“BNP chief’s Muslim slur” ran this morning’s headline in The Sun.  “THE racist leader of the British National Party branded Asians rapists and muggers at a secret meeting, a court heard yesterday.  Nick Griffin whipped up hatred against Muslims by claiming gangs of them were targeting white women, a jury was told.  He even claimed the sex attacks were part of their RELIGION, it was alleged.”

That is what passes for balanced reporting at Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper.  No doubt The Sun’s libel lawyer cleared this nakedly hostile line on the basis of those four little words, “a jury was told”.  Regardless, it remains a disgrace.

Generally, though, it is an impression of the thinness of MSM reporting that one takes away from a survey of the trial coverage todate.  The Mirror can hardly be bothered to say anything at all.  The Daily Mail plays it straight.  The Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times are all factual in their approach but major, predictably, on the prosecution case.

Since I refuse to pay for the pleasure of reading The Indie, I can’t comment in detail on its reporting of the trial.  But judging from the opening two paragraphs, which is all you get free of charge, the signs don’t look good.

The leader of the British National Party fabricated a “nightmare vision” to provoke fear and resentment of British Asians, a jury was told yesterday.

At the start of Nick Griffin’s trial on charges of inciting racial hatred, Rodney Jameson QC described how, in a speech taped by an undercover BBC documentary team, the BNP leader conjured a picture of rapes and muggings which he said Asian people were “entirely responsible for” and boasted he “could get seven years” in prison if what he said was reported to police.

Overall, though, one is left with the impression that the trial is, for whatever reason, of little news value.  One wonders whether that is a reflection of the weakness of the prosecution case, given that “white hate crime” stories usually run for months, even years.

Thankfully, there is always the good old BBC.  It has reported every day that there has been something to report, and managed to conclude its piece today with this journalistic sleight of hand:-

Mr Jameson said Mr Collett’s speeches were “all about race”.
He said: “It’s all about building up a picture of Asians and asylum seekers or any race as cockroaches, terrorists, rapists and murderers, to be feared and therefore to be hated.”

Mr Collett replied: “Not at all. You are cherry-picking the best bits of these speeches.”

The trial was adjourned until Wednesday.

Not quite in The Sun’s class, but pretty low for the nation’s own broadcaster.

Today Mark Collett finished giving his evidence.  Nick Griffin will be in the witness box tomorrow, when the press might be able to escape from the hooks of that other, much more exotic but scarcely more politically interesting event.

One last point on the reporting of the prosecution case.  Of Griffin’s remarks taken from that fateful speech recorded by a BBC mole, one that has been picked out repeatedly by the headline writers is that Britain has become a multiracial hell-hole.  With this shocking slur on our always, of course, vibrant countrymen in mind I decided to check a local newspaper in a likely hellish area.  Could Griffin possibly be right?

So to South London, as reported by the South London Press.

The first story on the on-line news-log tonight is

headlined “He tortured me and threw my own blood in my face”.  It is certainly hellish:-

A RESTAURANT boss who ordered a man to drink a glass of his own blood during a horrific torture ordeal has been jailed for nine years.

Vietnamese Linh Le, 41, tied Joe Smith to a chair and jabbed him with a stun gun because he believed he was a police officer.

Mr Smith, 30, an Ivory Coast national who was looking for a false passport, was beaten and pistol-whipped until he was left with a fractured skull and a broken leg and arm.

Le told Mr Smith and his friend Peter Dennis they would be chopped into pieces and dumped in bin bags if a £10,000 ransom was not paid.

When Mr Smith begged for water he was handed a glass of his own blood by Le and two of his laughing heavies and told to take a sip at the New Saigon restaurant in the Old Kent Road.

Then we have the equally odd little tale of Nada Zakaria, a lady doctor.  So one must hope never to fall ill in Tooting.

A DOCTOR with a caution for biting a policeman and drink-driving didn’t tell her bosses, fearing it would bring shame on her family.

Nada Zakaria’s past was only revealed to her employers at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, when they checked with the Criminal Records Bureau, a hearing of the General Medical Council (GMC) was told.

Zakaria, of Champion Hill, Camberwell, said her family were well known in her native Sudan and “shame and fear” stopped her telling bosses.

Next up, the brave decision by Southwark Council to close the ghastly, architecturally modernistic pedestrian tunnels under the Elephant & Castle.

EERIE tunnels where a horrific rape attempt took place will be filled in.

Farhan Osman, 27, was the first person convicted of the attempted rape of an “unknown person” after his attack was caught on CCTV.

Harrowing film footage showed his victim pleading into the camera as the sex beast tore at her clothes in an Elephant & Castle underpass.

The attack, in the early hours of March 28 last year, only ended when another man walked into the subway and the woman escaped.

She was never found but in August the Crown Prosecution Service clinched the conviction based on video evidence.

Now the tunnels - for years a no-go zone late at night - will be plugged as pedestrian routes are brought above ground.

The fourth story on the news-log is one that has seen a good deal of trial coverage featuring on the national broadcast and print media.  It concerns four young people - a black boy and girl and a white boy and girl, the later pair very obviously colonised by local black street culture - kicking and stamping a homosexual barman to death in October 2004.

SADISTIC happy-slappers who stamped a gay barman to death so they could film the attack on mobile phones were yesterday jailed for a total of 44 years.

David Morley, 37, was told, “Pose for the camera” by 14-year-old Chelsea O’Mahoney before her gang pounced on him in chilling scenes likened to 1960s brutal film Clockwork Orange.

He was repeatedly punched and kicked before the girl thug, now 16, kicked his head “like a football” as he lay helpless on the ground, the Old Bailey heard.

In a rampage of violence around the South Bank the gang staged five separate attacks on eight people to capture them on camera and laugh about the clips afterwards.

Common Serjeant of London, Judge Brian Barker said it was clear the gang of happy-slappers were “obsessed” by filming assaults on total strangers.

There are many more pages of the South London Press to trawl through if further evidence for Griffin’s assertion is really required.  It isn’t, of course.  His isn’t a controversial claim.  Everyone except the race replacement artistes like Ken Livingstone has always known it.  The well-worn adage about sensibility-laden liberals never venturing into contact with multiracial reality just doesn’t ring true.  To me, it looks much more like a case of hypocrisy than ignorance.