Jo Cox Dead - The Press Excuses

Yesterday’s Daily Mail front page, the paper’s hacks would like you to know, has no connection to today’s. That is the unpublished message that the most bellicose and vitriolic in the Fourth Estate want to convey this morning. “Let Us In … We’re From Europe” has nothing to do with an MP being shot dead in the street by someone who wanted to “put Britain first”. That is how today’s debate is being framed.

Tommy Mair, who was arrested on suspicion of attacking and murdering Jo Cox outside her constituency surgery yesterday, is now the subject of an organised attempt to frame the story so as to get readers to “look over there”. Mair is being painted as someone acting alone, and not subjected to any influence from weeks of increasingly incendiary rhetoric from those same newspapers on the upcoming EU referendum.

After all, Mair is not brown or black, unlike all those Scary Muslims (tm) and the man who attacked and decapitated an elderly woman in her garden, who in the retelling was called a “Muslim convert” (he wasn’t). So he is categorised as a “loner”, and his actions are ascribed to “mental health problems”. By deployment of these devices, the press seeks to wriggle off the hook for its incessant barrage of scare stories.

Above all, the papers that spent so long raging at the EU all had to do one thing today: not mention the EU, at least not on their front pages. It wasn’t about the EU, it wasn’t about the referendum, and it wasn’t about the constant barrage of scare stories. So it was that the Mail told its readers “Devoted mother of two. Dedicated public servant. MP Jo Cox was a remarkable woman. Yesterday she was brutally murdered by a loner with a history of mental illness … WHAT A TRAGIC WASTE”. The Sun followed suit.

“Murdered in cold blood … Husband’s moving tribute as MP shot 3 times and knifed 7 times by crazed loner … MY JO” is their take, with no mention in either paper of Ms Cox’s commitment to the Remain camp, or indeed of her advocacy on behalf of Syrian refugees - all those brown people who are mainly Muslim and are, on other days, coming over here to overwhelm our housing stock, schools, and health service.

Even the Express, aka the Daily UKIP, managed something it has not made a habit of for some time, and kept the EU off its front page, telling only “MP KILLED IN STREET GUN HORROR … Police hold man, 52, over mother of two’s death … BRITAIN was in shock last night at the horrific murder of a woman MP”.

There is a good reason that the EU, and the referendum, are being kept off those front pages, and Mair painted as a “loner” with “mental health problems”, and that is because all those papers have not only been advocating for Britain to leave the EU, they have all been part of the ramping up of the rhetoric over the past weeks and months. Plus linking Ms Cox’s murder to the Out campaign is likely to deal it a blow from which it may not recover.

And don’t forget: the press didn’t do it. They’re in the clear. Providing we look over there.