necessarily the truth and, in the use of newspaper headlines, a complete distortion of the facts.”
Ms Winfrey’s company, Harpo Productions, said: “We stand by the broadcast in its entirety”.
Oprah Winfrey’s interview of The Dutch and Duchess Of Sussex revealed a period of loneliness and mental health issues experienced by Meghan Markle who was shocked by the reality if royal life, on top of the distress of being on the receiving end of constant press stories which she said were deliberately falsified to make her look bad.
The fact that examples of those media coverage shown as part of the documentary distorted the facts and context of the allegedly racist articles. may call for a fuller examination of media articles alleged to have been racist.
There can be no denial that some articles may have been motivated by racism, but distorting facts to make a point of press racism, itself reveals prejudice on the part of the programme makers.