This article is more than 8 years old

This article is more than 8 years old

It appears that Rupert Murdoch's newspapers are rather keen on surveillance.

In Britain, the News of the World used private eyes to follow "targets". In the United States, the New York Post has attacked a news agency because it dared to reveal that the city's police department has a controversial policy of keeping Muslims under surveillance.

The attack - by the Post's editorial page editor Bob McManus - concerns the long-running Associated Press investigation into the activities of the NYPD, which has been spying on Muslims as they go about their normal lives.

Four AP reporters have been writing stories, dating back to August last year, about the controversial police surveillance programme, which has split political and public opinion.

The Post and its tabloid rival, the Daily News, were critical of the AP from the outset. But the Post has stepped up its hostility towards the news agency since it picked up a major journalism award 10 days ago.

In his latest broadside, McManus defends the NYPD's intelligence operation as necessary to keep the city safe in a post 9/11 world. He wrote:

"At least twice in the decade before the NYPD programme began, Islamist sleeper agents attacked New York city. The first time, six people died; the second, thousands. Since then, the department has disrupted a number of Islamist-initiated plots; there is no way of telling how many more were never undertaken because the city is so aggressively anti-terrorist. And there have been no terror-related fatalities since 9/11".

He poured scorn on the AP's efforts:

"Strip away the emotive rhetoric and what's left is a series of stories over several weeks that show pretty clearly that the NYPD works very hard to keep the city safe."

He suggested that AP cares more about winning a Pulitzer prize than the threat of terrorism.

But AP's reporters have exposed inconsistencies in the police's claims that its officers only follow leads rather than going on "fishing expeditions" by keeping a whole community under surveillance.

The Post is unimpressed. On 19 February, the day AP won the Polk award, Post columnist Michael Walsh described the agency's reporting as a "journalistic jihad against the NYPD."

An AP spokesman, Paul Colford, told the Huffington Post that its journalists "have always been committed to the story of what the government and officials of the government are doing...

"The AP is not passing judgment on the New York Police Department. We are unearthing information and sharing it with readers so they may consider its value."

Though the two New York tabloids have backed the NYPD's programme, two New Jersey papers have expressed concerns over what the AP has discovered.

The Star-Ledger carried an editorial board piece in which it called the "ethnic mapping" of Muslims "insidious" and a "betrayal for an entire population of American citizens, targeted for their faith."

And the Times of Trenton's editorial board asked: "How in the name of all that's holy can we still be so irrational as to consider Muslims guilty until proven innocent?"

The NYPD has also been criticised by the Buffalo News, Newsday and NYU's Washington Square News.

Oddly, there has been no comment from the New York Times, though one of its columnists, Michael Powell, wrote a piece in which he encountered Muslims in New Jersey were were too afraid to speak.

Sources: New York Post/HuffPo/NY Daily News/New York Times