The media's take

The shooting dead of a Brazilian man at a London tube station and the coverage of the Padraig Nally case showed that media discrimination still exists.

This being an Irish summer, Meejit spent part of the week tucked up with hot drinks trying to get rid of a cold. As the remote control flicked the TV from gaelic to cycling to cricket to the news channels, there seemed to be an endless procession of James Bond movies on the stations between, with Sean Connery never shouting "Stop! Police!" as he exercised his licence to kill on a succession of deadly foreign baddies.

Hollywood, and Pinewood, have got a lot to answer for. Their images of spies and cops have served the needs of geopolitical propaganda – the likes of Connery's fairytale Bond was the Cold-Warrior extraordinaire. But there's worse: TV and films have inflicted on viewers a nearly unbroken vision of the integrity and competence of police that is even further divorced from reality than, say, the ludicrous portrayals of journalism.

News media are happy to join in Hollywood's heroic-police charade for a number of reasons: it's easier to confirm readers' and viewers' expectations than to challenge them; flattered cops are likelier to be cooperative cops when it comes to telling a story; journalists go to the pictures too and many of them half-believe this stuff; it serves a wider world-view about the relationship between virtuous social "order" and its dangerous opponents.

The propaganda dulls our thinking. Thus when a man is shot dead by cops on the London Underground, the first reaction for most of us isn't "hmmm, this from the nation that brought us WMD in 45 minutes"; instead, we're probably picturing the terrifying (and cinematically eyewitnessed) scene and adding some suspenseful electronic music.

Even in the wake of the police "confession" that they mistakenly targeted Jean Charles de Menezes, no one would publicly draw the obvious conclusion: that the institutions we trust with "protecting society" are probably at least as badly run, and badly motivated, as those we trust with, eg, collecting and disposing of our rubbish. (Interestingly, the closest you tend to get to such an acknowledgment of cops' commonality is from anonymous police on radio phone-in programmes.)

Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police's 24-hours-plus of lying about the "suspect" they had killed was widely shrugged off by the media, with even the Guardian's editorial giving the force a thumbs-up for coming clean – as though the cops would have had any chance of sustaining the lie once the man had been identified and his unIslamic friends and family emerged into public view. After all, in the realm of stereotype, "Brazilian" is precisely the opposite of "Muslim fundamentalist".

It was sadly notable in the "vox pop" debate about the Stockwell tube station incident that skin colour was an accurate predictor of attitude. The more pigment you had, the likelier you were to be worried by police officers' guesswork about who is a potential suicide bomber.

The more suspicious attitude of darker people isn't simply a matter of their anticipating a racial element in police "profiling" in the current situation, though of course that is a factor. It's also often born of experience, first-hand knowledge of how individuals and communities are criminalised.

Here in Ireland, Travellers have been getting this treatment from gardaí and media since long before there were enough Africans and Arabs to divert some attention. This racism could be seen after the verdict in the Padraig Nally case, when the Evening Herald posters screamed "Crimes of the dead Traveller".

The paper itself didn't actually enumerate the crimes of Nally's victim, John "Frog" Ward – just an alleged suspicion. And that was of the vaguest sort, a suggestion that he was one of many Travellers questioned by gardaí after a pensioner was killed in 1998.

The blame-the-victim game continued inside: "Gardaí on alert as tensions mount" – a piece seeming to forecast Traveller riots after the verdict. Well, you know what these unruly minorities are like.