Jon Danzig wins his fight with the Daily Mail with a game,set and match ruling in his favour by the Press Complaints Commission. New Europeans are proud of his achievement which strikes an important blow for press freedom in the UK. It is now just over 8 months since our chair, Roger Casale, stood at Luton Airport at 7.30am on 1st January waiting for the first flight of the New Year to arrive from Romania, to welcome the new arrivals on the first flight from Romania following the lifting of work restrictions. The plane was less than 3/4 full and only one passenger - Viktor - was coming to the UK for the first time. The whole British press corps were there - almost outnumbering the passengers from the plane, desperately trying to fake the stories they had been making up for weeks about an imminent invasion, stories . These stories reached a crazed peak in the days between Christmas and the New Year, culminating with the ridiculous and offensive article in the Daily Mail on 31 December which Jon Danzig has exposed as a fabrication. It was a nasty, spiteful piece of journalism aimed at whipping up fears and bad feeling towards Romanians and Bulgarians, who like us, are fellow citizens of Europe. Thanks to our European citizenship all of us who are nationals of an EU member state have some protection from unfair treatment, a democratic voice and the right to free movement. Thanks to top investigative journalists like Jon Danzig, we can see that it is in fact possible to bring those who invent some of the stories we read in the press to be held to account. This particular story was toxic, politically motivated and had the intended effect of generating a wave of intolerance and scare-mongering which persists to this day. But Jons tireless work has at last robbed that story of its sting. In this, he has done all citizens of Europe, including the Brits, a huge service and we at New Europeans are very grateful to him for that.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 22:13:32 +0000
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