The Northern Echo covers the announcement of a national protest in Newcastle by the English Defence League on Saturday 25th May “over proposals to open an Islamic school in the city”.

Newcastle City Council approved plans to turn Benwell Towers into an Islamic fee paying school last December. The site had previously been the setting for the popular BBC series Byker Grove.

The planning application has received considerable attention from the far right with the BNP denouncing the school as ‘Burka Grove’ in a leaflet distributed in 2010.

The EDL organized earlier demos against the school’s plans last June and December. A week before the December protest the proposed school’s premises was defaced with a pig’s head hung on the railings.

A counter-demo by Newcastle Unites Against The EDL will be also held on Saturday in Newcastle.

At ENGAGE, we regularly monitor print, broadcast and social media to record and challengemisrepresentations and inaccurate reporting of Islam and Muslims in the UK.We have in our parliamentary briefing paper on Islamophobia, enclosed herewith, argued for closerscrutiny and better self-regulation of the UK media in order to make it more responsive to badpractices, journalistic bias and the prevalent practice of exaggerating the influence of fringe Muslimgroups to demonise the wider British Muslim population.We have approached the PCC on a number of occasions to lodge complaints on coverage we havedeemed to be inaccurate, unfair or discriminatory. A summary of these complaints is elaborated on insection one below providing details for the complaint (inaccuracy, misrepresentation, discriminatoryreportage) together with the responses from the respective newspaper or the PCC to our complaint.Section two elaborates on cases lodged by third parties which reflect inaccuracy, poor reporting ordiscrimination. Section three concludes with our ongoing concerns on the modus operandi of theEditors’ Code of Practice and its limitations with specific reference to media reporting of Islam andBritish Muslims.

Download this full publication

 Executive summary:

• On 20th September 2011 the Palestinian Authority will unilaterally declare independence at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York and seek recognition as a sovereign state and 194th Member of the international community of states embodied in the United Nations.
• The PA will seek recognition from the Member-States of the UN and the UN Security Council of the state of Palestine based on the pre-1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
• This move has been a long time coming and has its foundation in a broad body of international law. These include UNSCR 242 and 1397, regarding the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Occupied Palestinian Territories; UNGAR 181, 2253 and 2254 and also UNSCR 267, 298, 476 and 478 regarding the status of Jerusalem and its occupation by Israel; UNSCR 446, 452, 465, 471 regarding the illegality of settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
• The ongoing, illegal occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the introduction of new obstacles to peace, in the form of the blockade on Gaza, the illegal wall constructed in the occupied West Bank , and the expansion of illegal settlements in East Jerusalem, have all contributed to the loss of Palestinian confidence in the peace process and its oftpromised outcomes.
• The vote in the General Assembly must be backed by a majority in the Security Council for the vote to materially deliver a seat for Palestine in the UN as a sovereign state and international recognition as a member of the community of states. The Palestinian Authority is confident of securing the two-thirds majority it requires in the General Assembly, 129 votes out of the total 193.
• The US Government has threatened to exercise its veto power to obstruct passage through the UN Security Council
• The unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood finds its culmination in the two-year program of the 13th Government of the Palestinian National Authority, ‘Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State,’ adopted in August 2009.
• International bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank and the UN accept that Palestinian institutions are ready to assume the responsibilities of statehood.
• The British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has previously spoken of the need for “decisive leadership” in resolving this protracted conflict. To act otherwise, he said, would only foment “decades of potential conflict and even deeper difficulties in the Middle East.”
• The Palestinian Authority has taken the initiative and shown “decisive leadership” in declaring its intent to push a vote for recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN in September 2011. We would urge the British Government to match this with a display of “decisive leadership” of its own and vote in favour of recognition in order to rescue the peace process and to make progress towards a fully negotiated settlement by establishing its long-overdue and principal outcome: a viable, independent and sovereign Palestinian state.

Download this full publication

The Guardian covers the publication of research undertaken by the Media Standards Trust into press coverage in the 100 days prior to the publication of the Leveson Inquiry report last November.

The study analyses press coverage from 14th July 2011, the day after the Leveson Inquiry was announced, until 28th November 2012, the day before the report was published. A total of 2,016 news articles from 18 national newspapers were analysed.

The research shows that nine national titles published no positive opinion of the inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. The titles, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Daily Express, Sunday Express, Sunday People, Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday, “were part of a wider pattern of "overwhelmingly negative" coverage of the inquiry into press standards, according to the Media Standards Trust study of more than 2,000 articles,” The Guardian notes.

The MST study shows that a single narrative dominated the coverage and that narrative was largely negative.

The research also shows that “negative coverage of the judicial inquiry "increased drastically" in the 100 days before the report was published, with articles in this period five times as likely to contain only negative viewpoints as only positive ones.

“Newspaper leader columns grew more adversarial on the eve of the report, according to the research, with 23 out of the 28 articles containing only a negative analysis of Lord Justice Leveson's scrutiny of the press.”

Tabloids fare worse in the analysis with “34 out of 43 articles…found to be "negative only" by the researchers, compared with 62 out of 85 reports published by broadsheet newspapers”.

The analysis is not all that surprising given that the newspaper groups that rejected the Royal Charter and devised an alternative, omitting some of the most significant recommendations put forward by Lord Justice Leveson, are none other than the parent groups of the nine titles listed above, Associated Newspapers, Express Newspapers, Trinity Mirror, News international and Telegraph Media Group.

The lack of objectivity and patent disregard for the criticisms levelled at the industry’s workings by Lord Leveson should come as little surprise in the case of the worst offenders of ethics, News International and the phone hacking scandal. But such also extends to those who have gained most of the weakness in the extant Press Complaints Commission and the feebleness of self-regulation as it currently operates. In a list compiled by Media Standards Trust of titles that have breached the code most frequently, the Daily Mail tops the list.

The wider consequences on the failure of the press to present an even and balanced argument on the issues raised by the Leveson Inquiry is captured by the author of the MST study, Gordon Ramsay, who writes:

"The strength and vitality of the UK press stems in large part from its ability to present the public with a wide range of authoritative and accessible views on often complex policy issues.

"However, the data gathered here shows that, where press coverage has expressed a view on the Leveson Inquiry, one viewpoint has dominated. Though much of the coverage of the inquiry during the public hearings was neutral, comment and opinion pieces were overwhelmingly negative."

The MST study certainly reinforces arguments advanced by groups pushing for independent self-regulation of the press on the basis that the current system is grossly failing and that the industry is too important in shaping public opinion to be left to its own devices.