Page 288 - Culture Society and the Media

278 HOW THE MEDIA REPORT RACE
nor could there be any departure from its policy of truth in order to achieve racial
harmony (Toynbee, 1976).
According to Jeremy Isaacs, a former producer of ‘Panorama’, it was Enoch
Powell who demonstrated that the media consensus had been counter-
productive:

Television current affairs deliberately underplayed the strength of racist
feelings for years, out of the misguided but honourable feelings that
inflammatory utterances could only do damage. But the way feelings
erupted after Enoch Powell’s speech this year was evidence to me that the
feeling [i.e. presumably, against black immigration] had been under-
represented on television, and other media. (Quoted in the Guardian, 13
November 1968)

The main purpose of the speech on immigration which Enoch Powell delivered
in Birmingham in 1968 was to sweep away what he saw as an artificial
consensus. It could be argued that he succeeded in this purpose in so far as many
opinions which would formerly have been labelled as ‘unsavoury’, and could
therefore have been safely ignored, were now regarded as expressions of
legitimate attitudes and fears, and as such could be given circulation in print and
on the air. Much later, however, Powell paid tribute to the resilience of the old
consensus:

One cannot but grudgingly admire the success with which those in
authority, political and official, and the ‘best people’ of all parties and of
none, have succeeded in burying out of sight the greatest problem
overhanging the future of Britain. (1975 speech, quoted in Evans, 1976, p.
11)

Powell challenged, in particular, two important elements of the consensus. First,
he pointed out that the threat of black immigration had not been ended by the
various Immigration Acts because the rights of dependents of existing
immigrants remained untouched. Second, he questioned the viability of a
peaceful multi-racial Britain in face of a black presence which would grow
irrespective of any immigration laws which might be passed, as growing
numbers of blacks would be born here.
The speech received extremely wide coverage (an opinion poll taken a few
days later revealed that 96 per cent of respondants were aware of the nature of
the speech) because Powell had chosen to speak out on a subject that everyone
else of repute in politics had chosen to avoid. He chose to speak in a way,
moreover, which he believed expressed the feelings of the general public and
which was designed, in his own words, ‘to bring out the sense of oppression, the
sense of being victimized which is felt in these areas’ (i.e. of coloured immigrant
settlement) (quoted in Seymour-Ure, 1974, p. 113). The result was, in Seymour-