The far-right protests that erupted in Melbourne over the weekend which included neo-Nazis, should prompt us to be vigilant about those who seek to divide their fellow Australians on racial lines.

So editorialised the Australian on Monday in the wake of news that Queensland senator Fraser Anning had attended a far-right rally at Melbourne’s St Kilda Beach on the weekend.

The Australian’s unequivocal denunciation of those who seek to foment anger and intolerance based on race was refreshing.

But also a little surprising. Had the editorial writer been reading any News Corp publications during 2018? Had they missed the year-long campaign to demonise the African community in Melbourne as a hotbed of gang activity?

The same newspaper only last week editorialised “unfortunately, the Andrews government and senior police have equivocated at times about African gangs, as if the greater danger were an outbreak of mass racism among ordinary Victorians”.

Anning cited the rise of “African gangs” in his home state as the reason why he spent $3,000 of taxpayers’ money to attend the rally at the invitation of Blair Cottrell, a notorious far-right convener of the United Patriots Front.

But who helped highlight this “racial problem?” Outgoing racial discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane warned that focusing on race without looking at factors such as social disadvantage, or indeed the real facts about crime, posed an “urgent risk to racial harmony in Australia”.

It is absolutely right for media to report on violent incidents in any city. Public safety is a legitimate concern. But it is absolutely wrong to dwell on the ethnicity of the offender unless it is germane to the story.

The reason is simple. It plays to the worst aspects of human nature – fear and prejudice – damaging entire communities, whether that is the intention or not.

News Corp publications, notably the Herald Sun and the Australian, have given oxygen to the “African gangs” phenomenon throughout 2018, despite the concerted efforts of the Victorian police to douse the comparisons with US-style gangs.

Take this front-page headline in the Herald Sun on 9 September: “High rise chaos: police hunt violent African youths following tower mayhem.”

Or this: “Carjack gang busted: AK 47 seized. 14 African, Middle Eastern and Asian youths arrested.”

Columnist Andrew Bolt spent 2018 highlighting incidents involving people of African background in his blog. There was no mention of crimes by drunken Aussies or visiting backpackers. Instead he recited a litany of incidents involving people of African appearance, who may or may not have been born overseas.

On 12 July he offered this:

We can’t pretend – as police once did – that there is not a very big crime problem in this specific group. In fact, police statistics last year showed the Sudanese-born, for instance, are an astonishing 128 times more likely than other Victorians to commit violent robberies and 68 times more likely to stage home invasions. What we don’t describe will not get addressed.

We can’t pretend – as many politicians keep doing – that importing refugee groups from tribal war-torn Third World areas and from cultures very different to ours does not put Australians here in danger. It is just not fair to those who then become victims of crime.

We need descriptors to help catch perpetrators.

Bolt’s highly selective figures, which he says are police figures from 2015, are alarming at first glance. But the Sudanese community is small – just 1.1% of the Victorian population and younger than the Victorian average, which means there are likely to be more interactions with police.

Social justice advocate Nyadol Nyuon offered this defence of the Sudanese community on Radio National: “The overwhelming majority of crimes in Victoria are committed by Australian and New Zealand-born people ... South Sudanese do commit about 1% of the offences.”

The ABC and Guardian fact-checked her claim, using figures from Victoria’s Crime Statistics Agency, and found that between April 2017 and March 2018, Australian and New Zealand-born offenders made up a combined 73.5% of the unique offender population (those people alleged to have committed crimes) in Victoria; whereas, those born in Sudan made up 1.1%.

Despite the facts showing offenders are much more likely to be born in Australia, when the immigration minister Peter Dutton observed in January 2018 that people in Melbourne were “scared to go out to restaurants” because of African gang violence, Bolt and his fellow columnists leapt to his defence.

News Corp columnists such as Rita Panahi have accused Victoria police of “engaging in semantics” when they have rejected the label “African gangs”.

The police commissioner, Graham Ashton, has been lampooned for trying to distinguish between gang activity and street level crime. He argued that while these offenders know each other and might come together through social media, they are not part of an organised structure which is the hallmark of bikie gangs or overseas gangs.

The reason why he’s made this point is not to downgrade the incidents, but to point out the solution might not lie in more vigorous police enforcement, but a much broader social response to bored and disenfranchised youth roaming the streets of outer Melbourne with little to do.

Labelling these groups as gangs also runs the risk of making the lawlessness cool and can actually lead to more formal structures forming, say criminologists.

But the more immediate fallout is for the largely law-abiding members of the particular community in the crosshairs, who have reported feeling fearful and being shunned in the street.

And it gives licence to groups on the far right, who embrace the mainstream media narrative of a “racial problem” and then turn it into far more powerful hate speech, often directing their vitriol towards unrelated groups such as the Jewish community.

As University of Adelaide media academic John Budarick observed: “Such media coverage is, sadly, something African-Australians have been exposed to before – it seems to have popped up regularly in some form over the past 10 years, at least.

“Before this, it was the Lebanese who were said to be forming menacing gangs, and before them, the Vietnamese and the Italians. The Australian media have a poor record in dealing with difference and diversity.”

Perhaps the Australian’s editorial represents a turning point in News Corp’s coverage, a signal that 2019 will usher in a more nuanced approach to crime and ethnicity – and a deeper understanding of the responsibility that the media carries for informed reporting.