THE founder of a media reform campaign will deliver a keynote lecture on how a newspaper has “rewritten history” on its role in the Stephen Lawrence case.
Brian Cathcart, a professor of journalism at Kingston University and the founder of Hacked Off, which campaigns for a free and accountable press, will speak at Robert Gordon University’s Aberdeen Business School on Wednesday.
The event will draw on the writer’s award-winning book on the murder, which happened 25 years ago.
The mishandling of the investigation allowed those responsible to evade justice for 18 years.
Cathcart says “outlets such as the Daily Mail” took credit in bringing the case to court.
However, he says: “This is a case study in the rewriting of history by a powerful newspaper. Ever since 1997 the Mail has exaggerated its influence on the Stephen Lawrence case and today those exaggerations are widely accepted as fact.”
In 2012, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre wrote that without the paper’s headlines and “years of campaigning, none of this would have happened”.
Cathcart said: “Placing the contribution of the Daily Mail in its proper context is valuable because the paper’s role has been inflated and this has considerably distorted our understanding of the case.
“The issues raised in the Stephen Lawrence case and the media coverage surrounding it are still relevant today to see how far the myth is removed from reality in this instance is to witness the continuing power of propaganda in a society that likes to consider itself sceptical.”
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