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Biting
the Had That Feeds – Part 1
Greg
Palast, Robert Fisk, George Monbiot, Media Lens, The New Statesman and
Newsnight
by
David Edwards and Media Lens
June
26, 2003
The
media isn’t all bad. If it were, it would be relatively harmless - people would
quickly see through the manipulation and deception, as was the case with the
Soviet system. This is not a problem for totalitarian regimes, which use
violence to control what people do, rather than illusions to control what
people think. But in democratic societies, where manipulation is key where
the illusion of final freedom is understood to be the perfect prison it is
vital that the media looks pretty good.
This
is why we need to be careful to look beyond occasional examples of honest and
courageous reporting to the performance of the media as a whole. This or that
article might be reasonably critical of power, this or that documentary might
surprise us with its candour but what about the bigger picture? Are the really
important truths being told?
We
know, for example, that the media has almost completely suppressed the fact
that one million Iraqi civilians died as a result of US-UK sanctions. Of all
the many millions of words written and spoken on the politics and history of
Iraq over the last year, almost nothing has been said about the responsibility
of our government for genocidal killing. It is a staggering achievement of
deception, self-deception, and of “brainwashing under freedom”.
We
could not possibly describe as honest, independent, courageous and free any
media entity that has participated in this cover up. And yet the reality is
that no UK media entity has made even a fraction of the effort merited in
exposing either the truth or the cover up of the truth. An honest media would
have used the exposure of recent government lying as a springboard for a series
of front-page evaluations of the credibility of earlier government claims on
sanctions, on the rationale for attacking Afghanistan, and on the alleged
“genocide” in Kosovo that was said to have motivated NATO’s bombing of Serbia,
but which was also a lie.
The
media has similarly suppressed the true urgency and seriousness of the threat -
perhaps terminal, and perhaps within the next ten years - of climate change,
and the true responsibility of corporate power for sabotaging efforts to avert
that threat. Scientists - the US National Academy of Sciences, for example -
are warning of impending disaster, but the media sail on blissfully unaware.
Rather than raising the alarm, they are busy advertising the same wares and
materialist ideology of the same corporate giants that are filling the
atmosphere with deadly greenhouse gasses. ‘We have a free press’, people
casually declare, while that same corporate press, naturally, stays silent on
the inherent insanity of its own limitless drive for maximised growth and
profits, and that of its advertisers, parent companies and of the system as a
whole.
The
truth is that Western crimes, catastrophic environmental threats, and multiple
other horrors and problems, are all suppressed in deference to the Golden Rule
of mass media ‘pragmatism’ ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds.’ We need to be
clear that the influence of this Golden Rule is felt throughout the media,
extending even to the dissident margins. In the latest Media Guardian, Greg
Palast writes:
“I
long ago threw my US television out the window. I wouldn’t allow toxic waste in
my house, so why that? In Britain I’ll watch the Mark Thomas Project and
Newsnight. Kirsty Wark has a very sexy brain. Better than Hustler.” (Palast,
‘My Media’, June 23, 2003)
Newsnight,
then which happens to broadcast Palast’s reports - is not “toxic waste”. In
2001 we asked Palast about media reporting on former Chilean dictator, Augusto
Pinochet, held under house arrest in Britain for eighteen months. We expressed
our amazement at the fact that the Guardian and Observer had printed almost
nothing about the role of Britain and the US in bringing Pinochet to power. We
were interested in Palast’s view because he had published an excellent article
on the subject in the Observer in 1998 (Palast, ‘A Marxist threat to cola
sales? Pepsi demands a US coup. Goodbye Allende. Hello Pinochet’, the Observer,
November 8, 1998), although the article was not given high prominence in the
paper. In his cryptic response, Palast referred to Guardian editor, Alan
Rusbridger:
“Well,
Alan R’s my boss and the Observer’s his rag as well as the Guardian ... so, he
did cover it. The Sunday editor, Alton,
said he would have moved it [Palast’s 1998 article] up to the front. How can I complain?... Therefore, I have no
(big) problem with the Guardian or Observer, except the usual employee
bitches.” (Email to David Edwards, January 19, 2001)
The
reflexive habit of journalists to defend their employers however awful they
may be - is a common theme among British radicals. The British mass media,
including the Independent, can completely fail to inform the public on even the
most important matters and yet Robert Fisk can write:
“I
don’t work for Colin Powell, I work for a British newspaper called The
Independent; if you read it, you’ll find that we are.” (Live From Iraq, an
Un-Embedded Journalist: Robert Fisk on Washington’s ‘Quagmire’ in Iraq,
Civilian Deaths and the Fallacy of Bush’s ‘War of Liberation’ By Robert Fisk,
Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now!, March 25, 2003)
We
have huge respect for Robert Fisk, but the Independent is +not+ independent of
corporate advertising, on which it depends for 75% of its revenue. It is not
independent of bottom line priorities, or of the fierce pressures that
advertisers, corporate flak machines and allied political flak machines are
able to pitch against journalists and media declared ‘unpatriotic’, ‘extreme’
and ‘irresponsible’. No paper is independent, for example, of the kind of
pervasive propaganda that persuaded readers to reject the Daily Mirror for
being ‘unpatriotic’ in opposing an illegal and immoral war once fighting had
begun. In 2001 Noam Chomsky said of the Independent’s reporting on Iraq:
"It's
worth remembering that no matter how much they try, they are part of the
British educated elite, that is, ideological fanatics who have long ago lost
the capacity to think on any issue of human significance, and entirely in the
grip of the state religion. They can concede errors or failures, but anything
more is, literally, inconceivable." (Noam Chomsky, email to David
Cromwell, February 24, 2001)
Chomsky,
incidentally, was not here referring to Fisk’s work, for which he has
tremendous respect.
In
a debate with Media Lens last year, George Monbiot also defended his employer,
the Guardian:
“The
Guardian's problem, as I perceive it, is that it has to recruit its journalists
from somewhere... There seems to me to be plenty of evidence that the Guardian
would print more radical journalism if it could find it. I am repeatedly asked
by the editors of other sections to write for them, but very seldom have the
time to do so. I am also asked quite often to suggest other journalists.”
(‘Update: Final Exchange With George Monbiot On The Guardian And The Propaganda
Model’, December 10, 2002, Media Alerts archive - www.medialens.org)
In
private, Monbiot has talked very differently of a cell of hardcore
reactionaries on the Guardian which makes life hell for anyone attempting to
promote a more radical agenda. But in our free society this kind of thing cannot
be said in public, and so the public are left in the dark about the truth of a
free press that persuaded them that the latest attack on a Third World country
was, once again, ‘The War That Could Not Be Stopped’. And once again, the
Golden Rule applies: ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds.’
Mark
Curtis is one excellent dissident critic who is not also a mainstream corporate
employee. It is interesting to compare the above with Curtis’s scathing
criticisms:
“Government
statements on its always noble intentions are invariably taken seriously and
rarely even challenged, let alone ridiculed. These assumptions and ways of
reporting are very deep-rooted.
”Thus
Guardian editors can write of ‘Britain's reputation as both a respecter and
champion of human rights’. One of its regular columnists can write that ‘the
foreign policies of democratic states, beyond the basic requirement of ensuring
physical security, are now based firmly on two pillars - trade advantage and
human rights’. In their book on the New Labour government, two Guardian writers
can refer to Blair as ‘a high minded champion of human rights’.” (Web of
Deceit, Vintage, 2003, p.380)
The
Guardian is the flagship of the liberal media it is an influential and highly
respected paper that all ‘liberal’ journalists aspire to write for. Silence on
its failings, therefore, is the rule - John Pilger aside, we know of literally
no other dissident writer in the UK who has dared make such direct criticisms
of the Guardian and Observer.
It
is noticeable that the best known British dissidents are very often employed by
the mainstream. If the liberal media employ and boost these dissidents, and if
they in turn accept the Golden Rule, then these media are thereby granted the
tacit approval of people deemed to represent the country’s moral conscience.
The entire media might collectively suppress vast crimes against humanity, but
we know the Independent, Newsnight, the Guardian and Observer are doing their
bit for truth and democracy because our greatest thinkers and writers say so,
or at least have nothing to say about their failings.
All
it needs is for one writer, recognised as courageous and honest by the public,
to be recruited by each liberal media entity one fig leaf per paper or TV
programme appears to be deemed sufficient and much of the reality of their
propaganda role can be obscured. It is an astonishing propaganda coup - one
that, we believe, plays a vital role in keeping us all ‘in our box’.
We,
ourselves, write an occasional column for the New Statesman. We do so on the
condition, agreed with the editor, that we are free to criticise the press
generally and his magazine in particular. And there is much to criticise. The
New Statesman’s chief political correspondent, John Kampfner, typified much of
the magazine’s standard pro-establishment propaganda when he wrote of Blair in
February:
“As
early as 1998, he proved his credentials by supporting brief campaigns of
bombing on Afghanistan and Sudan, against a world opinion that saw both actions
as nothing more than an attempt to distract attention from Bill Clinton's
embroilment in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Four months later came a dress
rehearsal for the current crisis with Iraq. Saddam Hussein had thrown out the
UN inspectors and Blair lined up behind Operation Desert Fox, another US aerial
bombardment, despatching a token force from the RAF.” (John Kampfner, New
Statesman, February 17, 2003)
Blair
“proved his credentials” by supporting a cruise missile attack on the Sudanese
Al-Shifa factory that destroyed half the pharmaceutical production capacity for
the country. This admirably moral stand against world opinion had other
interesting consequences, as the German Ambassador to Sudan noted:
"It
is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a
consequence of the destruction... but several tens of thousands seems a
reasonable guess." (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, 9-11, Seven Stories Press, 2001)
The
idea that Saddam had “thrown out” the weapons inspectors in 1998 has now, at
last, been recognised as an important component of Blair’s “honourable
deception” a crude lie immediately exposed by anyone troubling to glance back
at mainstream reporting in December 1998.
What’s
Our Problem?
This
might be a good point to pause to question the motivation of Media Lens in
continuously raising the issue of media corruption and compromise what,
actually, is our problem?
It
is reasonable to suppose, after all, that people always complaining about
something, always criticising other people, might themselves be guilty of some
kind of unreasonable and objectionable behaviour. Certainly we do not at all
enjoy criticising people. Our ‘problem’, however, is that we believe that real
flesh and blood human beings are consistently paying an appalling price for the
compromised silences that we perceive in the mass media.
An
obvious example is the terrible suffering of war and chaos being experienced by
the people of Iraq, in part because our best media the Guardian, the
Observer, the Independent and the BBC did not raise even the most basic
objections to US-UK claims relating to the alleged Iraqi ‘threat’ before the
war. It took a series of extremely high-level resignations just prior to, and
after, the war to move them to challenge the government’s ludicrous claims. We
hope that people understand that if there is a choice to be made between
suffering on this scale and hurting the feelings of a few journalists, and
perhaps even of a few friends, then that for us is no choice at all.
There
is an assumption among many progressive thinkers and writers that, while it is
reasonable to direct any amount of invective at mainstream journalists, it is
unacceptable to criticise more honest and courageous journalists. It is argued
that the best journalists are struggling to survive in a hostile environment,
are performing a wonderful service, and so should be supported.
We
have enormous respect for many of these journalists, but that does not mean
they should be beyond criticism, just as we are not. Does anyone seriously
argue that they should be? Even unusually honest journalists are not free of
faults. And while these individuals might choose to keep silent on the
corruption of the media employing them often for very understandable reasons
no one else is obliged to accept their personal decision and also remain
silent. The idea that it is outrageous for other people to speak out on what
they have decided not to discuss is absurd we are all free to make our own
decisions on such an important matter.
If
they are right in what they are not saying, and our protests are flawed, then
they are vindicated. If we are raising important points that are never
discussed, then how could this not be valuable? Why should anyone fear honest
debate and discussion? Why should anyone feel attacked and abused by the simple
question: ‘Why have you not discussed this issue?’ If the answer is, ‘Because I
can’t if I want to keep doing the valuable work I’m doing!’ then does this not
point to an extraordinary infringement of their freedom of speech that should
be exposed and challenged?
Part
2 will follow shortly...
David Edwards is the editor of Media Lens, and the author of Burning All
Illusions: A Guide to Personal and Political Freedom (South End
Press, 1996). Email: editor@medialens.org. Visit the Media
Lens website: http://www.MediaLens.org
The
goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for
others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain
a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write
to Greg Palast
Website:
www.GregoryPalast.com
Write
to Robert Fisk
Email:
robert.fisk@independent.co.uk
Write
to George Monbiot
Email:
g.monbiot@zetnet.co.uk
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editor@medialens.org
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