What comes to mind when you think of Piers Morgan? He’s a man who has managed to manufacture a very particular image of himself. But I think it’d be fair to say that, for those of us who frequently find ourselves sick with frustration at his antagonistic Twitter outbursts, it’s not very often that his name is attached to a headline in a positive capacity.
And what of Katie Hopkins? Probably not all that dissimilar. Not to mention the fact that they both write columns for the MailOnline. Columns which, much like the rest of the site’s content, are typically are run with what we can only assume to be intentionally crass and offensive headlines. The beast feeds on click bait.
But the way that Mail Online conducts itself is common knowledge. It’s inclusion in a 2016 report that examined the role of media outlets in the rise of racist violence andhatespeech wasn’t remotely surprising. This, the outlet known for headlines such as the later retracted: ‘Isolated British Muslims are so cut off from the rest of society that they see the UK as 75 per cent Islamic’ and ‘Hands up if you’re worried about being mown down, blown up or axed to death by a white, right wing nutter (unless, of course, you’re the Home Office). Thought not.’ over on in Katie Hopkins’ column a couple of months ago, seems to have adjusted its stance a bit.
In response to the devastating Finsbury Park attack that happened days earlier, of course, the Mail's two most intentionally controversial mouthpieces covered what had happened in their columns. The headlines that lead those articles, however, went against the grain of what the characteristically divisive and sensationalist homepage, full of angry bold buzz words in capital letters, normally has to offer.
‘Finsbury Park is just what ISIS wants. It’s what the Far Right Islamaphobes want’, read the headline to Piers Morgan's column. ‘And it’s up to the rest of us to fight the hate and lies from both’. While Katie Hopkin’s read: ‘Britain is at boiling point and if we want to step back from the brink we need to stop screaming at each other like kids and start talking together like adults’. Taken a back much?
Yes, it's fantastically depressing that we just expect to see an array of accusatory and offensive introduction to pieces written on the site. And even more depressing that we're surprised when, what two of their columnists, known particularly for their brash opinions, do have to say is remarkably reasonable (for their usual standpoint). But what it might mean is that, in toning down the rhetoric, the far right media could finally be getting the memo. What is presented in the press really does matter. And the impact of promoting hatred and inciting racist, sexist or Islamophobic attitudes, for example, to its ginormous readership is greater and more harmful than some are still too slow to acknowledge.
‘I worry because in the rush to start shouting and get even, we have lost sight of the craziness of life in 21st Century Britain today. We are living in mad times', Hopkins wrote.
She added: 'We're too busy shouting from our soap box to see, so divided across so many fault lines everyone is at odds with someone. No left versus right. Or Muslim versus non-Muslim. Or rich versus poor. We are multiple points on a spider web diagram, a full 360 of possible points of disagreement, held together by the finest of threads'.
Obviously she still managed to get a few wince-inducing lines in there, and embeded within the article were Hopkins' inevitable jibes at JK Rowling in response to their Twitter fall out a little while before - JK Rowling tweeted in response to the spiralling conversations around the Finsbury Park attack and the supposed blame for radicalisation. At one point, Rowling directed attention to both Katie Hopkins and Nigel Farage to highlight the responsibility she thinks lies with them too, for encouraging messages of division and hate in the past.
But actually, either Hopkins or her editors at the Daily Mail have taken JK Rowling's point, because the tone seems to have changed - just for a moment - which can only be a good thing. In her column, Katie Hopkins' (main) message was of unity. As for whether this apparent change of pace is a direct response to her having been sacked from LBC radio when she pretty outrageously called for a 'final solution' (a phrase is known to have been used by Nazis to refer to the Holocaust) after the devastating Manchester Arena attack, or not, I suppose is up for debate. Obviously, it'd be a smart move for Katie to tone down the controversy that she normally provokes in the wake of losing a job for doing just that. But at the same time, the fact that she was sacked at all is a big deal in itself. The fact that Piers Morgan's column seems to have been tempered down at the same time says something. And what we hope is that it isn't just a one off, and that people are finally waking up to the fact that the often poisonous rhetoric of certain sections of the media isn’t okay. Something had to give, and perhaps this is it.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.