As far as I personally was concerned, there came a point with the presentation of the so-called evidence, with the moment when Colin Powell sat down at the UN General Assembly and unveiled what he said was cast-iron evidence of things like mobile, biological weapon facilities and the like…

When I saw all of that, I thought, well, ‘We know that Colin Powell is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man. If he believes all this to be the case, then, you know, he’s seen the evidence; I haven’t.’

Now that evidence turned out to be absolutely meaningless, but we only discover that after the event. So, you know, I’m perfectly open to the accusation that we were hoodwinked. Yes, clearly we were.¹

Consider the admission that Newsnight’s leading interviewer could respond to government claims clearly intended to supply a pretext for war on what was, even more obviously, the very brink of war: “If he believes this to be the case; he’s seen the evidence, I haven’t.”

Does not government submission of evidence mark the point where serious journalism +begins+ rather than ends? What is the reason for journalism at all, if the responsibility is simply to accept what a US Secretary of Defence says because we “know” he “is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man”?

As Paxman should be aware, the “sceptical” Powell helped whitewash the March 1968 massacre of some 500 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai by troops of the US Americal division. Powell was tasked with investigating a detailed whistleblowing letter from US soldier, Tom Glen, confirming that Americal was guilty of routine brutality against civilians. Among other horrors, Glen reported that Americal troops, “for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.” In his report responding to Glen’s letter, Powell wrote:

“In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”²

It is not true that Powell’s evidence on Iraq was revealed to be “absolutely meaningless” only “after the event”. In fact, it was immediately evident, as we reported in our media alert of February 10, 2003, five days after Powell‘s presentation. See.

We wrote to Paxman on November 4:

Hi Jeremy

Hope you’re well. In your contribution to Coventry University’s ‘Is World Journalism in Crisis?’ event, you commented:

“When I saw all of that, I said ‘we know that Colin Powell is an intelligent thoughtful man, and a sceptical man. If he believes this to be the case; he’s seen the evidence, I haven’t.’

“Now that evidence turned out to be absolutely meaningless but we only discover that after the event. So I am perfectly open to the accusation that we were hoodwinked. Clearly we were.”
(http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/536290.php)

And yet you also said the function of the BBC was “finding things out and telling it as straight as you can tell it”.

What was to stop you from checking the credibility of Powell’s claims against independent expert opinion? In his February 5, 2003 presentation to the United Nations, Powell held up a vial of dry powder anthrax. But Professor Anthony H. Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies had already discounted the possibility that Iraqi anthrax produced prior to 1991 could have remained effectively weaponised:

“Anthrax spores are extremely hardy and can achieve 65% to 80% lethality against untreated patients for years. Fortunately, Iraq does not seem to have produced dry, storable agents and only seems to have deployed wet Anthrax agents, which have a relatively limited life.”
(CSIS, ‘Iraq’s Past and Future Biological Weapons Capabilities,’ 1998, p.13)

The vial held up by Powell contained the type of dry, storable anthrax that Iraq did +not+ seem to have produced, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1998.

Former chief UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, Glen Rangwala of Cambridge University, and others, also offered important testimony refuting Powell’s claims – all readily available to you and the BBC at the time. So why did you respond to Powell by thinking merely “he’s seen the evidence, I haven’t”?

Best wishes

David Edwards

We have received no reply.

Despite admitting that he had simply taken Powell at his word on one of the most important issues in modern political history, Paxman repeatedly advocated a far more rigorous approach to journalism. When asked at the Coventry media event what he would change about his profession, he replied: “I’d plea for an unwillingness to believe what you’re told. It seems to me you want to have an instinctive distrust of powerful vested interests.”

When asked to describe the function of the BBC, Paxman commented: “My own view is that it’s to do, to the best of its ability, the ordinary business of journalism, which is finding things out and telling it as straight as you can tell it.”

When asked to supply advice to budding journalists, he said: “Do a bit of finding out. Really, it’s not for you if you’re not interested in discovering how things work and trying to hold people to account.”

And, yet again, when asked what he would choose as an epitaph, Paxman answered: “Well, I don’t really care what’s on my epitaph. I mean, you know: ‘He tried to find things out,’ or something like that.”

Richard Keeble, professor of journalism at Lincoln University, was a member of the audience listening to Paxman. When he challenged this striking cognitive dissonance — taking Powell at his word while repeatedly advising people to be sceptical of vested interests — Paxman replied:

Next time I see a presentation from the American State Department, or the CIA, about, I don’t know, Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, I shall look on it differently to the way that I looked upon their presentation of the so-called presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. At the time I did not have… independent evidence. One merely had the assertion of a murderous dictator on one hand, and one had what +appeared+ to be impartially — not impartially but covertly — gathered intelligence on the other. And I and many others judged that wrongly; we believed it. And clearly it didn‘t stack up in the event.

In fact it is absurd to suggest that Saddam Hussein was the only source for views challenging the credibility of claims made by Powell, Bush and Blair on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. We and our readers at Media Lens sent Paxman reams of credible, referenced information in 2002 and early 2003 of the kind we sent to him again in our recent email. He ignored it then, as he has again now. He commented in his interview:

“Of the stuff that I get sent… it’s [mostly] in textual form. Most of it is giving a very, very partial version of events which consorts with the senders’ political prejudices.”

In 2003, Paxman chose to accept the “very, very partial version of events” supplied by Colin Powell and others — a version that resulted in one of the most devastating wars in modern history, with over one million dead, four million made refugees and a country torn apart.

Paxman’s assurance that “I shall look… differently” on evidence in future was unconvincing. Why did he talk in terms of the future when six years have already passed since Powell’s deception? Why did he not express his increased scepticism by denouncing some of the fraudulent claims made by the US-UK governments since 2003? Certainly, we have seen no evidence of a more challenging approach from Paxman or the rest of the Newsnight team. Paxman’s own comment provided a good example: he referred to “Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.” In fact the existence of that programme is merely +alleged+ by the same governments that hoodwinked Paxman over Iraq.

We asked Richard Keeble what he thought of Paxman’s replies. He responded:

I was not really surprised at Paxman’s responses to my questions. Clearly the BBC as an institution trusts the powers-that-be far too much. The lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was just one period amongst a host of others when their journalists should have been questioning the rhetoric of the politicians and the military. They didn’t and so the lies about WMD went largely unchallenged. Paxman has the reputation of being a rottweiler amongst interviewers — and yet even he admits to being ‘hoodwinked’ by Colin Powell and Co.³

There was no mention of Paxman’s comments in any UK newspaper. A single mention was recorded on the blogosphere at Journalism.co.uk.

As we have often noted, compassion for the suffering of others is a key concern that separates the best dissident writers from their mainstream counterparts. It is not that dissidents care more about the lives of Iraqis and Palestinians than they do about the lives of Americans and Britons — their concern is to do whatever they can to relieve the suffering of people under attack from governments for which they, as democratic citizens, are responsible. Also, the government we are most able to influence is our own, so this should be the focus of attention. It is simply a fact that mass popular activism, as during the Vietnam War, +can+ restrain our government’s actions; whereas there is just not much we can do about the actions of, say, the Chinese or Russian governments.

When Martin Amis recently asked an audience of literary Londoners for a show of hands on the question: “How many of you feel morally superior to the Taliban?” he was missing the point.

The point is that it is a morally inferior position to focus on the crimes of foreign governments when we are responsible for, and far more able to influence, our own government. And it is a kind of moral idiocy to stridently protest the crimes of other governments when we know these protests will be exploited by our government in justifying its own crimes. Yes, there was a moral case for protesting Saddam Hussein’s abuse of human rights in 2002 and 2003 — but not if doing so made the US-UK devastation of Iraq more likely, so piling vastly more suffering on the Iraqi people.

Compassion, then, is the key concern — where best to direct our efforts in the hope of doing something to relieve suffering in the world. Journalism should be honest and rational, but it should not be indifferent or neutral — it should be biased in the direction of relieving misery. Noam Chomsky has gone so far as to suggest that a life without compassion is meaningless:

“So if you decide not to make use of the opportunities that you have; not to try to live your life in a way which is constructive and helpful, you end up looking back and say: ‘Why did I bother living?’”

This position is important because it provides the psychological motivation for challenging vested interests that are keen to reward servility with status, privilege, even power. In the absence of compassion, there is every reason to conform, to toe the line — to perhaps give the appearance of adopting dissenting positions without really rocking the boat. Then journalism is a job like any other — a way of paying the bills. To be sure, Chomsky’s position is an exotic one from the perspective of much mainstream journalism. When asked what he likes about his job as a journalist, Paxman answered:

“It offers you the opportunity to meet all sorts of fascinating people… If you have a curious mind and you like words it’s a wonderful, wonderful occupation.” But the pay is not good, he warned: “The salaries are very poor… There is no job security.” Nevertheless: “It remains a fascinating way to spend your time.”

1. Paxman, ‘Is World Journalism in Crisis?,’ Coventry University online interview, October 28, 2009.
2. Robert Parry and Norman Solomon, ’Behind Colin Powell’s Legend – My Lai,’ The Consortium, 1996.
3. Keeble, email to Media Lens, November 3, 2009.

On September 24, we wrote to the BBC’s Barbara Plett:

Dear Barbara Plett

It’s hard to believe your article, ‘Debuts and diatribes at the UN’, was written by a member of an ostensibly free press. You write of Obama:

“New US President Barack Obama set the stage with a sweeping speech announcing America’s re-engagement with the UN. Coming after the winter years of the Bush administration, this was a gale of spring air.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8272081.stm)

By contrast, the “quixotic colonel”, Gaddafi, “embarked on a diatribe that rambled on for an hour-and-a-half.”

As for our own Dear Leader:

“After the Libyan leader finally sat down, an indignant Mr Brown changed his speech to defend the founding principles of the UN.”

Jolly good show! And the Iranian president:

“Mr Ahmadinejad himself didn’t mention Iran’s nuclear programme in front of the assembly, nor did he seem distracted by walkouts to protest his denials of the Nazi Holocaust, and what many see as his fraudulent re-election. In typical style he lambasted Israel and the West for double standards, failed ideologies and imperial interventions.”

This reads like a spoof of Big Brother-style thought control. Through an unsubtle mix of swoons and snarls we’re told who are the ‘good guys’ and who the ‘bad guys’. The BBC insists its journalism is carefully balanced with all personal opinions omitted — but this is not journalism, it is propaganda.

Sincerely

David Edwards

Plett replied on October 6:

Dear Mr Edwards

Apologies for the lateness of my response, I started to reply last week but have been distracted by demands on both work and domestic fronts.
With regards to your comments that my article amounted to unsubtle propaganda that delineated the “good guys” and the “bad guys:”

In essence, I was writing about what three world leaders had to say on the opening day of the General Assembly, how they presented themselves on the world stage, and how they were received. I was not suggesting that any of them delivered the objective truth, the piece was meant to convey what was said from the point of view of the speaker. Given your complaint, I can see it might have been helpful to signpost more clearly.

But to clarify:

Gaddafi made some points that resonated with the audience, but his presentation was rambling and often incoherent. It was received with a mixture of curiosity and irritation, tending towards the latter as his speech wound on Ahmadinejad’s objective was to criticise the west of double standards (on nuclear issues), failed ideologies (capitalism and corruption) and imperial intervention (invasion & occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan). That was the main thrust of his speech to the General Assembly

Obama’s objective was to announce that America was re-engaging with the UN. I think it is fair to say the General Assembly broadly welcomed that. That’s what I meant by a gale of spring air: there was a palpable sends of relief to have a US president prepared to work through rather than against the UN. For sure this will be in pursuit of national foreign policy objectives, but that is the same for all members.

A final comment on “good guys” and “bad guys:” It is a fair point that stains on the US record (ie launching what the UN regarded as an illegal war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib etc) should also be mentioned if one is to accuse Gaddafi of oppressing the opposition and Ahmadinejad of fraudulent elections. The qualification I would make is that Ahmadinejad and Gaddafi were personally implicated in abuses against their own people, whereas Obama was not present at the time of the Iraq invasion and has campaigned for a US withdrawal. Also as I mentioned earlier, the piece was about personalities, not about states or state policies.

Best regards,
Barbara Plett

We replied on October 19:

Dear Barbara

Many thanks for such a lengthy and thoughtful response; it’s much appreciated. You write:

“In essence, I was writing about what three world leaders had to say on the opening day of the General Assembly, how they presented themselves on the world stage, and how they were received.”

You claim you were writing about how the three world leaders “were received”. But you wrote that Obama’s words were “a gale of spring air”, full stop. You +then+ added that Obama had been given “a warm reception” by UN members. The first comment expressed your own opinion – it was the kind of impassioned, personal endorsement of Obama that is continually being made by mainstream journalists. Likewise, you wrote that Gaddafi “rambled on”. You did not write that UN members +felt+ that Gadaffi had rambled on. You then focused on the Iranian leader’s alleged sins and noted that he “lambasted Israel” in “typical style” – again, your personal, derogatory assessment.

You write further:

“It is a fair point that stains on the US record (ie launching what the UN regarded as an illegal war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib etc) should also be mentioned if one is to accuse Gaddafi of oppressing the opposition and Ahmadinejad of fraudulent elections. The qualification I would make is that Ahmadinejad and Gaddafi were personally implicated in abuses against their own people, whereas Obama was not present at the time of the Iraq invasion and has campaigned for a US withdrawal.”

You say that Obama has “campaigned” for a US withdrawal. But he is the president of the United States. He is the commander-in-chief of the occupying force. He doesn’t need to campaign; he has the power to order an immediate withdrawal. He is therefore directly accountable for maintaining an illegal occupation that since 2003 has resulted in the deaths of more than one million people. Worth mentioning, one would think, but such a comment is inconceivable in a BBC report.

Obama has escalated wars from south Asia to the Horn of Africa. In July, John Pilger reported in the New Statesman that since Obama had taken office US drones had killed 700 civilians in Pakistan (http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=545). A month earlier, in a report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, UN Special Investigator Philip Alston called the United States’ reliance on pilotless missile-carrying aircraft “increasingly common” and “deeply troubling.”
(http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/06/04/drone.attacks/)

In July, one of Britain’s most senior judges, Lord Bingham, said that drone attacks were so “cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance”. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/top-judge-use-of-drones-intolerable-1732756.html)

US drone attacks on Pakistan are almost certainly illegal under international law. Under Article 51 of the UN Charter, the US is entitled to self-defence only when it preserves “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations” (http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter7.shtml). Pakistan is clearly not engaged in an attack on the United States.

You could have mentioned some or all of these issues (and many others) in balancing your comments on Ahmadinejad’s “denials of the Nazi Holocaust, and what many see as his fraudulent re-election”. Instead, we were left with the standard BBC depiction of a world divided up between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This kind of propaganda has terrible consequences in yet again preparing the public mind for bloodshed.

Best wishes

David

The Limits Of Influence: Jeremy Bowen And The Superpower

The BBC’s Middle East correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, similarly practices a version of ‘balanced’ reporting that betrays the truth of the murderously unbalanced Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We wrote to Bowen on September 24:

Dear Jeremy

You write:

“Mr Netanyahu’s refusal to do as he was asked has been an embarrassing, even humiliating reminder of the limits of America’s influence over Israel, a close ally which receives billions of dollars of US military aid and lashings of political support.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8271715.stm)

The reality, as even your comment must lead us to conclude, is very different – the ‘failure’ was a humiliating reminder of the limits of peace activists’ influence over an American political class that bankrolls and arms the Israeli aggressor. The idea that America is a neutral peacemaker in this war of conquest, wringing its hands in frustration, is a lie. Norman Finkelstein made the point:

“But who gave the green light for Israel to commit the massacres? Who supplied the F-16s and Apache helicopters to Israel? Who vetoed the Security Council resolutions calling for international monitors to supervise the reduction of violence?…

“Consider this scenario. A and B stand accused of murder. The evidence shows that A provided B with the murder weapon, A gave B the “all-clear” signal, and A prevented onlookers from answering the victim’s screams. Would the verdict be that A was insufficiently engaged or that A was every bit as guilty as B of murder?”

Best

David

Bowen replied the same day:

Interesting argument — except that the individual most humiliated by Israel’s refusal was the man at the summit of the political class, the President hinself.

Yes, the Gaza war was greenlighted by his predecessor. You’ll remember Israel ended its main operation just as he took office. Had Mr Bush still been in office the issue of a freeze would not have arisen.

What has changed is the definition of what’s in the interests of the US.

I don’t think I suggested the US was a neutral peacemaker. It’s simply Pres Obama defines his country’s interests differently to Pres Bush, by identifying a peace settlement as a US national priority. Otherwise he wouldn’t need to bother doing what he’s doing.

Thanks for writing

Yours

Jeremy Bowen
BBC Middle East Editor

We wrote again on the same day:

Dear Jeremy

Thanks. On the Gaza attack, the US was a participant throughout — that’s been the norm since 1967. As for the “embarrassing” reminder, why on earth should Netanyahu agree to ending settlement growth (in accord with Israel’s commitment in the Road Map) after Obama has stated clearly that there won’t even be a slap on the wrist – he won’t go as far as Bush I — if Israel continues to build?

On Gaza again, you’re missing the point. Bush gave the green light. Obama agreed. That’s why he said not one word about it, claiming that there was only one President (which didn’t stop him from commenting on many other issues). As Israeli sources make clear, the Gaza operation was very carefully planned throughout. It was planned to end just as Obama came into office, as a favour to him, so that he could continue to fail to say a word about the US-backed crime. Which is what happened.

On settlement growth, Obama is just repeating what Bush II said (and what’s in the Road Map that Bush II signed) — and, importantly, he’s not even going as far as Bush I. That aside, the issue of settlement growth is hardly more than a device to obscure real issues – namely, the settlements themselves are all illegal, all constructed by the US-Israel in ways that undermine any realistic hope for Palestinian self-determination.

Best

David

Journalists who criticise powerful interests can be attacked for their ‘bias’, for revealing their prejudices. On the other hand, as we will see in the examples below, almost no-one protests, or even notices, the lack of balance in patriotic articles reporting on the experience of British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the credibility of British and American elections, or on claims that the West is spreading democracy across the Third World. Then, notions of patriotism, loyalty, the need to support ‘our boys’, make ‘balance’ seem disloyal, disrespectful; an indication, in fact, that a journalist is ‘biased.’

The media provide copious coverage of state-sponsored memorials commemorating the 50th, 60th, 65th anniversaries of D-Day, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of Arnhem, the retreat from Dunkirk, the Battle of the Atlantic, the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War, and so on. Even the 200th anniversary of The Battle of Trafalgar was a major news item. Remembrance Sunday, Trooping The Colour, Beating The Retreat, the Fleet Review are all media fixtures. The military is of course happy to supply large numbers of troops and machines for these dramatic flypasts, parades and reviews.

On June 11, 2005, senior BBC news presenter, Huw Edwards, provided the commentary for Britain’s Trooping The Colour military parade, describing it as “a great credit to the Irish Guards”. Imagine if Edwards had added:

“While one can only be impressed by the discipline and skill on show in these parades, critics have of course warned against the promotion of patriotic militarism. The Russian novelist Tolstoy, for one, observed:

The ruling classes have in their hands the army, money, the schools, the churches and the press. In the schools they kindle patriotism in the children by means of histories describing their own people as the best of all peoples and always in the right. Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, monuments, and by a lying patriotic press.” (Tolstoy, Government is Violence — Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism, Phoenix Press, 1990, p.82)

Edwards would not have been applauded for providing this ‘balance’. He would have been condemned far and wide as a crusading crackpot, and hauled before senior BBC management.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury recently offered the mildest of criticisms of the invasion of Iraq in a sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral, the Sun newspaper responded: ‘Archbishop of Canterbury’s war rant mars troops tribute.’ It added:

“The Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday hijacked a service honouring the sacrifice of British troops in Iraq – to spout an anti-war rant.”

The Archbishop’s crime was heinous indeed, as the Sun explained:

“In an astonishing breach of convention, he then accused politicians of failing to think enough about the war’s human cost.

“Speaking from the pulpit of St Paul’s, Dr Williams said:

It would be a very rash person who would feel able to say without hesitation, this was absolutely the right or the wrong thing to do, the right or the wrong place to be. The conflict in Iraq will, for a long time yet, exercise the historians, the moralists, the international experts. Reflecting on the years of the Iraq campaign, we cannot say that no mistakes were ever made.”

We would be interested to see Williams’ case for arguing that invading Iraq might have been the +right+ thing to do. It could hardly be more obvious that invading was “the wrong thing to do” — it resulted in the virtual destruction of an entire country. It was also a monumental crime and not a mistake.

The Sun’s article was archived under “news/campaigns/our_boys”. As Tolstoy would have understood, the Sun is in fact a bitter class enemy of “our boys”. It is a rich man’s propaganda toy parading as a trusty pal of ‘ordinary people’. We wrote to Williams on October 12:

Dear Rowan Williams

In your October 9 sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral, you spoke movingly of the cost paid in Iraq by British servicemen and women, and their families:

“Justice does not come without cost. In the most obvious sense, it is the cost of life and safety. For very many here today, that will be the first thing in their minds and hearts – along with the cost in anxiety and compassion that is carried by the families of servicemen and women.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/09/rowan-williams-iraq-war-sermon)

But you made no mention of Iraqi civilian or military suffering. According to an October 2006 report published in the Lancet medical journal, the US-UK invasion had by then caused some 655,000 excess deaths. In February 2007, Les Roberts, co-author of the report, argued that Britain and America might have triggered in Iraq “an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide”, in which 800,000 people were killed. (Roberts, ‘Iraq’s death toll is far worse than our leaders admit,’ The Independent, February 14, 2007; http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2268067.ece)

Later that year, the BBC reported:

“More than a million Iraqis have been killed since the invasion in 2003, according to the British polling company ORB.” (Newsnight, BBC2, September 14, 2007)

Why did you make no mention of these death tolls and of the truly awesome suffering of the Iraqi population?

Best wishes

David

We have received no reply.

My Pal Stan — Justin Webb And The General (And The Guidelines)

On October 7, the BBC published new draft editorial guidelines. It is worth paying close attention to section 4.4.13:

Presenters, reporters and correspondents are the public face and voice of the BBC — they can have a significant impact on perceptions of our impartiality. Journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgements, rooted in evidence, but may not express personal views on public policy, on matters of political or industrial controversy, or on ‘controversial subjects’ in any other area.

Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal prejudices of our journalists and presenters on such matters. This applies as much to online content as it does to news bulletins: nothing should be written by journalists and presenters that would not be said on air.

The Guardian noted that some industry observers are already referring to the last phrase as the “Jeremy Bowen clause”. In April, the BBC Trust partly upheld complaints over accuracy and impartiality made against Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor.

Bowen was censured for a piece he wrote for the BBC website in June 2008 on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He referred to “Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier”. He wrote that Israel showed a “defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own” and that its generals felt that they were dealing with “unfinished business”, left over from 1948. (‘Bowen “breached rules on impartiality,”’ The Independent, April 16, 2009)

A BBC committee ruled that Bowen’s reporting had partially breached the BBC’s rules on accuracy and impartiality. In reality, he was stating indisputable facts. Bowen was criticised for his “loose phrasing”, but the point we are making is that, if Bowen had made comparable comments about official enemies like Iran, Syria, Venezuela and North Korea, no BBC executive would have given a thought to any lack of balance. Such reports continuously pass completely unnoticed. The truth is that media balance is a function of power. Indeed it might properly be termed the balance of power.

In the October 4 edition of the Mail on Sunday, Justin Webb, presenter of the BBC’s Today programme, wrote about the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, in an article titled:

‘Why my pal Stan has a terrorist’s false arm on his wall.’

To be clear, the title described the US commander waging this controversial and bloody war as Webb’s “pal”. Just this single sentence clearly contravenes the BBC’s guidelines on balance. And notice that it is inconceivable that a BBC journalist could pen an article with the title:

‘Why my pal Osama has a US soldier’s false arm on his wall.’

Webb explained the arm on the wall:

“The severed arm, I should say, is sticking out of the kind of ornate frame you might choose for a watercolour. The arm looks real but is actually a prosthetic limb. On closer inspection the oddity is compounded: the hand is clutching a mobile phone.

“The General enters the room and provides the explanation.

“‘The guys were fooling around,’ he says. ‘We went out to kill a sheik who had only one arm and we ended up getting the false arm but nothing else.’

“’That’s not it,’ the General adds, with a slight hint of wistfulness. ‘They just mocked that up for the joke. The phone was what gave his position away.’”
(the online title has been altered from the print original)

We wrote to Webb on October 13:

Dear Justin Webb

Doesn’t the title of your recent article in the Mail on Sunday (October 4, 2009) contravene [the latest draft BBC editorial] guidelines:

‘Why my pal Stan has a terrorist’s false arm on his wall’?

You wrote of the US commander in Afghanistan:

“Stanley McChrystal is a character. In some respects he straight is out of central casting: big, with fierce eyes and weather-beaten skin. He looks every bit as fit as a Hollywood version of a special forces soldier. Yet he eats only one meal a day.”

You even joked about the collecting of trophies from Afghan war dead:

“One-armed Taliban fighters should still be wary, though. When Stanley McChrystal comes home, he’ll want something for the other walls.”

You made reference to allegations of torture by American forces serving under McChrystal in Iraq, but there was no mention of the serious legal and human rights concerns surrounding Nato’s war in Afghanistan. Wasn’t this article in fact profoundly biased in favour of Nato’s war?

Sincerely

David

Webb also referred in passing to a particularly gruesome Nato attack:

“When German troops in Afghanistan called in an air attack on stolen oil-filled tankers last month, killing a number of civilians in the process, McChrystal had trouble raising some of his European colleagues on the phone.”

Presumably the number of civilians burned alive was unworthy of mention. Al Jazeera reported:

“Thirty Afghan civilians were among nearly 100 people killed after Nato aircraft destroyed two stolen oil tankers in the north of the country earlier this month, an Afghan government investigation has concluded.”

Webb replied on October 13:

David hello — and yes the title was unfortunate I agree. The entire piece was approved by the BBC but the sub editors then came up with that introduction. Having said that I certainly don’t agree that the piece supported any war or any individual — merely pointed out that he is a character, which he is. I expressed no personal view on the Afghan conflict, nor could you guess from the piece what my personal view is!

best jw

It says everything that the piece was approved by the BBC, which presumably perceived no lack of balance. Again, Tolstoy offered an example of the kind of thinking that is far beyond the pale for BBC journalism:

“Above all, they inflame patriotism in this way: perpetrating every kind of injustice and harshness against other nations, they provoke in them enmity towards their own people, and then in turn exploit that enmity to embitter their people against the foreigner.” (Tolstoy, ibid., p.82)

Comments that offer a penetrating insight into the disaster that is US-UK strategy in Afghanistan, both past and present.

Part 2 will follow shortly…

“The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming and yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system – the Westminster village, the media and particularly the political parties, including this one – are the groups most in denial about what is really happening to our democracy.” (Brian Wheeler, ‘Dyke in BBC “conspiracy” claim,’ BBC website, September 20, 2009.)

Dyke argued there had never been a greater separation between the “political class” and the public:

I tried and failed to get the problem properly discussed when I was at the BBC and I was stopped, interestingly, by a combination of the politicos on the board of governors, one of whom [Baroness Sarah Hogg] was married to the man who claimed for cleaning his moat, the cabinet interestingly — the Labour cabinet — who decided to have a meeting, only about what we were trying to discuss, and the political journalists at the BBC.

Why? Because, collectively, they are all part of the problem. They are part of one Westminster conspiracy. They don’t want anything to change. It’s not in their interests.

Dyke said the MPs’ expenses scandal had been “British democracy’s Berlin Wall moment” but the opportunity to change the system was fading. He added:

“It’s time to be radical. Our current model was designed for the 18th Century. It doesn’t fit 21st Century Britain.”

Dyke was also candid about political interference with the BBC. He discussed an internal review of the BBC’s political coverage carried out at the beginning of the decade, to which all political parties were asked to contribute. He said: “there was a lot of pressure from the government of the day not to change anything… A lot of the governors were what I call semi-politicians and they liked the present system and…. maybe they were right — it’s not the job of the BBC to change the political system and to start questioning the political system. I happen to not agree with that but, you know, we didn’t get anywhere.”

If these comments were extraordinary, the media response to them was predictable — close to zero coverage in the national UK press. Dyke’s speech was covered in three sentences in the Belfast Telegraph on September 21. A longer piece appeared in the Herald (Glasgow) on the same day. In response to our prompting, the website Journalism.co.uk covered the story on September 22. They then contacted Roy Greenslade, who covered the story on his Guardian website blog a day later — the sole national mainstream mention. Greenslade wrote of the story:

… the national press appears to have ignored it, or missed it altogether. Yet the claim should have generated widespread interest. If true, it requires more probing. If false, it should severely dent Dyke’s credibility”. (Greenslade, ‘Dyke’s BBC conspiracy theory,’ Greenslade Blog, September 23, 2009.)

On September 28, one week after the speech was reported by the BBC, Media Guardian published an article by Maggie Brown titled: ‘When trust breaks down: The BBC Trust is under siege from politicians of all parties, rival broadcasters, corporation staff and the viewing public. But is it fulfilling its remit — and, if not, what is the alternative?’ Greg Dyke was mentioned, but there was no reference to his whistleblowing comments.

Dyke’s comments were important, providing a rare moment of honesty from such a senior insider. They were of clear public interest and doubtless chimed with the concerns of many people outraged by the scandal of MPs’ expenses. As discussed, the story was broken on the BBC’s own website — a high-profile source familiar to mainstream journalists. So what could explain the lack of interest from all mainstream national newspapers?

The answer is found in the story itself: the national media are indeed part of an elite system which is not interested in discussing, much less effecting, radical political change. Dissident outsiders attempting to challenge the status quo are dismissed as marginal figures. But even high-profile insiders — celebrity managers, journalists, writers, dramatists and diplomats — are ignored.

On September 23, we wrote to the BBC’s Brian Wheeler, the journalist who broke the story.

Dear Brian

Hope you’re well. I was impressed and amazed by your story, ‘Dyke in BBC “conspiracy” claim.’

I would have thought it was important news of great interest to the public that a former BBC director general had described the BBC as part of a “conspiracy” preventing the “radical changes” needed to UK democracy. Isn’t it extraordinary that not a single UK national newspaper has reported your story? What do you make of it?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Wheeler replied the same day:

Hi David

Thanks for your comments. I’m afraid I have no idea why the story wasn’t picked up by the nationals, although I think Media Guardian may have done something on it. It’s sometimes hard to predict which stories will get followed up.

Brian

Wheeler was of course reluctant to speculate (and to reply to our second email) because BBC journalists are not allowed to express their personal opinions — or so we are to believe.

Last month, Milton Coleman, senior editor at the Washington Post, sent a memo to staff on the issue of use of “individual accounts on online social networks, when used for reporting and for personal use”. The memo warned staff to “remember that Washington Post journalists are always Washington Post journalists”. It added:

“All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens… Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything—including photographs or video—that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility. This same caution should be used when joining, following or friending any person or organization online.”

These rules echo BBC editorial guidelines. In 2005, we asked the BBC’s World Affairs correspondent, Paul Reynolds, if he thought George Bush hoped to create a genuine democracy in Iraq. Reynolds replied:

“I cannot get into a direct argument about his policies myself! Sorry.” (Email to Media Lens, September 5, 2005)

Reynolds explained to one of our readers:

“You are asking for my opinion about the war in Iraq yet BBC correspondents are not allowed to have opinions!” (Forwarded to Media Lens, October 22, 2005)

As these comments suggest, media guidelines require that journalists relinquish, not just “personal privileges”, but also moral responsibility. Journalists are not free to declare their “bias” even in abhorring mass murder, war crimes and climate chaos, if doing so “could be used to tarnish” their employers’ “journalistic credibility”. The problem is that the people with the power to do the tarnishing are overwhelmingly of the right – big business and political centres of power dominated by big business.

In reality, the demand for ’balance’ means that journalists can say pretty much what they like in favouring powerful interests, but they will be severely castigated for losing ‘balance’ when they criticise the wrong people. Thus we find that it is not ‘biased’ to suggest that Britain and America are committed to spreading democracy around the world, but it +is+ ‘biased’ to suggest that they are responsible for crimes in the Third World. In short, the demand for ‘balance’ is a weapon of thought control — it is a way of policing and enforcing bias in media performance.

As Greg Dyke made clear, the truth hidden behind the sham of ‘balance’ is that political journalism works hard to protect an elite system of which it is very much a part.

Thus Dan Milmo, writer in residence at the Guardian, noted that de Botton was “the latest artistic figure to tread the precarious line between creative independence and commerce after signing a publishing deal with the financial support of Heathrow’s owner, BAA.”¹

Milmo recalled how novelist Fay Weldon had been found to be responsible for “one of the most notorious sell-outs of recent times” when it emerged that her latest novel had been sponsored by the Italian jewellery firm Bulgari. Weldon explained last month:

I was accused of defiling the novel. The deal was that I must mention Bulgari 12 times in a novel I wrote for them as a giveaway. My agent was terribly good and knocked them down to nine and a half mentions. In the end I mentioned them 46 times.

If some small part of Milmo’s brain recognised that he also treads a “precarious line” between creative independence and commerce, it didn’t show – journalists typically play intellectual possum when the issue is raised. In a recent discussion on the ethics of advertising in an age of climate crisis, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said it was fine for newspapers to be funded by Wal-Mart, “as long as Wal-Mart demands nothing in return”.

This kind of assurance is a complete red herring. The point is that when corporate advertisers keep media corporations in business, the corporate nature of both parties all but guarantees a corporate-friendly media performance. Nobody has to tell a media business to favour business, to tread carefully around issues that harm business control of society. Especially when politics, which is also in thrall to corporate power, has the power to reward and publish, praise and lambast, ‘respectable’ and ‘irresponsible’ journalism.

Similarly, the problem is not that writers sell-out, but that, as Noam Chomsky told the BBC’s Andrew Marr, “if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”² Chomsky once related a story he had heard from a civil rights activist at Harvard Law School:

He once gave a talk and said that kids were coming in to Harvard Law School with long hair and backpacks and social ideals and they were all going to go into public service, law and change the world. That’s the first year. He said around April the recruiters come for the summer jobs, the Wall Street firms. Get a cushy summer job and make a ton of money.

So the students figure, What the heck? I can put on a tie and jacket and shave for one day, because I need that money and why shouldn’t I have it? So they put on a tie and a jacket for that one day and they get the job for the summer. Then they go off for the summer and when they come back in the fall, it’s ties and jackets and obedience and a shift of ideology.

De Botton was educated at the elite Dragon School, and at Harrow and Cambridge. His father was head of Rothschild Bank, then founded Global Asset Management in 1983 with £1m capital and sold it to UBS in 1999 for £420m.³

In the Evening Standard, de Botton explained the Heathrow job spec that so excited him:

This character would be given free rein to wander the premises for a week in August, from the control tower to the baggage carousels, and talk to staff and passengers alike. Then he or she would be asked to sit at a specially constructed desk in the departures hall and, in full view of everyone (with big screens projecting to the public what was being written on the computer), write a book in a few weeks, for publication in mid-September.⁴

A month after the work was completed — 12,000 words with photographic illustrations — 10,000 free copies would be handed out to passengers at the airport. This seemed like “a rare and fascinating offer”, de Botton felt. After all, “very few organisations can be bothered to open themselves up to strangers, who might ask the wrong questions and be a nuisance.”

In reality, the heart experiences something akin to a sudden loss of cabin pressure at the thought of one more behind-the-scenes report from an airport in the wake of docusoap series like Airport, Holiday Airport, Animal Airport and Luton Airport. Even de Botton’s evaluation of the potential risk put the actual danger in perspective. In an age of catastrophic climate change — to which aviation is one of the most potent contributors — a loose philosophical cannon could do far more than ask awkward questions and be an irritant. He or she could conceivably wreak havoc on the image of Heathrow airport, its owner BAA, and the aviation industry more generally.

De Botton realised that he risked looking like someone who had sold his soul. He was candid about his concerns:

I was lucky to be picked for the job but I had a few long nights of the soul before accepting. Heathrow swarms with contentious issues, not least the burning question of the third runway, and I wanted to be sure that I’d be allowed to say what I pleased. My agent and I devised the cockroach test: in other words, I had to be allowed to discuss every last cockroach I might spot at the airport if that’s what I felt like doing. To their credit, the airport took the point and didn’t flinch.

In the Independent, Terence Blacker reported that a Heathrow spokeswoman had told him that de Botton “bit our arms off to be involved in the project.”⁵

The PR firm, Mischief of London, which was behind the idea, told the Independent that their goal was to inspire “branded conversations through the experience of seeing a top literary figure at the airport”. De Botton was delighted: “On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it’s nice that writers seem to matter.”⁵

Blacker was unimpressed:

“Enough of this nonsense. The publicists may indeed get their ‘branded conversations’ but beleaguered writers, among whom the millionaire philosopher can surely not be including himself, gain nothing from these marketing games.”

We wrote to de Botton on September 9:

Dear Alain

Hope you’re well. I was interested to read of your work as writer in residence at Heathrow important. In the Evening Standard you wrote:

“My agent and I devised the cockroach test: in other words, I had to be allowed to discuss every last cockroach I might spot at the airport if that’s what I felt like doing. To their credit, the airport took the point and didn’t flinch.”

But surely the real “cockroach” for BAA and Heathrow is the threat of catastrophic climate change. Aviation is one of the most potent contributors to the problem. Did Heathrow pass the climate change test? How much did you have to say about the issue in the terminal and in the book to be released on September 28?

Best wishes

David Edwards

De Botton replied and a series of interesting exchanges followed. He asked that these remain “private”. From his replies, it seems likely that BAA was not subjected to our “climate change test” in his book — he had other, “aesthetic” priorities.

De Botton’s two articles on the project in the Evening Standard and the Sunday Times mentioned that airports are associated with “our destruction of nature,” that “Heathrow swarms with contentious issues, not least the burning question of the third runway,” that “Heathrow is routinely accused of being the biggest eyesore in the South-East” and “its environmental and noise impact is hard to forget.”⁶ But these were trivial criticisms when set against the truly awesome crises looming over us all and particularly over the aviation industry. Climate change was not even mentioned. Instead, de Botton wrote:

There is something sublime about standing in a cloudless dawn at the end of 27LR, as Heathrow’s northern runway is known to pilots, and observing a sequence of planes, each visible as a single diamond, lined up at different heights, on their final approach.” He observed, further, “there is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race, however preoccupied with the payroll, who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come to meet him at arrivals.⁶

The environmental journalist, Andy Rowell, who has often written for the Guardian, made a crucial point:

Advertising reassures people that it is OK to buy and consume. It provides a safety net to make it acceptable to consume. What makes this so important is the media are often the windows through which we see the world. If we open a paper and see fast cars it makes it acceptable to drive one, if we see cheap flights it makes it acceptable to go on one.⁷

Similarly, if we read articles and books about aviation that downplay or ignore climate change, the “pathology of normalcy” — the illusion that we are living in an ordinary world in ordinary times — is reinforced. Of course we can argue that not all writing is obliged to embrace political issues, but writing for BAA in 2009 is an unavoidably political act with real consequences.

On September 7, we wrote to Terence Blacker at the Independent:

Dear Terence

Hope you’re well. I was interested to read your article in the Independent on Alain de Botton’s “branded conversations” at Heathrow airport (’Why does a philosopher need to join the clamour for speed?,’ August 21). You wrote:

“The world is obsessed with immediacy, as if there is a connection between how quickly a blog, news report, twitter or online video appears and how worthwhile it is. In these times, it is more important than ever that a few serious-minded people are there to remind us that true wisdom comes from thought, quiet and solitude.

“Something sad is happening, a small defeat for seriousness, when a man who has made his reputation with a book on Proust, who has pronounced interestingly on the afflictions of modern society, joins the clamour of instant comment rather than stepping back from it.”

But isn’t the real problem of our age, not “instant comment”, but the predominance of corporate-sponsored “branded conversations”? Corporations aren’t interested in “true wisdom”, whatever the origin or speed of production; they are interested in profits. You noted that de Botton had been hired by the PR firm Mischief of London. According to Mischief, the aim of the campaign was “to make a passenger’s time at Heathrow the best memory of the trip”. The real goal, of course, was enhanced PR image – profits, in other words. Inconvenient truths are actually a threat to these aims.

Isn’t corporate domination of the mass media the real problem for all who value “seriousness”?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Blacker replied the same day:

Dear David Edwards

Thank you for your interesting email. I agree that a branded conversation is as bad as instant opinion: neither, I would have thought, are fit pursuits for a philosopher. On the other hand, I’m not sure de Botton is exactly mass media. As a columnist, I personally don’t feel the heavy hand of corporatism on my shoulder.

Best wishes.

Terence Blacker

We wrote again on September 8:

Dear Terence

Many thanks. I wouldn’t take too much comfort from the absence of a “heavy hand of corporatism” on your shoulder – it may have surreptitiously entered your heart. The American journalist, Gary Webb, was an investigative reporter for nineteen years, focusing on government and private sector corruption, winning more than thirty awards for his journalism. He was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories on California’s 1989 earthquake. Webb described his experience of mainstream journalism:

“In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking under rocks. I didn’t get any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn’t work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as I could tell. It +encouraged+ enterprise. It +rewarded+ muckracking.” (Webb, ‘The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On’, in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw – Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Prometheus, 2002, pp.296-7)

Alas, Webb had an epiphany:

“And then I wrote some stories that made me realise how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.”

Jonathan Cook, who wrote for the Guardian and the Observer for many years, has commented:

“If they are to survive long, writers must quickly learn what the news desk expects of them. Newcomers are given a small amount of leeway to adopt angles that are ‘not suitable’. But they are also expected to learn quickly why such articles are unsuitable and not to propose similar reports again.

“The advantage of this system is that high-profile sackings are a great rarity. Editors hardly ever need to bare their teeth against an established journalist because few make it to senior positions unless they have already learnt how to toe the line.

“The media’s lengthy filtering system means that it is many years before the great majority of journalists get the chance to write with any degree of freedom for a national newspaper, and they must first have proved their ‘good judgment’ many times over to a variety of senior editors. Most have been let go long before they would ever be in a position to influence the paper’s coverage.

“Journalists, of course, see this lengthy process of recruitment as necessary to filter for ‘quality’ rather than to remove those who fail to conform or whose reporting threatens powerful elites. The media are supposedly applying professional standards to find those deserving enough to reach the highest ranks of journalism.

“But, of course, these goals – finding the best, and weeding out the non-team players – are not contradictory. The system does promote outstanding ‘professional’ journalists, but it ensures that they also subscribe to orthodox views of what journalism is there to do. The effect is that the media identify the best propagandists to promote their corporate values.”

Cook believes that columnists are ‘filtered’ in the same way. I’d be interested to hear your views.

Best wishes

David

Blacker replied on September 9:

Dear David

This is a big and interesting subject. Speaking personally, I don’t sense that corporatism has entered my soul without my having noticed. I didn’t have a long training and was never filtered – I write books most of the time and, a little over ten years ago, wrote to the Independent to offer my services as a columnist. I don’t have anything to do with the news desk and, have never been leant on to express or suppress a view.

I don’t feel like a team player in the slightest. In my experience, the Independent, for all its many faults, does live up to its name and, unlike the Mail and the Guardian, does not encourage (that’s too gentle a term) a particular mindset in its writers.

On the other hand, you may be right. Financial nervousness is a great corrective in these matters. There are damned few heroic columnists.

Yet I cling to the belief that people like Nick Cohen and Johann Hari are bloody-minded enough to go their own way.
Where, incidentally, would your model of uninfected press opinion be? In a nationalised press, presenting the government view? On-line?

I think I prefer being in the infected ward. You may, incidentally, be over-estimating the power and seriousness of the mass media. The prejudices and hang-ups of editors are far more pathetic, personal nit-picking than you think.

Best wishes.
Terence Blacker

Finally, we wrote on September 10:

Dear Terence

Thanks for responding with such candour. Upton Sinclair offered an interesting observation:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

I think this is why so many journalists are able to tread so carefully around so many powerful toes without realising that they are doing so. You write:

“Speaking personally, I don’t sense that corporatism has entered my soul without my having noticed… I don’t have anything to do with the news desk and, have never been leant on to express or suppress a view.”

Alan Rusbridger once told me in an interview:

“If you ask anybody who works in newspapers, they will quite rightly say, ‘Rupert Murdoch’, or whoever, ‘never tells me what to write’, which is beside the point: they don’t have to be told what to write.”

Journalists simply internalise the values; they quickly come to ‘understand’ what is and is not acceptable. Or they are recruited because their minds are already ’right’ (the public schools and Oxbridge do a marvellous job in this regard). You comment:

“In my experience, the Independent, for all its many faults, does live up to its name and, unlike the Mail and the Guardian, does not encourage (that’s too gentle a term) a particular mindset in its writers.”

But the Independent, like other quality newspapers, is dependent on corporate advertising for 75% of its profits (Peter Preston, ‘War, what is it good for?’, The Observer, October 7, 2001). Even mainstream stalwarts like your former editor Andrew Marr recognise the inevitable corrosion of independence:

“But the biggest question is whether advertising limits and reshapes the news agenda. It does, of course. It’s hard to make the sums add up when you are kicking the people who write the cheques.” (Marr, My Trade, Macmillan, 2004, p.112)

In fact this has really enormous implications for press freedom. History tells us that newspapers that alienate corporate advertisers can suffer a catastrophic loss of revenue that can put them out of business or drive them to the margins. How can they possibly be deemed to be independent of these pressures?

The Independent is also owned by Irish billionaire Sir Anthony O’Reilly, who is chief executive of Independent News & Media Plc (INM). O’Reilly is a former chairman, president and CEO of H J Heinz, the leading food company. He is also a former member of the board of the New York Stock Exchange. His personal fortune has been estimated at £1.3 billion, which makes him one of the richest men in Ireland. He earns £15 million a year in salary and dividends.

O’Reilly has a controlling 72% share in Arcon, the zinc mining operation, and he has interests in oil and gas exploration. He also owns Fitzwilton, a large industrial group with core activities in food retail and light manufacturing. The list goes on… Isn’t it naïve to believe that your newspaper is independent of O’Reilly’s priorities, or of the senior management he hires in pursuit of them?

In 1996, Marr interviewed the linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky. Marr commented:

“What I don’t get is that all of this suggests – I’m a journalist – people like me are self-censoring.”

Chomsky responded:

“I don’t say you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is, if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” (The Big Idea, BBC2, February 14, 1996)

I’m equally sure you are sincere in your view that you are free of corporate “infection”. But the fact that you can seriously suggest that the Independent lives up to its name suggests otherwise.

You ask:

“Where, incidentally, would your model of uninfected press opinion be? In a nationalised press, presenting the government view? On-line?”

The corporate obsession with profit-maximising – the deep source of its bias – is really an institutionalised form of greed and selfishness. Outside a few Buddhist meditation masters, it’s hard to conceive of anyone being totally free of this distorting “infection”. But it’s certainly true that non-corporate, online media like Democracy Now!, FAIR, RealNews.org, ZNet, Spinwatch and the like offer far more honest and rational analysis than the mainstream media. For example, I defy anyone to make sense of events in Haiti and Korea relying solely on the corporate press. It can’t be done. But understanding +can+ be found on non-corporate, specialist websites motivated by concern for human suffering rather than profits.

Best wishes

David

1. Milmo, ‘High minded: Heathrow hires De Botton: Philosophical author begins work as airport’s writer-in-residence,’ The Guardian, August 19, 2009.
2. The Big Idea, BBC2, February 14, 1996.
3. Sunday Times profile, ‘A kicking from the boohoo boy of books,’ July 12, 2009.
4. De Botton, ‘Plane English,’ Evening Standard, August 19, 2009.
5. Blacker, ‘Why does a philosopher need to join the clamour for speed?,’ The Independent, August 21, 2009.
6. Botton, ‘Plane English,’ Evening Standard, August 19, 2009.
7. Rowell, speech to climate activists, May 2007.

Murdoch’s speech was the headline event at the Guardian-sponsored festival and the paper duly devoted precious newsprint to an extract:

“There is a land grab going on – and it should be sternly resisted. The land grab is spearheaded by the BBC. The scope of its activities and ambitions is chilling.”¹

Murdoch made a noble plea for press freedom:

“Above all, we must have genuine independence in news media. Independence is characterised by the absence of the apparatus of supervision and dependency. Independence of faction, industrial or political. Independence of subsidy, gift or patronage. [...] people value honest, fearless, and independent news coverage that challenges the consensus.”

Murdoch wrapped up his speech with “an inescapable conclusion”:

“The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.”

The lack of self-awareness was stunning. The Murdochs of this world are naturally unable to conceive that corporate sponsorship compromises news reporting, showering pound and dollar-shaped sticks and carrots that inevitably cause journalism to slither in corporate-friendly directions. The speech was widely reported but debate was mostly facile, deflecting attention from the corporate media’s systemic failings; not least those of the BBC itself.

Nuanced Nonsense

The liberal press reacted in a suitably ‘nuanced’ way to Murdoch’s salvo. An Independent editorial had “much sympathy with Mr Murdoch’s [...] cri de coeur about the lack of restraints on the BBC’s growth, in particular on the internet.” The struggling newspaper bemoaned that:

“As long as the BBC provides what amounts to an all-encompassing news service on the internet within the price of the licence fee, it will be nigh-impossible for anyone else – on the internet or in print – to charge. [...] In highlighting how the BBC’s dominance distorts the news market, James Murdoch has done all the British media a favour.”²

A Guardian editorial argued that Murdoch had “made some good points”:

“There are aspects of the BBC’s size and purpose that should be scrutinised. Regulation should change with the times.”

Fanciful waffle about “media ecosystems” followed:

“What works rather well in the UK is a mixed economy of private and public. Newspapers are lightly regulated, fiercely opinionated and proudly independent. Public-service broadcasters are more heavily regulated in return for their subsidy. It’s not a perfect mix, but its (sic) part of the texture of life in the country.”³

“Not a perfect mix” is an interesting way to describe a media system that is innately, and massively, biased towards power and profit.

Peter Preston, veteran Guardian columnist and former editor, was ‘pragmatic’:

“Forget ‘chilling’ hyperbole about ‘state-sponsored news’ and standard Orwellian allusions: James Murdoch is right – or at least not far wrong. [...] How does a newspaper that wants (nay, needs) to move on to the web and pay for the words it puts there, cope when the BBC dishes them out for free?”

Participating in the controversy his newspaper had concocted, Jonathan Freedland responded to Murdoch in the Guardian:

“The BBC is one of the few British exports to be universally recognised as world class. That’s why BBC programmes from The Blue Planet to the Dickens adaptations are snapped up around the globe. They may not be watching Bleak House in Burma or Iran, but they are relying on BBC News for an independent, truthful view of the world.”⁴

In his dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell described the art of thought control called “Newspeak”:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

We are offered a “debate” confined between two false poles: the claim that the BBC is a threat to the “independent news” provided by commercial interests, and the claim that the BBC is a rare source of “independent, truthful” reporting. Modern journalism acts to “narrow the range of thought”, thus serving the powerful interests that control the mass media. It is not Big Brother; but it is certainly a form of “Newspeak”.

We’re Independent And Impartial Because We Say So

The fact that BBC journalists perform as they do without overt external interference is offered as proof of their independence. In 2007, Justin Webb, then the BBC’s North America editor, rejected the charge that he is a propagandist for US power, saying: “Nobody ever tells me what to say about America or the attitude to take towards the United States. And that is the case right across the board in television as well.”

Webb began a radio programme from the Middle East thus:

“June 2005. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flies to Cairo and at the American University makes a speech that will go down in history: ‘For sixty years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East; and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”⁵

Webb told his listeners in all seriousness: “I believe the Bush administration genuinely wanted that speech to be a turning point; a new start.” Nobody had to tell Webb to say these words; he really believed them.

Consider, too, the pronouncements of one BBC correspondent, reporting from Iraq:

“This is not promising soil in which to plant a western-style open society.”

And: “The coalition came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights.”⁶

When we challenged BBC news director Helen Boaden on whether she thought this version of US–UK intent perhaps compromised the BBC’s commitment to impartial reporting, she replied that such “analysis of the underlying motivation of the coalition is borne out by many speeches and remarks made by both Mr Bush and Mr Blair.”

If we are to take Boaden’s comments at face value, she was arguing that Bush and Blair must have been motivated to bring democracy to Iraq, because they said so! In other words, “impartial” reporting means that we should take our leaders’ claims on trust – to challenge the idea that they mean what they are saying is to stray into unprofessional bias.

In 2004, Boaden told one viewer: “People trust the BBC because they know it is an organisation independent of external influences. We do not take that trust lightly.”⁷

And yet the BBC’s senior management is appointed by the government of the day. In 2001, Steve Barnett noted in the Observer that “back in 1980, George Howard, the hunting, shooting and fishing aristocratic pal of Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, was appointed [BBC chairman] because Margaret Thatcher couldn’t abide the thought of distinguished Liberal Mark Bonham-Carter being promoted from vice-chairman.

“Then there was Stuart Young, accountant and brother of one of Thatcher’s staunchest cabinet allies, who succeeded Howard in 1983. He was followed in 1986 by Marmaduke Hussey, brother-in-law of another Cabinet Minister who was plucked from the obscurity of a directorship at Rupert Murdoch’s Times Newspapers. According to Norman Tebbit, then Tory party chairman, Hussey was appointed ‘to get in there and sort the place out, and in days not months.’ ”⁸

The same machinations continue to this day. At the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, both the BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies and his director-general, Greg Dyke, were supporters of, and donors to, the Labour party. Davies’s wife ran Gordon Brown’s office; his children served as pageboy and bridesmaid at the Brown wedding. Tony Blair had stayed at Davies’s holiday home. “In other words”, noted columnist Richard Ingrams, “it would be hard to find a better example of a Tony crony.”⁹

Readers will recall that BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan lost his job, along with Davies and Dyke, after intense government flak in response to Gilligan’s report that the Blair regime had manipulated intelligence over Iraq’s supposed WMD.

Displaying a wilful blindness to all of the above facts, the Observer described the BBC this week as “genuinely independent of government.”¹⁰

Consider, too, the establishment links of the members of the BBC Trust whose duty it is to ensure that the BBC upholds its public obligations, including impartiality. One of these worthies is Anthony Fry, formerly of Rothschilds and later the ill-fated Lehman Brothers where he was head of UK operations. Fry boasts on the BBC website:

“Having spent my career in the City as an investment banker, for over a decade specialising in the media industry, it’s a great privilege to bring my commercial understanding of the sector to help the BBC deliver value for licence fee payers in today’s rapidly changing broadcasting environment.”

The Trust consists of twelve safe pairs of hands with extensive backgrounds in large corporate media organisations, advertising, banking, finance and industry. We are to believe that these individuals are independent of the government that appointed them, and of the elite corporate and other vested interests in which they are deeply embedded. We are to believe that they will uphold fair and balanced reporting which displays not a hint of bias towards state ideology or economic orthodoxy in a world of rampant corporate power.

Corporate reporters are required to be oblivious to such simple realities. Thus the Guardian could once again find space to allow Sir Michael Lyons, chair of the BBC Trust, to insist that the broadcaster provides “free, impartial, accurate news”.¹¹

Just days later the Guardian gave free rein to Mark Thompson, BBC director general:

“The absolute first building block keystone of the BBC is delivering impartial, unbiased news.”¹²

But Lord Reith, founder of the BBC, put it rather differently when he wrote of the establishment in his diary: “They know they can trust us not to be really impartial.”¹³

1. James Murdoch, ‘Put an end to this dumping of free news’, Guardian, August 29, 2009.
2. Leader, ‘The BBC’s unhealthy dominance’, Independent, August 29, 2009.
3. Leader, ‘An American in Edinburgh’, Guardian, August 31, 2009.
4. Jonathan Freedland, ‘Don’t let Murdoch smash this jewel’, Guardian, September 2, 2009.
5. Justin Webb, ‘Death to America’, BBC Radio 4 series, part three, first broadcast on April 30, 2007.
6. Paul Wood, BBC1, News at Ten, December 22, 2005.
7. Helen Boaden, email forwarded to Media Lens, December 2, 2004.
8. Steve Barnett, ‘Right man, right time, for all the right reasons’, Observer, September 23, 2001.
9. Richard Ingrams, ‘We don’t need Tony’s cronies at the BBC,’ Observer, September 23, 2001.
10. Leader, ‘A bold BBC does not need to be a bigger BBC’, Observer, September 13, 2009.
11. John Plunkett, ‘Sir Michael Lyons: BBC will not retreat from news’, guardian.co.uk, September 9, 2009, 15.49 BST.
12. Jane Martinson, ‘Mark Thompson: “People want the BBC to step backwards,” ’ Guardian, September 14, 2009.
13. Quoted, David Miller, ‘Media wrongs against humanity’, TruthOut.org, June 24, 2005.

Also in June, a military coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of Honduras. President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and deported to Costa Rica on June 28. Initial clashes between troops loyal to the coup plotters and Zelaya supporters left at least one person dead and 30 injured. On July 30, as many as 150 people were arrested, with dozens injured, when soldiers and police attacked demonstrators with tear gas, water cannon, clubs and gunfire. One of the wounded, a 38-year-old teacher, was left fighting for his life after being shot in the head. Journalists reporting from the scene were also attacked.¹

Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, describes how the Honduran people have been “risking their lives, confronting the army’s bullets, beatings, and arbitrary arrests and detentions”. And yet the US media has reported this repression “only minimally, with the major print media sometimes failing even to mention the censorship there.”²

Our own media database search (August 3) of national UK press editorials mentioning the word ’Iran’ over the previous five weeks delivered 26 results. A search for editorials containing the word ’Honduras’ delivered 2 results. In fact, there has been a single leading article on the Honduran crisis (in the Independent on June 30 — see below). Over the same period, a search for UK national press articles mentioning ‘Iran’ gave 848 results; for ‘Honduras’ 96 results. This is not hard science, but it does indicate comparative levels of UK media coverage of the two issues.

Weisbrot notes that the Honduran coup is “a recurrent story” in Latin America, pitting “a reform president who is supported by labor unions and social organizations against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite who is accustomed to choosing not only the Supreme Court and the Congress, but also the president.”³

Mainstream outlets claim the coup marks a worrying return to earlier regional trends. A July 23 BBC “Q&A“ on Honduras commented:

“Coups and political upheaval were common in Central America for much of the 20th Century, and until the mid-1980s the military dominated political life in Honduras. Mr Zelaya’s removal is the first in the region since 1993…”⁴

This is false. In April 2002, a US-backed military coup briefly ousted Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez until mass protests returned him to power. A Guardian article that month reported that the “US ‘gave the nod’ to Venezuelan coup.” Several weeks prior to the coup attempt, US government officials had met the business leaders who assumed power after Chávez was arrested. General Rincon, the Venezuelan army’s chief of staff, had visited the Pentagon the previous December and met senior officials.⁵

A 2004 military coup forced Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to flee to Central Africa. Aristide told the Associated Press that he was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces.⁶ Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, wrote:

“Haiti, again, is ablaze… Almost nobody, however, understands that today’s chaos was made in Washington – deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly.”⁷

The BBC Q&A noted: “The role of the US is key, as it is Honduras’s biggest trading partner.”

Curiously, the article failed to mention that the US has its only Central American military base in Honduras. In fact the Honduran military is armed, trained and advised by Washington in a relationship that is deep and enduring. The two generals who led the coup were both trained at the US School of the Americas (SOA) based in Georgia (SOA is now known as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC). Commander-in-chief Romeo Vasquez, head of the Honduran military, received training at SOA between 1976 and 1984. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, head of the air force, studied there in 1996. Colonel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, a Honduran army lawyer who also trained at SOA, has admitted the illegality of the military’s kidnapping of Zelaya. He told the Miami Herald: “It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government. That’s impossible.”²

Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of School of the Americas Watch, described SOA last month as “this school of assassins, this school of coups, this school with so much blood on its hands.”⁸

Weisbrot notes that Washington’s response to the Honduran coup is guided by conflicting interests: “powerful lobbyists such as Lanny Davis and Bennett Ratcliff, who are close to [Hillary] Clinton and are leading the coup government’s strategy; the Republican right, including members of Congress who openly support the coup; and new cold warriors of both parties in the Congress, the state department and White House who see Zelaya as a threat because of his co-operation with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and other left governments.”⁹

This explains Washington’s ambiguous reaction. The Obama administration’s first statement did not criticise the coup, and the state department continues to refuse to describe it as a coup. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeatedly refused to say that ‘restoring the democratic order’ in Honduras requires the return of Zelaya. It took three weeks for the White House to threaten to cut off aid.

Roger Burbach, Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas, writes:

U.S. efforts to restore Zelaya have been quite tepid compared to other countries. While many ambassadors have been withdrawn, the US head diplomat Hugo Llorens, appointed by George W. Bush, remains in place. There are reports that he may have even given the green light to the coup plotters, or at least did nothing to stop them. And while the World Bank has suspended assistance, the State Department merely warns that $180 million in US economic aid may be in jeopardy. Most importantly the United States refuses to freeze the bank accounts and cancel the visas of the coup leaders, measures that Zelaya and other Latin American governments have urged Washington to do.¹⁰

Recently, US Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley, commented:

We certainly think that if we were choosing a model government and a model leader for countries of the region to follow, that the current leadership in Venezuela would not be a particular model. If that is the lesson that President Zelaya has learned from this episode, that would be a good lesson.¹¹

The Independent: Doing Democracy A Service

In their June 30 leading article, the Independent’s editors, led by pro-Iraq war editor Roger Alton (formerly editor of the Observer), opened with this extraordinary paragraph:

The ousting of the Honduran President Manuel Zelaya by the country’s military at the weekend has been condemned by many members of the international community as an affront to democracy. But despite a natural distaste for any military coup, it is possible that the army might have actually done Honduran democracy a service.¹²

By contrast, many experienced observers have warned that the coup represents an extreme threat to prospects for democracy in Honduras and the region. The Independent explained its reasoning:

President Zelaya was planning a referendum to give him power to alter the constitution. But the proposed alterations were perilously vague, with opponents accusing Mr Zelaya of wanting to scrap the four-year presidential term limit. The country’s courts and congress had called the vote illegal.

This is an increasingly familiar turn of events in emerging democracies: an elected leader, facing the end of his time in office, decides that the country cannot do without him and resorts to dubious measures to retain power. The Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez, won a referendum in February altering his country’s constitution and abolishing term limits. He now talks about ruling beyond 2030.

On the same day, in the same newspaper, Heather Berkman, a Latin America associate at the global political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, wrote:

Manuel Zelaya has taken a few unexpected turns to the left during his tenure as President of Honduras, deviating from its political norms. This time, it looks like he may have gone too far… Mr Zelaya can be blamed for staging a coup that, in turn, provoked a counter-coup.”¹³

Recall that these articles appeared in the Independent, widely considered to be at the left of the mainstream media spectrum.

Weisbrot argues that in fact there was no way for Zelaya to extend his rule even if the referendum had been held and passed:

The June 28 referendum was nothing more than a non-binding poll of the electorate, asking whether the voters wanted to place a binding referendum on the November ballot to approve a redrafting of the country’s constitution. If it had passed, and if the November referendum had been held (which was not very likely) and also passed, the same ballot would have elected a new president and Zelaya would have stepped down in January. So, the belief that Zelaya was fighting to extend his term in office has no factual basis – although most people who follow this story in the press seem to believe it. The most that could be said is that if a new constitution were eventually approved, Zelaya might have been able to run for a second term at some future date.²

Nikolas Kozloff, journalist and author of Revolution!: South America and the Rise of the New Left, traces the deeper sources of opposition to the Honduran president. Around 2007-2008, the initially conservative Zelaya began to embrace “the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas.” Kozloff explains:

It’s Chávez’s answer to the US-imposed free trade agreements in the region. And Zelaya had come out in support of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. And so, this set him at odds with the United States, and there was a history of friction between the US and Zelaya leading up to the coup.”¹⁴

As the Independent editorial makes clear, the mainstream offers a different version of events. Kozloff comments:

I think if you were just reading the reports in the mainstream media, you might get the impression that this coup is just about term limits in Honduras and it’s just a conflict over whether Zelaya will be able to extend his constitutional mandate of one four-year term.

The BBC, for example, reported: “Zelaya was sent into exile on 28 June amid a power struggle over his plans for constitutional change.”⁴

The Times wrote: “His opponents say that he wanted to overturn term limits and extend his power like leftist regional allies such as President Chávez of Venezuela…”¹⁵

Kozloff comments: “And my point is that there is an ideological component to this coup… the first salvo against the Honduran elite was his moves to raise the minimum wage by 60 percent… I mean, this is a country where you have these maquiladora assembly plants, and the Honduran elite were, to say the least, displeased by the moves.”

In a rare exception to his newspaper’s wretched performance, Johann Hari wrote in the Independent of how Zelaya had “increased the minimum wage by 60 per cent, saying sweatshops were no longer acceptable and ‘the rich must pay their share’.

“The tiny elite at the top – who own 45 per cent of the country’s wealth – are horrified. They are used to having Honduras run by them, for them.”¹⁶

As Hari noted: “It was always inevitable that the people at the top would fight back to preserve their unearned privilege.”

Prior to the coup, US multinational Chiquita expressed its concern at Zelaya’s minimum wage decrees, which they said would reduce profits and increase export costs. Chiquita appealed to the Honduran Business Association, which was also opposed to Zelaya’s minimum wage policy. Kozloff told the website Democracy Now!: “what I find really interesting is that Chiquita is allied to a Washington law firm called Covington, which advises multinational corporations. And who is the vice chairman of Covington? None other than John Negroponte…”¹⁷

Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, when he played a key role in coordinating US terror attacks on Nicaragua by means of “the Contras”, a mercenary army. Negroponte is complicit in massive human rights abuses committed by the Honduran military.

Throughout the twentieth century, Chiquita, then known as United Fruit Company, was associated with “some of the most backward, retrograde political and economic forces in Central America and indeed outside of Central America in such countries as Colombia”, Kozloff notes. In 1954, United Fruit played a leading role in the US-backed coup that ousted Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected leader of Guatemala.

Kozloff reports that the current US Attorney General, Eric Holder, was Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton. Holder defended Chiquita and its actions in Colombia when Chiquita was allied to right-wing paramilitary death squads in the 1990s and was found guilty of paying off paramilitaries. Holder was Chiquita’s lead counsel.

We searched national UK newspapers (August 3) for articles containing the words ‘Honduras’ and (separately) ‘Chiquita,’ ‘John Negroponte’ and ’Eric Holder’ since June 28; all searches produced zero results.

1. Bill Van Auken, ‘Honduran coup regime launches brutal crackdown,’ August 1, 2009, World Socialist Web Site.
2. Weisbrot, ‘Hondurans Resist Coup, Will Need Help From Other Countries,’ ZNet, July 9, 2009.
3. Weisbrot, ‘Does the US back the Honduran coup?’ The Guardian, July 1, 2009.
4. ‘Q&A: Crisis in Honduras,’ BBC website, July 23, 2009.
5. Julian Borger and Alex Bellos, ‘US “gave the nod” to Venezuelan coup,’ The Guardian, April 17, 2002.
6. Eliott C. McLaughlin, Associated Press, March 1, 2004.
7. Sachs, ‘Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti,’ The Nation, February 28, 2004.
8. ’Generals Who Led Honduras Military Coup Trained at the School of the Americas,’ Democracy Now!, July 1, 2009.
9. Weisbrot, ‘U.S.- Brokered Mediation Has Failed – It’s Time for Latin America to Take Charge,’ ZNet, August 1, 2009.
10. Burbach, ‘Obama and Hillary Nix Change in Honduras,’ ZNet, July 27, 2009.
11. James Suggett, ‘Honduras Coup,’ ZNet, July 28, 2009.
12. Leading article, ‘Guns and democracy,’ The Independent, June 30, 2009.
13. Berkman, ‘Zelaya pushed,’ The Independent, June 30, 2009.
14. ‘What’s Behind the Honduras Coup? Tracing Zelaya’s Trajectory,’ Democracy Now!, July 1, 2009.
15. Hannah Strange, ‘Deposed President “can never return”,’ The Times, July 3, 2009.
16. Hari, ‘The other 9/11 returns to haunt Latin America,’ The Independent, July 3, 2009.
17. ‘From Arbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America,’ Democracy Now!, July 21, 2009.

The “big beasts” of the pre-digital media age are in big trouble, the Guardian tells us. In the last year, they have faced, not only structural challenges but the worst recession for a generation:

“As advertising revenues dried up, newspaper, television and radio owners – especially those in local media – faced a stark challenge: adapt or die.

“The result was tens of thousands of job losses and unprecedented uncertainty over how the media landscape will look in just a few years’ time. How many national newspapers will survive? Can commercial radio avoid complete meltdown? How much are people prepared to pay for content online – if at all?” (9)

At the heart of the uncertainty lies the internet and how to make it pay. For 100 years the corporate mass media has flourished thanks to its monopoly of the means of mass communication. Reviewing the history of the British media, James Curran and Jean Seaton write that the industrialisation of the press in the early twentieth century triggered “a progressive transfer of power from the working class to wealthy businessmen, while dependence on advertising encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press and stunted its subsequent development before the First World War.”¹

The effect of advertising was dramatic: “one of four things happened to national radical papers that failed to meet the requirements of advertisers. They either closed down; accommodated to advertising pressure by moving up-market; stayed in a small audience ghetto with manageable losses; or accepted an alternative source of institutional patronage.”²

Unable to compete on price and outreach, the radical press was pushed to the margins. Hard to believe now, but there were once 325 newspapers and magazines published by supporters of the US Socialist Party, reaching 2 million subscribers.

A torrent of propaganda has poured out of the corporate media monopoly. Former BBC Controller, Stuart Hood, argued that both the BBC and commercial TV have always “interpreted impartiality as the acceptance of that segment of opinion which constitutes parliamentary consensus. Opinion that falls outside that consensus has difficulty in finding expression.”³

But if media “impartiality” is based on the “parliamentary consensus” then, by definition, even highly rational challenges to that consensus will be rejected as “biased” and will “find difficulty in finding expression”. An example was provided in 2006 by the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent Bridget Kendall:

“There’s still bitter disagreement over invading Iraq. Was it justified or a disastrous miscalculation?”⁴

The “parliamentary consensus” does indeed limit thinkable thought between the two poles arguing that the invasion was either “justified” or, at worst, a “miscalculation”. The far more reasonable argument — that the invasion was a war crime — is usually ignored because it falls beyond “that segment of opinion which constitutes parliamentary consensus”.

Amazingly, then, parliament is, in effect, granted the right to define reality, with the media acting in support to affirm the definition. If this sounds fantastical, consider comments made in 2004 by Nick Robinson, then political editor at ITV news, in the Times:

In the run-up to the conflict, I and many of my colleagues, were bombarded with complaints that we were acting as mouthpieces for Mr Blair. Why, the complainants demanded to know, did we report without question his warning that Saddam was a threat? Hadn’t we read what Scott Ritter had said or Hans Blix? I always replied in the same way. It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… That is all someone in my sort of job can do. We are not investigative reporters.⁵

Thus, the media act as intellectual filters, reinforcing the consensus view and ignoring or attacking challenges to it. If it turns out that parliament is in thrall to elite interests offering a Tweedledum/Twiddledee no-choice, then the media will promote, rather than expose, this empty shell of a democracy. And this, of course, is exactly the situation we are in: politics and media work together to insulate power from rational thought and public interference.

The corporate media got away with its role in this closed-loop oppression for so long by simple virtue of its monopoly power to suppress dissent. But the world has changed. The internet allows non-corporate journalists and commentators to bypass the corporate gatekeepers and communicate to a global audience, instantly, at almost zero cost. These analysts generally do not charge for their work — almost all radical material is freely available on the internet.

And here is the rub for the mainstream: this non-corporate journalism is unconstrained by the distorting influence of wealthy owners and parent companies with busy fingers in any number of economic and political pies. It is unconstrained by the reliance of corporate journalists on corporate advertising, with all that that implies. It is uncompromised by the insidious dependence on government and other official sources for cheap news; by thoughts of career progression in the revolving door between journalism, public relations and government.

The result is really beyond argument: dissident reporting and commentary is rational, honest and, therefore, interesting, in a way that corporate journalism can never be. This has struck us with very great force, many times. In researching specialist issues relating, for example, to Haiti, Iran, Korea and the financial crisis, we constantly find ourselves unable to make sense of the mainstream version of events, which is compromised and distorted to the point of incomprehensibility. By contrast, when we turn to independent, non-corporate expert opinion, we are quickly able to understand what is happening and why. (The specialists cited in our recent media alert, ‘Cartoon Korea’, provide an excellent example of this.) The mainstream is just not able to compete on honesty and rationality. And, crucially, it needs to charge for its extremely poor product.

The deceptiveness of the corporate media version of the world is all around us, rendered invisible (like the nose on our face) only by its omnipresence. In announcing MediaGuardian’s latest annual list of the 100 “most powerful people” in the media, the Guardian boldly declares of itself:

“The paper is the voice of the left in the British press.”

Evidence for the claim is proffered: “a Guardian leader last month said Labour should replace Gordon Brown as its party leader and prime minister. ‘The truth is there is no vision from him, no plan, no argument for the future and no support,’ it said.”

This is the Guardian’s idea of speaking up for the left!

At 51 on the Guardian list, the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson is a fiercely challenging interviewer, we are to believe. He “can have earned no higher accolade than that afforded him before Barack Obama’s first appearance before the British press. He has ‘generally considered the most important job in British political journalism’, said a briefing prepared for the president by US intelligence officials. It added that he has ‘carved out a niche as a persistent irritant to world leaders’.”

Again, an example is given. Robinson proved his mettle by “stumping the normally word-perfect Obama with a question about who was to blame for the financial crisis. Robinson, with his trademark glasses and bald pate, presumably won’t have to be pointed out to the president next time.”

This is the anaemic version of dissent sold by an industry whose priority is “the smooth operation of the machinery of everyday life and the perpetuation of the present arrangement of wealth and power,” as Howard Zinn has noted.⁶

In January 2003, Robinson told ITV news anchor Nicholas Owen:

However, Nick, +they+ look at these things in a slightly different way in Downing Street. +Yes+, almost two-thirds of the public say they’re not convinced of the case for war, that it hasn’t yet been made, but Tony Blair would probably say the same — he would say we’re not +yet+ making the case for war, we’re making the case that you have to be ready for war otherwise Saddam Hussein won’t back down. The difficulty, as one Downing Street insider put it to me, is we’re more in a parallel with 1930 than with 1939. In other words, this isn’t a dictator who’s already attacked another country; it’s a dictator who +might+ do something, who’s got potential. His [Blair's] message, very simply, Nick, is we +have+ to confront this man – we can’t back down.⁷

Robinson later described how hundreds of British troops were “risking their lives to bring peace and security to the streets of Iraq.”⁸

The MediaGuardian 100 list at least provides some insight into the world of the “big beasts” who control what we know and think. Consider number 8 on the list, Rebekah Brooks (nee Wade), editor of the Sun and chief executive elect of News International:

Married last month to her second husband, horse trainer Charlie Brooks, the guest list at the wedding was like a who’s who of Westminster, Fleet Street and the City including Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Jeremy Clarkson, Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone, and the extended Murdoch family, including Rupert, James, Elisabeth and her husband, Matthew Freud. The Daily Telegraph editor, Will Lewis, was the best man.

A feature in Tatler magazine last month described how the pair liked to rise early ‘at their two-bedroom taupe-painted barn outside Chipping Norton’ to fly to Venice by private jet for lunch at Harry’s Bar before returning to central London for dinner at Wilton’s restaurant in Jermyn Street.

Afghanistan — “The Verbiage About ‘Democracy‘s War’”

The latest manifestation of the media monopoly reinforcing a “parliamentary consensus” involves the US-UK war on Afghanistan. In an article entitled, ‘Back our boys — they fight for your lives,’ Sue Carroll asks in the Mirror:

Enjoy your barbecue at the weekend? Sleep easy in your bed last night? Get to work without any problems? I trust you did because this is what liberty is all about. The right to live safely in a civilised community free from the oppression of thugs and fanatics who wouldn’t think twice about crushing our democracy and slaughtering us as we sleep.

It’s hard-earned, this easy living. Millions of men have died for our freedom and more are losing their lives in Afghanistan to protect us. So less of the hand-wringing please about whether we should or should not be fighting a war against the Taliban. It’s a no-brainer.

This is the approved propaganda view, not just of the current conflict, but of every war throughout history. The Telegraph comments:

“The conflict in Afghanistan is complex and difficult but it is, on balance, a war worth fighting to crush the camps which train terrorists for assaults on Western cities.”⁹

There are problems, in fact absurdities, but conveniently, the Telegraph reminds us, “The Obama surge is addressing all that.”⁹ Indeed, the Telegraph did a good job of explaining Obama’s utility and popularity right across the political spectrum:

“If this anti-Iraq war disciple of ‘soft power’ feels the need to put 20,000 more American troops in harm’s way, there surely must be good reason for concern.”¹⁰

We can be sure Obama knows best. Curiously, the disciple of “soft power” has (“temporarily”) increased the size of the US Army by 22,000 soldiers, raising the total number of active US soldiers from 547,000 to 569,000.

In 2004, an Egyptian academic described how hatred of the US is rooted in its support for “every possible anti-democratic government in the Arab-Islamic world… When we hear American officials speaking of freedom, democracy and such values, they make terms like these sound obscene.”¹¹

The Financial Times reported: “while only might can destroy al-Qaeda, its expanding support base can be eroded only by policies Arabs and Muslims see as just”. Destroying al-Qaeda will therefore have little effect if “the underlying conditions that facilitated the group’s emergence and popularity – political oppression and economic marginalisation – will persist.”¹²

Two political scientists commented:

“Delicate social and political problems cannot be bombed or ‘missiled’ out of existence… Violence can be likened to a virus; the more you bombard it, the more it spreads.”¹³

Ami Ayalon, the head of Israel’s General Security Service (Shabak) from 1996 to 2000, has suggested that “those who want victory” against terror without addressing underlying grievances “want an unending war.”¹⁴

This appeared to be obvious to the editors of the Guardian in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. On September 15, 2001, a Guardian editorial observed:

“But America’s dilemma, once the verbiage about ‘democracy’s war’ and ‘freedom’s brightest beacon’ is cut away, is that its military options, to the extent that they are currently understood, are largely unsuited to the task in hand.

“Indeed, much of what appears to be under contemplation will just make matters worse. For consider: any major air and/or ground attack mounted against Afghanistan in pursuit of prime suspect Osama bin Laden will certainly produce civilian casualties. It may not produce Bin Laden (who may not even be there). Such an attack would inflame Muslim opinion and hand the terrorists a second triumph: following Manhattan, here would be the ‘holy war’ they have long sought to provoke.“¹⁵

Consider how the ideological blinkers had fallen over the Guardian’s eyes by 2006 in relation to “democracy’s war”, when it referred to “the foreigners helping steer this long-suffering country towards stability and democracy.”¹⁶

More recently, the Guardian noted that the reality in Afghanistan “is a country where security is getting worse and advances – such as democracy, the return of refugees and universal education – are under threat.”¹⁷

Not only had “the verbiage about ‘democracy’s war’” been more than verbiage, it had resulted in actual democracy, which was now under threat.

By striking contrast, the war correspondent Reginald Thompson commented on attempts to bring “democracy” to the Korean peninsula by force of arms in the 1950s. In his superb book, Cry Korea, published in 1951, Thompson wrote:

“What a mockery it was to name this kind of thing democracy! What a Quixotic business – at best – to try to establish it, to imagine it possible to establish an evolutionary result without evolution.”¹⁸

Thompson was even able to comprehend Chinese suspicions:

“But would the USA or the UN leave Korea? China might think not – it was already apparent to all observers that democracy is not a saleable commodity but an evolutionary growth in certain circumstances. It might take a long time to take root, even given the circumstances, in a peasant country like Korea, accustomed only to tyranny of one kind of another. So that the US and UN role might be reasonably that of conquerors and colonisers.”¹⁹

By contrast, an Independent leader comments:

“We need to be mentally prepared for the duration of this vital mission to secure Afghanistan’s democratic future, as well as the likely human cost.”²⁰

Roger Alton, the pro-Iraq war editor of the Independent, remains onside:

The Western mission in Afghanistan, though overshadowed by the foolish invasion of Iraq and often poorly carried out these past eight years, remains a worthy one… Nato troops, including Britain’s contingent, are in Afghanistan at the invitation of the democratically elected government of President Hamid Karzai. And their purpose is to protect civilians from the depredations of the Taliban while the Afghan army builds up the capacity to take over the job.

They are also fighting for the protection of British citizens. Some three-quarters of UK terror plots under surveillance by the authorities have links to militants based on the Afghan/ Pakistan border. The Taliban granted al-Qa’ida a base before 2001. There is no reason to suppose they would not do the same again if they returned to power. Our own security is bound up with the safety of the Afghan people.²⁰

In a rare departure from the propaganda norm, the Guardian published comments by former diplomat and deputy governor in occupied Iraq, Rory Stewart, now Ryan Family professor of the practice of human rights, Harvard University:

Afghanistan’s political and strategic significance has been grossly exaggerated. The idea that we are there so we don’t have to fight terrorists in Britain is absurd. The terrorist cells and training camps are not in Afghanistan. The people the Americans and British are fighting in Afghanistan are mostly local tribesmen resisting foreign forces. Does al-Qaida still require large terrorist training camps to organise attacks?

Could they not plan in Hamburg and train at flight schools in Florida; or meet in Bradford and build morale on an adventure training course in Wales? Those who argue that we have the right strategy provided we have enough troops and equipment were saying not long ago that if we had only had 7,000 troops in Helmand instead of 5,000, we could defeat the Taliban.

Impressively honest, but Stewart’s views on Afghanistan have been mentioned in a total of four articles in the entire UK national press. As ever, opinion that falls outside the parliamentary consensus “has difficulty in finding expression”.

1. Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility — The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Routledge, Fourth Edition, 1991, p.47.
2. Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility — The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Routledge, Fourth Edition, 1991, p.9.
3. Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility — The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Routledge, Fourth Edition, 1991, p.200.
4. Kendall, BBC Six O’Clock News, March 20, 2006
5. Robinson, ‘“Remember the last time you shouted like that?” I asked the spin doctor,’ The Times, July 16, 2004
6. The Zinn Reader – Writings on Disobedience and Democracy, Seven Stories Press, 1997, p.339.
7. Robinson, ITV News, 12:30, January 13, 2003.
8. Robinson, ITV News, September 8, 2003.
9. Leading article, ‘Our troops in Afghanistan need the right tools for the job,’ Daily Telegraph, July 10, 2009.
10. Irwin Stelzer, ‘A lesson from history that goes unheeded; Great leaders can see the bigger picture; in times of conflict,’ Daily Telegraph, July 15, 2009.
11. Quoted Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Or Survival, Hamish Hamilton, 2003, p.215.
12. Editorial, Financial Times, May 14, 2003.
13. James Bill and Rebecca Bill Chavez, Middle East Journal, autumn 2002.
14. Quoted Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Or Survival, Hamish Hamilton, 2003, p.213.
15. Leading article: ‘The penknife and the bomb: Brute force is not the way to defeat the terrorist threat,’ The Guardian, September 15, 2001.
16. Leading article: ‘Afghanistan: The forgotten war,’ The Guardian, January 18, 2006.
17. Leading article: ‘Afghanistan: Bravery may not be enough,’ The Guardian, June 10, 2008.
18. Thompson, Cry Korea – The Korean War: A Reporter’s Notebook, Reportage Press, 2009, p.175.
19. Thompson, Cry Korea – The Korean War: A Reporter’s Notebook, Reportage Press, 2009, p.222.
20. Leading article, ‘The public mood is shifting, but the mission must push on,’ The Independent, July 13, 2009.

Earlier this month, the UN announced the results of an inquiry into attacks on its buildings and personnel in Gaza. It concluded that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were:

“[I]nvolved in varying degrees of negligence or recklessness with regard to United Nations premises and to the safety of United Nations staff and other civilians within those premises, with consequent deaths, injuries, and extensive physical damage and loss of property.” (Donald Macintyre, “UN retreats after Israel hits out at Gaza report,” Independent, May 6, 2009)

Incidents for which Israel was held responsible by the UN inquiry included:

* The deaths of three young men killed by a single IDF missile strike at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Asma school in Gaza City.

* The firing of heavy mortar rounds into the UNRWA Jabalia school, injuring seven people sheltering in the school, killing up to 40 people in the immediate vicinity and injuring a further 50.

* Aerial bombing of the UNRWA Bureij health center on the same day, causing the death of a patient, serious injuries to two other patients and injuries to nine of the health center’s employees.

* Artillery firing by the IDF into the UNRWA field office compound in Gaza city, combined with the use of white phosphorus, causing injuries and considerable damage to it and the surrounding buildings, and leading to the disruption of the UN’s humanitarian operations in Gaza.

* Artillery firing by the IDF into the UNRWA Beit Lahia school, again with the use of white phosphorus, causing the deaths of two children, aged 5 and 7, and injuries to 13 others.

Contrary to Israeli claims, the UN inquiry found no evidence that “Hamas militants” had used UN property to attack Israel or Israeli forces. Indeed, the report demanded that the UN urge Israel to retract its allegations to that effect.

The inquiry’s narrow remit was restricted to UN property and personnel; a key recommendation was that $11m compensation should be sought from Israel for damage to UN property in Gaza. But the final recommendation was that +all+ killings, injuries and damages in Gaza “should be investigated as part of an impartial inquiry mandated, and adequately resourced, to investigate allegations of violations of international humanitarian law.” (Julian Borger, “UN chief rejects further inquiry,” Guardian, May 6, 2009)

Shamefully, however, when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented the inquiry results, he rejected its authors’ call for such an investigation. He even decided not to release the full 184-page report. According to a brief item on the BBC Arabic news website, the BBC was informed by “a diplomatic source” that the United States “informed Ban’s office that the report should not be published in full due to the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks.” (Cited in Hasan Abu Nimah, “Ban Ki-moon’s moral failure,” The Electronic Intifada, May 6, 2009.)

The sophistry of these words — “the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks” — is newspeak for “dangerous truths that would further damage the reputations of Israel and the United States.”

Ban, no doubt aware of these dangers, conveniently produced his own 27-page summary. Inter Press Service reported that the original report was thus “meticulously stripped down . . . mostly due to [alleged] political sensitivities and on security grounds.” (Thalif Deen, “UN chief defends ‘watered down’ Gaza report,” Inter Press Service, May 5, 2009) The report supposedly contained “secret information supplied by Israel” about its attacks on Gaza. (Abu Nimah, “Ban Ki-moon’s moral failure,” op. cit.)

Ban then issued this summary together with a covering letter to the UN Security Council. In the letter, Ban said he was “carefully considering” what actions, “if any”, to take on the 11 recommendations by his own inquiry team. But he had already appeased both Israel and its powerful backers in the UN Security Council, notably the United States, by stating that he “did not plan any further inquiry.”

True to form, the Israelis had called the report “tendentious, patently biased” even before the summary was published. (”UN rejects UN probe under Israeli pressure,” Palestine Chronicle, May 6, 2009) Ban took his cue adroitly. While noting the Israeli government’s “significant reservations and objections”, he bent over backwards to praise them for their cooperation. He also spoke out, reportedly urged by Israeli ministers and officials, against “continued and indiscriminate” attacks by Hamas.

Of Circus Dogs And Whips

In effect, then, the UN Secretary General rejected his own inquiry which had been lead by Ian Martin, a former head of Amnesty International. Moreover, Ban’s effective suppression of the full report was doubtless an attempt to draw a line under the inquiry, minimizing damage to Israel and the United States.

Noam Chomsky commented on the possible role of US-Israeli “diplomacy” in the Secretary-General’s decision not to publish the full report or to proceed with a wide-ranging inquiry:

“[A]s far as I know there’s no direct evidence about what happened [behind the scenes], though it’s not hard to guess. Ban knows as well as any other Sec’y-General that criticism of the US (hence its offshoots [such as Israel]) will undermine what little there is of a UN.” (E-mail to Media Lens, May 13, 2009)

In other words, direct pressure is not always required. Indeed, it is often more efficient to have an amenable person in place who will do the master’s bidding without being told what to do. As George Orwell once observed:

“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip. But the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.” (Orwell, ‘As I Please,’ Tribune, 1944)

Ban Ki-moon has already demonstrated his gymnastic prowess. When he visited Gaza in January 2009, he was justifiably “appalled” at Israel’s “outrageous and totally unacceptable attack.” But his critical remarks were restricted to the attack on UN installations and personnel, not Gaza as a whole.

Hasan Abu Nimah, Jordan’s former UN ambassador, noted astutely that Ban’s “courage only went so far”:

“[His] flash of anger was limited however only to UN facilities. He spoke as if the rest of Gaza — where more than 7,000 people lay dead or injured, and thousands of homes, schools, mosques, universities, police stations and government buildings were destroyed — did not exist, or were not of UN concern.” (Abu Nimah, “Ban Ki-moon’s moral failure,” op. cit.)

He continued:

“Whisked around in his convoy, he did not bother to stop and talk to any of Israel’s victims — the families who had just dug the remains of their loved ones from the rubble or those with horrific injuries in Gaza’s overstretched hospitals. These are the very people, the Palestinian refugees, that the UN is in Gaza to help, but there was it seems no time for them.”

Ban did condemn “the excessive use of force” by the Israelis in its massive assault on Gaza. As Abu Nimah noted, presumably the UN Secretary-General “found Israel’s attack on Gaza perfectly acceptable, but he disagreed only with the tonnage of high explosives that should be dropped by Israeli planes.” While correctly condemning Hamas rocket attacks on Israel as “violations of basic humanitarian law,” Ban neglected to say the same of Israel’s ongoing massive violations.

Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said Ban’s response to the new UN report was “disappointing”. He was clear that the inquiry had produced a “very serious and very scrupulously argued report that’s based on very careful analysis of the available evidence.” (Al Jazeera, May 5, 2009)

Yvonne Terlingen, Amnesty International representative at the United Nations, also expressed her concern at Ban Ki-moon’s stance. She told Inter Press Service [IPS]: “We are very disappointed with the Secretary-General’s reaction to what we have come to know [from the report].”

Terlingen called for a broader inquiry into the Israeli attacks by the 15-member UN Security Council. But one unnamed Arab diplomat told IPS he did not expect any investigation by the Security Council because three of the permanent members, the US, Britain and France, are “far too protective” of Israel. The secretary-general, he said, “will not pursue a broader inquiry because he is under pressure and beholden to the big powers in the Security Council.”

“It’s a lost cause,” he added, pointing out that, “Israel knows that it can get away with murder.” (Deen, “UN chief defends ‘watered down’ Gaza report,” op. cit.)

Although the UN Secretary General refused to launch a full, wide-ranging investigation under his direct mandate, Israel’s leaders have not entirely evaded scrutiny. A four-person team lead by Justice Richard Goldstone has already been appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate alleged breaches of international law, and possible war crimes, in Gaza. But this will not have the same stamp of authority as a full-ranging, impartial investigation carried out by direct authority of the UN Secretary-General himself.

Moreover, the Goldstone investigation is likely to be severely hobbled by Israel’s refusal to cooperate and the time that has already elapsed since the assault on Gaza. Falk believes Israel is taking an obstructive stance “because it knows deep down that it made serious human rights violations.” He refutes Israel’s assertions that efforts to establish the truth are “one-sided attempts to demonize Israel” and “tarnish its reputation”:

“The real reason [for Israel’s non-cooperation] is that the facts overwhelmingly support allegations that Israel is understandably concerned that any objective inquiry would indeed confirm the allegations and create a situation in which the international community would be obliged to seek some kind of procedure for accountability.” (Press TV, “Falk tells why Israel stonewalls Gaza probe,” April 30, 2009)

The Media’s Shrug Of Indifference

While some elements of the above account could be pieced together from a handful of media reports in the corporate press, the coverage was largely fragmented, often confusing and the tone muted. Significantly, we could not find a single editorial in the British press expressing outrage, or even discomfort, at the subversion of the UN, and the evident contempt for the organization, by Israel and the US.

The most extensive coverage was in the Guardian with two articles totaling under 1,200 words. (Rory McCarthy and Ed Pilkington, “UN report accuses Israel military of negligence and urges reparations for Gaza deaths”; Julian Borger, “UN chief rejects further inquiry,” both on May 6, 2009)

An Independent article devoted just 654 words to the report and Ban Ki-moon’s rejection of it. (Donald Macintyre, “UN retreats after Israel hits out at Gaza report,” Independent, May 6, 2009)

Meanwhile, the Times exerted itself by expending all of 99 words on the story. (James Bone, “UN condemns Israel over phosphorus,” Times, May 6, 2009)

And nobody could accuse the Daily Telegraph of avoiding the matter. It granted the story two lines — a total of 47 words. (Alex Spillius, Daily Telegraph, “You must accept the goal of a Palestinian state, Biden tells Israel,” May 6, 2009)

In the days since Ban Ki-moon came to the defense of Israel and its powerful backers in the UN Security Council, the British news media has shrugged off any disquiet it might have had.

While there have been UN investigations of war crimes committed in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, somehow war crimes committed in Gaza do not deserve the same scrutiny and accountability. The omission is not unique, of course. There has never been a UN inquiry into war crimes committed by the United States in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The UN would surely be destroyed if such a move were ever seriously contemplated.

For the corporate media, then, there is no need for forensic analysis of this latest cynical sidelining of the UN, a body set up to promote world peace after all. There has been no rottweiler unearthing of this UN capitulation which, once again, effectively covers up major atrocities committed by Israel with heavy backing from its allies in the UN Security Council. But then, they are ‘our’ allies and, by definition, ‘the good guys.’ The media instinctively know this is the script they must follow.

In June 2007, an internal BBC report revealed that Auntie Beeb had long been perpetrating high media crimes, including: “institutional left-wing bias” and “being anti-American”.¹

Former BBC political editor, Andrew Marr, applied his forensic journalistic skills, noting that the BBC was comprised of “an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large”. This, he deduced, “creates an innate liberal bias”.²

On the other hand, despite the fact that the media system is made up of corporations that are deeply dependent on corporate advertisers (for revenue) and official government sources (for subsidised news), other possibilities are unthinkable. If one were crazy enough, one might ask, for example:

‘Is it accurate to describe the corporate media as servile to concentrated power? Or, as a key component of the state-corporate system, is media propaganda best described as a form of self-service?’

Such contemplations are beyond the pale right across the supposed media ‘spectrum’. Ironically, then, the popularity of what might be termed the Left-Wing Fallacy of media performance is a result precisely of a massive right-wing bias – the Left-Wing Fallacy is the only critique the media are willing to tolerate.

National Treasures

There are several good reasons why the media are keen to accept that they are biased to the left. First, the overwhelming preponderance of right-wing flak machines — ‘centre-left’ parties and governments, business front groups and powerful ‘religious’ organisations — persuades media executives that they really are too left-leaning. There is just far less flak criticising journalists from the left, and this flak is far less damaging.

Also, those on the money- and power-grubbing right have always been keen to associate themselves with the popular ethical positions of socialism. Hitler described himself as a “National Socialist”, after all, while Stalin headed an alliance of “socialist” republics. The modern media’s far-right militants — the likes of Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen — all declare themselves to be of the left.

Channel 4 Newsreader Jon Snow typically describes himself as “a pinko liberal hack”.³

Decca Aitkenhead noted in the Daily Mail that Snow “has achieved a rare status on television — famous as a radical, yet held in universal affection”.³ Aitkenhead added:

“There is a risk of his image… even becoming a little cosy. Surely he doesn’t like the idea of becoming a national treasure, Saint Jon Snow, man of the people…”

In a Guardian article, entitled, ‘The moral anchor,’ Jon Henley commented last month:

“Social engagement, and a fine line in self-deprecation, may be two reasons why Snow is so popular; on his way to national treasure status, even.”⁴

Arch-Blairite MP and pro-war propagandist Denis MacShane has described Snow as: “the closest we have to a modern-day George Orwell… Snow has managed to combine a moral commitment to criticising the powerful with a scrupulous care not to bend the facts.”⁵ Snow was, MacShane insisted, a “national treasure”.

Owen Gibson noted in the Guardian that Snow had recently “cemented his status as a national treasure”.⁶ Katy Guest wrote in the Independent: “With his cuddly iconoclasm and warm intelligence, Jon Snow is in danger of becoming a national treasure.”⁷

In fact the world does not work this way — serious (rather than “cuddly”) criticism of powerful interests is +never+ greeted with “universal affection” earning “national treasure” status. If George Orwell’s name springs to mind as an obvious counter-example, Noam Chomsky is on hand to clarify:

Fame, Fortune, and Respect await those who reveal the crimes of official enemies; those who undertake the vastly more important task of raising a mirror to their own societies can expect quite different treatment. George Orwell is famous for Animal Farm and 1984, which focus on the official enemy. Had he addressed the more interesting and significant question of thought control in relatively free and democratic societies, it would not have been appreciated, and instead of wide acclaim, he would have faced silent dismissal or obloquy.⁸

Snow benefits from wide acclaim because he has devoted much of his life to emphasising the crimes of official enemies. This can be divined even from the fact that he hosts a high-profile mainstream TV news programme — as a rule of thumb, we can be sure that the demonisation of official enemies is a key requirement of all journalists in Snow’s position. It is simply understood.

As the British media exulted in Baghdad’s rapid fall to US tanks on April 9, 2003, Snow interviewed then foreign secretary Jack Straw – one of the key Iraq war conspirators. Straw told Snow that, earlier in the day, he had met with the French foreign minister, who was fiercely opposed to the war. Snow asked wryly: “Did he look chastened?”⁹

In his book, Shooting History, Snow described a visit to the United States:

As the plane touched down at Dulles airport in the Virginia wastes beyond Washington, my thoughts were of mistrust for what America had done, of the death squads that flourished under the protection of US-backed military forces, of the dictators like Pinochet whom the Cold War had rendered ‘best friends’. I would expose it all!

But within twenty-four hours of landing my mistrust began turning into an improbable and lifelong love affair with ‘can-do’ America.¹⁰

Snow wrote of NATO’s attack on Serbia in 1999:

With a million refugees already outside Kosovo and more coming, the pressure was on Blair, Clinton and the other Western leaders to move quickly.

The point was emphasised when we reached the border the next morning. Straggling along the single-track railway line were unbroken lines of refugees stretching as far as the eye could see. It was like a scene out of Schindler’s List.¹¹

In fact, independent observers reported at the time that the flood of refugees from Kosovo began immediately +after+ NATO launched its 78-day blitz. Following the war, NATO sources reported that 2,000 people had been killed in Kosovo on all sides in the year prior to bombing — tales of a Holocaust-style Serbian genocide prior to bombing were as fraudulent as tales of deadly Iraqi WMD three years later. Snow added of British troops in Kosovo:

“I have never more wanted a force to go to war. This time I had none of the misgivings that were to dog the Iraq adventure four years later. The sheer mass of humanity in peril had convinced me.”¹²

In similar vein, the Times’s foreign editor, Richard Beeston, wrote last month:

[Iranian] President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s extraordinary performance today at the United Nations conference on racism confirmed that Iran’s leader is determined to retain his title as uncrowned king of the world’s awkward squad and speaker of the unspeakable.

Hugo Chavez might exchange handshakes and gifts with President Obama and other formerly hostile world leaders may now be prepared to open a new chapter with Washington, but Iran by its most recent words and deeds has demonstrated that it is not budging.¹³

Notice that the “awkward squad” — Ahmadinejad and Chavez — is +contrasted+ with “Washington”. The United States has never been described as a member of “the awkward squad”, or as “hostile”, by any foreign editor in any mainstream national newspaper. One might ask why. After all, we do not live in a police state — we live in an ostensibly free society. No one is holding a gun to the heads of our foreign editors.

Perhaps, then, the evidence is lacking. But how much proof do we need that the United States conspired with Britain to invade Iraq on utterly false pretexts causing the virtual destruction of an entire nation? What worse crimes have Ahmadinejad and Chavez perpetrated to earn themselves membership of the “awkward squad”? What would it take before Britain and America were inducted? The answer is that it could never happen because this kind of media labelling is a function of power, not of rational thought. The technical term: ‘propaganda’.

For our neutral media, ‘we’ are always reasonable, civilised, benign — it us up to ‘them’, the crazies, to reach out to ‘us’ in peace and friendship. Peace will reign when those who are “hostile” renounce their baseless aggression towards ‘us’. The myth of media objectivity obscures the deep mendacity of the mainstream stance: the world is always viewed from ‘here’, and ‘here’ is always high and moral.

Scrupulously Unbiased

An Independent leader writes of the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen: “Mr Bowen’s work has always been scrupulously unbiased.”¹⁴

The comment was made in response to the decision of the BBC Trust’s editorial standards committee to censure Bowen for breaching the corporation’s guidelines on accuracy and impartiality. Adel Darwish, the political editor of The Middle East Magazine Group, commented:

I don’t think this will be damaging to him but I think it will increase the polarisation regarding Jeremy Bowen.

He will be falsely applauded by the left-wing organisations, the Arabs and the anti-American groups. But on the other hand he will be seen as a villain by the pro-Israeli lobby who have a view that the BBC is biased against them.¹⁵

Bowen will indeed be lauded by pro-Palestinian groups and villainised by pro-Israeli groups. The problem is that Darwish has restricted the range of thinkable thought in a way that excludes the truth — that Bowen’s reporting consistently reflects exactly this pressure to toe a pro-establishment, pro-Israeli line.

Bowen was censured for a piece he wrote for the BBC website last June under the headline “Six days that changed the Middle East,” in which he provided background to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by describing the events of the 1967 Six Day War. He accurately described “Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier” and wrote of how Israel showed a “defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own”. The BBC’s editorial standards committee ruled that even these very mild gestures in the direction of the truth — a truth that is unrecognisably uglier than Bowen described — breached the BBC’s rules on accuracy and impartiality. It commented:

“Readers might come away from the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war. It was not necessary for equal space to be given to the other arguments, but… the existence of alternative theses should have been more clearly signposted.”

We are to believe that the BBC’s internal watchdogs are somehow blind to the lack of “alternative theses” in a mountain of other news reports. Readers will be familiar with (then) BBC political editor Andrew Marr’s assertion, on the same night that Jon Snow interviewed Jack Straw, that the rapid fall of Baghdad to US tanks meant that Tony Blair “tonight stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.”¹⁶

This was on the main evening news, in time of war — a war that was bitterly opposed by much of the British population. It was “not necessary for equal space to be given” to other arguments, but Marr might have mentioned that much of the world deemed Tony Blair a war criminal responsible for the supreme war crime — the launching of a war of aggression.

Or consider BBC world affairs editor John Simpson’s recent analysis of the British pull-out from Iraq:

“The British themselves tend to think of their time in Basra as a failure. The Americans told them bluntly that they were much too soft. They patrolled in berets instead of helmets, and were not allowed to wear sunglasses; they did not want to seem menacing. That worked well, until neighbouring Iran decided to stir up the militias to attack the British.”¹⁷

“Alternative theses” involve the obviously criminal nature of the occupation, and the utter catastrophe that has befallen Iraq, including Basra, since the invasion, which “worked well”. Another excluded “sensible view” is provided by Chomsky:

Would we have had a debate in 1943 about whether the Allies were really guilty of aiding terrorist partisans in occupied Europe? The absurdity of the whole discussion was highlighted by a marvellous statement by Condi Rice a few days ago. She was asked what the solution is in Iraq, and said something like this: ‘It’s obvious. Withdraw all foreign forces and foreign weapons.’ I was waiting to see if one commentator would notice that there happen to be some foreign troops and weapons in Iraq apart from the Iranian ones she was of course referring to. Couldn’t find a hint.¹⁸

A Media Lens reader made an interesting point in an email to the BBC’s Paul Reynolds regarding his article, ‘UN condemns N Korea rocket launch.’¹⁹

Dear Paul,

I refer to the above article and in particular the following paragraph:

‘The BBC’s Paul Reynolds says it remains unclear what Pyongyang’s intentions were in launching the rocket. The country may be attempting to develop a useable nuclear weapon and the means to carry it, or it may just be seeking to hold the world’s attention, making concessions which can easily be withdrawn, says our correspondent.’

Or indeed North Korea may simply have launched a communication satellite!?! Why is this option omitted from your analysis given America and Britain’s track record in ‘intelligence’? Iraq’s non-existent WMDs spring to mind!!

The email was ignored.

In March, a different reader asked BBC reporter Reeta Chakrabarti why she had claimed that Blair had “passionately believed” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. After all, an alternative thesis — based on a ton of compelling evidence — is that Blair was lying. Chakrabarti responded:

“I said Mr Blair passionately believed Iraq had wmd because he has consistently said so.”²⁰

Hard to believe, but senior BBC journalists and editors consistently present this argument: leading politicians must be sincere because, well, they say so! What possible reasons could they have for saying one thing and believing another?

In January 2006, as Iraq collapsed under the violence and chaos of military occupation, Jeremy Bowen commented:

Thanks to the Americans, Iraq had elections in December 2005. Voting in itself is not a magic formula to make people’s lives better. Just because they cast their ballots the violence won’t stop and the electricity won’t run all day. But voting is the way to create a fairer system, so something better might have started. Under American protection, Iraq’s newly elected politicians now have to show they can build a democracy.²¹

He added:

“All this does not mean that the dreams that the Bush administration has for the region are coming true… The Americans are discovering that the problem with democracy is that it can produce results that you don’t like. That’s just the way it is.”

Imagine these words being said of any other superpower occupation in history. Was it “scrupulously unbiased” to suggest that post-invasion Iraq was free to seek genuine democracy under “American protection”? Was it unbiased to portray the destroyers of Iraq — big business cynics like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell — as political ingénues dreaming of freedom for the world’s oil-producing nations, and then feeling dismayed as the latter made choices discordant with the dreams of US oil giants? Needless to say, there were no BBC committee rulings on the matter.

Returning to the present, the second finding of the BBC’s editorial standards committee related to a broadcast Bowen had delivered on BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent in January last year, in which he referred to a contemporary Israeli settlement, Har Homa. Bowen said the US government considered the settlement illegal. He should have said that +even+ the US government considered it illegal. The committee decided the assertion was inadequately sourced:

“The Middle East Editor had stated his professional view without qualification or explanation, and that the lack of precision in his language had rendered the statement inaccurate.”

This absurd comment was used as justification for its finding that the report had partially breached accuracy guidelines. Robert Fisk commented in the ²² :

The fact that the BBC Trust uses the Hebrew name for Har Homa – not the original Arab name, Jebel Abu Ghoneim – shows just how far it is now a mouthpiece for the Israeli lobby which so diligently abused Bowen.

Whenever I’m asked by lecture audiences around the world if they should trust the BBC, I tell them to trust [Israeli journalists] Amira [Hass] and Gideon [Levy] more than they should ever believe in the wretched broadcasting station. I’m afraid it’s the same old story. If you allow yourself to bow down before those who wish you to deviate from the truth, you will stay on your knees forever.²³

The same can be said of Fisk’s equally “wretched” newspaper — the Independent. Although, as discussed, it arguably does not “bow down” to power for the reason that it is itself a key element of the power that keeps us all on our knees. This is something Fisk will never accept, nor even discuss, in our strange ‘free’ society where the limits to free speech are subtly understood and crudely ignored.

The issue is not complex, not esoteric: in a world dominated by corporate power we rely on media corporations for news about that world. Future generations will surely be aghast that so few people today are able to perceive the perfectly obvious problem, the very clear source of mass control, that this implies.

1. ’Lambasting for the “trendy Left-wing bias” of BBC bosses,’ Daily Mail, June 18, 2007.
2. Nicole Martin, ‘BBC viewers angered by its “innate liberal bias”,’ Daily Telegraph, June 19, 2007.
3. Quoted, Decca Aitkenhead, ‘That’s Snow business,’ Daily Mail, October 10, 2004.
4. Henley, ‘The moral anchor,’ The Guardian, April 28, 2009; http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/28/jon-snow-interview-channel-4.
5. MacShane, ‘A spokesman for the truth,’ The Independent, October 29, 2004.
6. Gibson, ‘Interview: Dorothy Byrne,’ The Guardian, March 12, 2007.
7. Guest, ’Cheltenham Literary Festival,’ The Independent, October 14, 2004.
8. Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Hill and Wang, 1992, p.372.
9. Channel 4, April 9, 2003.
10. Snow, Shooting History, HarperCollins, 2004, p.212.
11. p.353.
12. p.353-354.
13. Beeston, ‘Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believes fervently in what he says,’ The Times, April 21, 2009.
14. Leader, ‘Bad judgement,’ The Independent, April 16, 2009.
15. ‘Bowen “breached rules on impartiality”,’ The Independent, April 16, 2009.
16. Marr, BBC 1, News At Ten, April 9, 2003.
17. Simpson, ‘UK combat operations end in Iraq,’ BBC website, April 30, 2009.
18. Chomsky, email to Media Lens, May 24, 2007.
19. Reynolds, April 13, 2009.
20. Forwarded to Media Lens, March 2, 2009.
21. Bowen, ‘Middle East on the road to change,’ January 2, 2006.
22. Independent
23. Fisk, ‘How can you trust the cowardly BBC?,’ The Independent, April 16, 2009.

You have fought against tyranny and disorder. You have bled for your best friends and for unknown Iraqis. And you have borne an enormous burden for your fellow citizens, while extending a precious opportunity to the people of Iraq. Under tough circumstances, the men and women of the United States military have served with honor, and succeeded beyond any expectation.¹

This might best be described as Generic Invader Nonsense (GIN). Much the same has been said by every war leader and general of every invasion in history. Did Goebbels not argue that Germany was fighting “tyranny” on the Eastern front in 1941? Were Indonesian armed forces not offering a “precious opportunity” to the impoverished people of East Timor in 1975?

Obama next directed his GIN to the people of Iraq:

Our nations have known difficult times together. But ours is a bond forged by shared bloodshed, and countless friendships among our people. We Americans have offered our most precious resource – our young men and women – to work with you to rebuild what was destroyed by despotism; to root out our common enemies; and to seek peace and prosperity for our children and grandchildren, and for yours.

The precise moment when the illegal invasion demolishing Iraq — the attack that “should never have been authorised and never been waged” — became a selfless act of friendship in pursuit of peace and prosperity was not identified. Did this happen half-way through 2003? Perhaps early 2004?

America and Iraq have indeed known “difficult times together” — the US has caused them and Iraq has suffered them. The US helped install a vicious dictator, Saddam Hussein, supporting him through his worst crimes, which Western governments and media worked hard to bury out of sight. It then inflicted the devastating 1991 Gulf War and 12 years of genocidal sanctions, which claimed one million Iraqi lives. The 2003 war and invasion have cost a further million lives, have reduced 4 million people to the status of destitute refugees, and reduced a wrecked country to utter ruin.

But Obama’s lies matter little to much of the public, anti-war activists among them. ‘You don’t understand,’ they tell us. ’Obama +has+ to say all this stuff — it’s not what he believes. He‘s out to change all this, but he has to say it.’

This involves a kind of treble-think. Politicians typically hide their ruthlessness behind compassionate verbiage. Obama, we are to believe, is hiding his compassion behind ruthless verbiage — Machiavellianism in reverse.

Which is exactly what was said of Clinton and Blair in the 1990s. Of course it could be the case now. But should we not aim to be a little more socially scientific in our political analysis?

We can observe that, in a way that mirrors Newtonian physics, enormous political forces tend to act unimpeded unless challenged by powerful oppositional forces. We can observe, further, that there is no reason whatever to believe that the greed and violence that have become entrenched in American politics over decades and centuries have simply gone away. Certainly they have not been countered by mass democratic movements rooted in compassion rather than greed. There are no new, mass-based parties rooted in progressive values; no city-stopping protests erupting out of a transformational political process.

If a brand new, benevolent face now fronts the system in which traditionally ruthless forces dominate, rationality demands that we assume it to be a makeover, a brand alteration, an attempt precisely to +reduce+ pressure on the system to change.

The Bush-Blair crimes contaminated the American brand with Iraqi and Afghan blood products – we have to assume that the same ferocious system is now in the process of rehabilitating, not revolutionising, that brand. Greed, ignorance and hatred do not miraculously transform into compassion, wisdom and peacefulness, in individuals or in superpowers. Call it Newtonian political physics. Call it Buddhist psychology. Call it common sense.

Obama then spoke to the US armed forces:

And so I want to be very clear: We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime — and you got the job done. We kept our troops in Iraq to help establish a sovereign government — and you got the job done. And we will leave the Iraqi people with a hard-earned opportunity to live a better life — that is your achievement; that is the prospect that you have made possible.

The first sentence is a flat lie. Bush also was “very clear” that the “single question” concerned the disarmament of Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. When it became impossible to deny their non-existence, Bush resorted to talk of “regime change”, although he knew this pretext was illegal under international law. Even this was not enough — the ‘coalition’ insisted the invasion would go ahead whether or not Saddam and his family left Iraq (as they were urged to do) because the goal, now, was “democracy”. As Noam Chomsky noted in April 2003:

“The one constant is that the US must end up in control of Iraq.”

Leaving Iraq?

Obama announced his plans for US forces in Iraq:

As a candidate for president, I made clear my support for a timeline of sixteen months to carry out this drawdown, while pledging to consult closely with our military commanders upon taking office to ensure that we preserve the gains we’ve made and to protect our troops. Those consultations are now complete, and I have chosen a time line that will remove our combat brigades over the next eighteen months.

He added:

As I have long said, we will retain a transitional force to carry out three distinct functions: training, equipping, and advising Iraqi Security Forces as long as they remain non-sectarian; conducting targeted counterterrorism missions; and protecting our ongoing civilian and military efforts within Iraq. Initially, this force will likely be made up of 35,000 to 50,000 US troops.

As commentators have noted, 50,000 is a lot of troops. The initial US invasion force in 2003, after all, consisted of 90,000 troops. And Obama did not comment on whether the US will maintain permanent military bases in Iraq. He did not discuss the withdrawal of over 100,000 private US military contractors and mercenaries stationed there.

On the face of it, there was a clear contradiction between Obama’s declared aim to “remove our combat brigades over the next eighteen months” and his leaving 30,000-50,000 troops to conduct, among other things, “targeted counterterrorism missions” — ie, combat missions.

The New York Times helped explain last December 4:

“Pentagon planners say that it is possible that Mr. Obama’s goal could be accomplished at least in part by relabeling some units, so that those currently counted as combat troops could be ‘re-missioned,’ their efforts redefined as training and support for the Iraqis.”²

Military occupiers have forever described their combat troops as ‘military advisors’ and suchlike — more GIN.

According to the American agreement with Iraq – known as a SOFA (status of forces agreement) – US forces must leave Iraq by the end of December 2011. But the “must” is actually much closer to a “might.” The New York Times noted that SOFA “remains subject to change, by mutual agreement, and U.S. Army planners acknowledge privately that they are examining projections that could see the number of Americans hovering between 30,000 and 50,000 — and some say as high as 70,000 — for a substantial time even beyond 2011.”²

“Privately”, obviously — why, in a democracy, would the public be told the truth?

In support of this private reality, Phyllis Bennis cites retired General Barry McCaffrey, who wrote in an internal report for the Pentagon last year:

“We should assume that the Iraqi government will eventually ask us to stay beyond 2011 with a residual force of trainers, counterterrorist capabilities, logistics, and air power. (My estimate–perhaps a force of 20,000 to 40,000 troops).”³

Because SOFA allows both sides to suggest changes, power politics has free reign. As Bennis notes, the Iraqi government has, from its beginnings, been “dependent on and accountable to the U.S.” She asks: “do we really think that that government would refuse a quiet U.S. ‘request’ for amending the agreement to push back or even eliminate the ostensibly final deadline for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops?”

The Media Response

The above was covered by the corporate press with the same wilful gullibility that is found in its reporting on all key issues – the pattern is systematic and unvarying. Patrick Cockburn announced dramatically in the Independent:

“The pullout will bring to an end one of the most divisive wars in US history…”⁴

No reasonable person could use “will” in that sentence. Honest news reporting would begin: “It is claimed…”. Instead, the Independent predicted:

“31 December 2011
“The date by which all US forces will have left Iraq.”⁴

Ewen MacAskill wrote in the Guardian:

“Almost six years after the invasion of Iraq, the end is finally in sight for America’s involvement in its longest and bloodiest conflict since Vietnam. Barack Obama yesterday set out a timetable that will see all US combat units out by summer next year and the remainder by the end of 2011.”⁵

There is no reason to believe this, but it is the required ‘liberal’ view of the new ‘liberal’ president‘s GIN. Stated with this level of confidence it is potent propaganda. MacAskill added for good effect:

“The prospect of 50,000 staying, even if only for another year, produced dismay among the Democratic leadership in Congress.”

It is an interesting and significant reality of modern press performance that the right-wing media are often more honest about ‘liberal’ leaders than the ‘liberal’ press. Compare the Independent and Guardian’s take on events with Tim Reid’s in Murdoch’s Times:

“President Obama announced the withdrawal yesterday of more than 90,000 US combat troops from Iraq by August next year but his decision to keep a force of up to 50,000 was attacked by leaders of his party as a betrayal of his promise to end the war.”⁶

MacAskill continued in the Guardian:

“For Iraq, the death toll is unknown, in the tens of thousands, victims of the war, a nationalist uprising, sectarian in-fighting and jihadists attracted by the US presence.”

This is truly shameful journalism. The idea that the death toll is simply “unknown” fits well with Chomsky’s observation:

“The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.”⁷

Just last month, John Tirman, Executive Director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, wrote:

“We are now able to estimate the number of Iraqis who have died in the war instigated by the Bush administration.”Tirman, ‘Iraq’s Shocking Human Toll: About 1 Million Killed, 4.5 Million Displaced, 1-2 Million Widows, 5 Million Orphans,’ The Nation, February 2, 2009.

Tirman reported that “we have, at present, between 800,000 and 1.3 million ‘excess deaths’ as we approach the six-year anniversary of this war.”

He added:

This gruesome figure makes sense when reading of claims by Iraqi officials that there are 1-2 million war widows and 5 million orphans. This constitutes direct empirical evidence of total excess mortality and indirect, though confirming, evidence of the displaced and the bereaved and of general insecurity. The overall figures are stunning: 4.5 million displaced, 1-2 million widows, 5 million orphans, about 1 million dead — in one way or another, affecting nearly one in two Iraqis.

Tirman noted that only 5 per cent of refugees have chosen to return to their homes over the past year. According to Unicef, many provinces report that less than 40 per cent of households have access to clean water. More than 40 per cent of children in Basra, and more than 70 per cent in Baghdad, cannot attend school.

It is important to recognise that it is utter catastrophe on this scale that is being so blithely misreported and downplayed by journalists in the Guardian and Independent. These are genuine crimes of journalism – crimes of complicity and deception perpetrated against the British and Iraqi people.

Even the Guardian’s own journalists last year found that “Estimates put the toll at between 100,000 and one million.”⁸

Why would MacAskill write of casualties “For Iraq” (not just civilian casualties) in “the tens of thousands” when the lowest figure, one year ago, +just+ for civilian deaths +just+ by violence, was 100,000?

Martin Chulov brought further shame on the Guardian, writing:

“Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed during the insurgency.”⁹

We wrote to Chulov and his editor, Alan Rusbridger, on March 2:

I’ve never seen that formulation before. This is how the truth is slowly cleansed from the newsprint through repeated brainwashing. Now the main context for the killing is the insurgency rather than the occupation. The occupation itself just +is+ — maybe it’s a natural phenomenon, happened out of a clear blue sky. The facts — that it was based on a pack of lies, that it was an illegal war of aggression, an oil grab, and has zero legitimacy such that the US has no right to be there at all — somehow just don’t matter to you.

We received no response. The Guardian editor has not replied to our emails since December 2005, such is his commitment to open debate.

The reality, as every thinking mainstream journalist knows, is that free discussion into corporate profit-making does not go.

1. ’Obama’s Speech at Camp Lejeune, N.C.,’ New York Times, February 27, 2009.
2. Thom Shanker, ‘Campaign Promises on Ending the War in Iraq Now Muted by Reality,’ New York Times, December 4, 2008.
3. Quoted, Bennis, ‘Obama To Announce Iraq Troop Withdrawal,’ February 27, 2009.
4. Cockburn, ‘Obama announces troop pullout,’ The Independent, February 28, 2009.
5. MacAskill, ‘US withdrawal: Six years after Iraq invasion, Obama sets out his exit plan,’ The Guardian, February 28, 2009.
6. Reid, ‘Obama promises to pull out 90,000 troops – but keep 50,000 there,’ The Times, February 28, 2009.
7. Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Hill and Wang, New York, 1992, p.79.
8. Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg, ‘What is the real death toll in Iraq?,’ The Guardian, March 19, 2008.
9. Chulov, ‘We will leave Iraq a better place – British general,’ The Guardian, March 2, 2009.

Israeli forces repeatedly bombed schools (including UN schools), medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, UN buildings, power plants, sewage plants, roads, bridges and civilian homes.

On January 15, Helpdoctors.org reported that Al Quds hospital had been “again the target of bombing”. Some 50 patients, 30 in wheelchairs, fled as the burning hospital was “totally destroyed”.

The hospital’s medical director said, “My heart is crying,” as he described how intensive care patients and premature babies in incubators were wheeled onto the street in the middle of the night.

On January 19, UN official John Ging said half a million people in Gaza had been without water since the conflict began — huge numbers were without power. Four thousand homes have been ruined and tens of thousands of people are homeless.

It is now known that the Israeli army (the IDF) used white phosphorus incendiary weapons – designed to burst over a wide area and burn to the bone — against civilian targets, including hospitals and UN buildings. The use of these weapons against civilians is a war crime.

Surgeons in Gaza have reported numerous, unusual cases where bomb victims had lost both legs rather than one, raising suspicions that the Israeli military used Dense Inert Metal Explosive (Dime) bombs — experimental weapons that generate micro-shrapnel that burns and destroys everything within a four-metre radius. Dr. Erik Fosse, a Norwegian surgeon, commented:

We suspect they used Dime weapons because we saw cases of huge amputations or flesh torn off the lower parts of the body. The pressure wave [from a Dime device] moves from the ground upwards and that’s why the majority of patients have huge injuries to the lower part of the body and abdomen… The problem is that most of the patients I saw were children. If they [the Israelis] are trying to be accurate, it seems obvious these weapons were aimed at children.¹

The IDF also used hideous “flachette bombs” — high-tech nail bombs that shower victims with small metal darts that penetrate flesh and bone.

The BBC: Impartial or Immoral?

Despite this carnage, despite the fact that 89% of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents have received no humanitarian aid since Israel began its assault, the Guardian notes that the BBC has refused to broadcast a national humanitarian appeal for Gaza, “leaving aid agencies with a potential shortfall of millions of pounds in donations.”²

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella organisation for 13 aid charities, launched its Gaza appeal yesterday saying the devastation was “so huge that British aid agencies were compelled to act.”²

By refusing to give free airtime to the appeal, the BBC made a rare decision to breach an agreement dating back to 1963. Other broadcasters then also rejected it. The DEC’s chief executive, Brendan Gormley, said:

“We are used to our appeal getting into every household and offering a safe and necessary way for people to respond. This time we will have to work a lot harder because we won’t have the free airtime or the powerful impact of appearing on every TV and radio station.”²

A BBC website article defending the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal, asserted:

“The BBC decision was made because of question marks about the delivery of aid in a volatile situation and also to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of an ongoing news story.”

Gormley rejected the BBC’s claim that there were question marks about the delivery of aid, saying 100 lorries a day were entering Gaza. He also challenged the alleged problem with “impartiality”:

“We are totally apolitical and are driven by the principles of the Geneva conventions in terms of impartiality and neutrality. This appeal is a response to those humanitarian principles. The BBC seems to be confusing impartiality with equal airtime.”²

ITV said: “The DEC asked all broadcasters if they could support the appeal. We (the broadcasters) assessed the DEC’s requirements carefully against the agreed criteria and we were unable to reach the consensus necessary for an appeal.”²

Sky said: “We were considering this request internally when the DEC contacted us to let us know that the BBC had decided not to broadcast the appeal at this time. As, by convention, if all broadcasters do not carry the appeal then none do, the decision was effectively made for us.”²

This immoral and callous decision by the BBC in response to the suffering of the people of Gaza should not go unchallenged.

1. Patrick O’Connor, ‘Reports reveal devastation wreaked by Israeli military in Gaza,’ World Socialist Web Site, January 20, 2008.
2. Jenny Percival, ‘Broadcasters refuse to air Gaza charity appeal,’ The Guardian, January 23, 2008.

“Can this be true?”

“If so, I think I have reason to feel aggrieved.”

The link was to a blog by Bob Shone. Shone has, himself, long felt aggrieved by our criticism of Iraq Body Count (IBC), of which he is a passionate supporter. In response, he has smeared us whenever and wherever he can across the web. Perhaps because we have written less about IBC over the last couple of years, Shone has branched out by, for example, misrepresenting our criticism of Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News. See:

In his latest blog, Shone writes:

Medialens stress that journalists should ‘subject their host media to serious and sustained criticism’ (Alert, 3/5/03). They’ve attacked Guardian columnist George Monbiot for not being more critical of the Guardian.* Yet, in a single Guardian article (The Lies of the Press), Monbiot wrote more words criticising the Guardian than Medialens wrote criticising the New Statesman (NS) in their entire run of NS columns.

Monbiot comments on our message board:

Now I discover that, if the posting I link to is correct, the editors justified their decision not to attack one of their employers – the New Statesman – with the very arguments they have lambasted me for using. I discover that the standards they have so volubly demanded of me somehow do not apply to them. In fact, they appear to be less prepared to do as they say than I am. Who would not, under these circumstances, feel annoyed? (Monbiot, December 4)

How casually Monbiot has chosen to confront us with this damning public criticism. This, of course, is how internet-based media with essentially no resources are often treated by corporate journalism. If Monbiot had been targeting a powerful think tank or political party, he would perhaps have checked if the posting was “correct”. And he would perhaps have taken a few seconds to look at the blog from which it came to examine the mindset of the blogger. Incidentally, our “employers” at the New Statesman paid us £60 per monthly column (if it appeared) – rather less, we suspect, than Monbiot’s employers pay him.

The casualness of Monbiot’s approach is even more depressing given that he has strongly supported our work, describing it as “a major service to democracy”. (Monbiot, email to Media Lens, February 2, 2005)

It seems that, on this occasion, feelings of personal offence weigh more heavily with Monbiot than concern for any service we might be rendering.

This is our response to Monbiot:

Hi George

We’re happy to hear from you again. But why now? We wrote to you just over one year ago, asking why you had written:

“I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb.” (Monbiot, ‘The Middle East has had a secretive nuclear power in its midst for years,’ The Guardian, November 20, 2007)

We asked you to explain the basis for your belief. You also wrote:

“Yes, Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. The president is a Holocaust denier opposed to the existence of Israel.”

We asked if you believed that Ahmadinejad, rather than Khamenei, was the supreme ruler of Iran. If so, why? And we asked which “acts of terror abroad” you had in mind: did you include the claims that Iran had supplied Explosively-Formed Penetrators to blow up US-UK tanks and troops in Iraq, for example?

Finally, we asked the basis for your belief that Ahmadinejad was “opposed to the existence of Israel”.

We wrote a further two times but received no reply. Two years earlier, you had written to us:

“I know we’ve had disagreements in the past, but I wanted to send you a note of appreciation for your work. Your persistence seems to be paying off: it’s clear that many of the country’s most prominent journalists are aware of Medialens, read your bulletins and, perhaps, are beginning to feel the pressure. If, as I think you have, you have begun to force people working for newspapers and broadcasters to look over their left shoulders as well as their right, and worry about being held to account for the untruths they disseminate, then you have already performed a major service to democracy. I feel you have begun to open up a public debate on media bias, which has been a closed book in the United Kingdom for a long time.” (Email, February 2, 2005)

More recently, we asked for your views on the Guardian’s latest comments on fossil fuel advertising – again, no reply. Why?

Bob Shone writes:

“Medialens stress that journalists should ’subject their host media to serious and sustained criticism’ (Alert, 3/5/03).”

The link is to a media alert from 2003, so we can easily check. This is what we actually wrote:

“The deeper problem with [David] Miller’s article – a problem faced by all honest journalists wherever they are writing in the mainstream – is that it appears in the Guardian but does not mention the Guardian. Miller’s article gives the impression that the Guardian is promoting open and honest discussion on media bias. But this is not so. In fact Miller’s article avoids many of the most serious issues of how the media colluded with a dishonest government to take us to war — an extraordinarily serious violation of our democracy — and, as seriously, it allows the Guardian to point accusing fingers at other media while being itself guilty of similar bias.

“We are well aware of the pressures facing Miller — mentions of the Guardian’s failings would not have been welcome in his article. The problem facing dissidents is that it seems better to publish some of the truth in a national newspaper rather than none at all, and so we forever allow the ‘liberal’ press to publish watered down versions of media bias as if they were themselves free of bias. This helps obscure the extraordinary extent to which these same media outlets are manipulating the public in support of establishment goals. Furthermore, the sight of one media outlet criticising another gives the false impression that competitive pressures and internal clashes are protecting us from systemic media bias.

“It is understood in the media that to criticise the host media providing such valuable exposure and publicity is in extremely poor taste and will surely result in a journalist falling from favour. For all the talk of ‘professional journalism’, media relations are remarkable in that they are actually much closer to social relations – a newspaper or magazine is viewed as a kind of ‘friend’. If you hurt your friend’s feelings — or, worse, her interests — your friend will naturally feel hurt and may well break off relations. It might be vital for democracy and freedom to hurt your friends feelings and interests, but that’s not the point – employees do +not+ criticise the company product. This curious personalisation of corporate media/individual journalistic relations has a powerful effect on what journalists feel able to write.

“The astonishing result is that we know of not one journalist writing in the mainstream willing to subject their host media to serious and sustained criticism. Because these media are part of the wider, profit-driven corporate media, journalists, with honourable exceptions, are also reluctant to criticise the media system as a whole, as this would clearly involve implicit criticism of their own media.”

In other words, Shone’s claim that we “stress that journalists should ’subject their host media to serious and sustained criticism’“ in the alert is simply false — we said no such thing. He misrepresented what we wrote. In our experience, this is a standard Shone tactic. It is also something you could easily have checked.

We wrote in the same alert:

“Assuming that it is vital to challenge the mainstream media system, and assuming that this system will not itself host such a critique, what options are open to people determined to make such a challenge?”

Why would we adamantly demand something of journalists that we ourselves declare impossible, especially when we are anyway discussing alternatives?

As the above material makes clear, what we’ve actually said (endlessly, as Shone knows, having closely monitored our message board for years), is:

1) Journalists are unwilling and/or unable to criticise their host media, not just in their own media but anywhere.

2) We understand why they don’t, the pressures against such criticism are huge, including: external flak, internal censure, stalled career progress, demotion, dismissal, reaching the point where a journalist is deemed “radioactive” (unemployable).

3) Nevertheless, we believe it is one of the tasks of the public to pressure journalists to do what they can to be +more+ critical of their host media and the media system more generally, and to pressure the media to accept more criticism. As you noted in your Guardian column, it was our criticism that prompted you to discuss the issue of fossil fuel advertising in the first place.

Our hope is that by generating public criticism, we can help give honest journalists leverage to push their editors to cover issues they would not normally consider. It seems to have worked in this case (also in the Independent and Independent on Sunday). That’s extremely important. We are aware that we are in a sense demanding the impossible, but reality has an odd way of bending before the insistence that something +should+ be possible. This has nothing to do with stupidly insisting that journalists should subject their host media to intense criticism as a matter of course, as Shone is suggesting.

4) It is also our task to look for alternative ways to challenge the system. We have, for example, talked of the possibility of dissident journalists boycotting the corporate media.

We did criticise the New Statesman while we were writing for them (2003-2005) both in the magazine and in media alerts. For example, in the magazine itself:

“Companies such as BNFL have money to fund a 32-page supplement in the New Statesman (which is 40 per cent dependent on advertising and sponsorship). But you won’t be reading 32-page supplements by the anti-war movement or radical green groups any time soon. The idea that money should buy influence in news reporting or commentary is deemed outrageous. But when it comes to advertising in our ‘free press’ — business is business.”

As Shone notes, citing us, we weren’t critical of the New Statesman more often because we considered it small beer. We used our small column — 450 words once a month — to expose the big propaganda in the big media to a mainstream audience. Apart from two related alerts in autumn 2006, we have also paid the New Statesman very little critical attention since we stopped writing for it, for the same reason.

In our New Statesman articles, which were always focused on corporate media propaganda, we were implicitly criticising almost everything the magazine said, for example, about Iraq. So when we commented in different New Statesman articles:

“Elite journalists are protected by a corporate media system locked into a status quo serving corporate interests – profit over people, profit over truth.” (David Edwards, ‘The powerful get an easy ride; Observations on media,’ New Statesman, July 5, 2004)

And:

“…with the establishment united in silence, the press has nothing to say.” (David Edwards and David Cromwell, ‘Rigorous? Don’t make us laugh,’ New Statesman, March 25, 2004)

And:

“In his new book, Web of Deceit, Mark Curtis shows how the mainstream media promote one key concept above all others: ‘the idea of Britain’s basic benevolence’. The illusion is maintained, Curtis writes, by consistent bias that ’sanitises quite terrible policies and presents them as ‘normal’. US-UK responsibility for suffering is always downplayed, never eliciting the attention or horror it deserves.” (David Edwards, ‘A strange kind of liberation; Observations on Iraq and the media,’ New Statesman, May 19, 2003)

we were implicitly criticising just about every New Statesman journalist (John Pilger aside) and every editorial that appeared around those articles at the time.

In February 2004, a time when we were writing the regular column, this appeared at the bottom of a media alert criticising then New Statesman political editor, John Kampfner:

Write to the John Kampfner, New Statesman political editor:
Email: john@jkampfner.net

Copy your emails to Peter Wilby, New Statesman editor, and the magazine’s letters page:
Email: peter@newstatesman.co.uk
Email: letters@newstatesman.co.uk

Both Kampfner and Wilby received numerous emails. It felt odd when one of us (Edwards) then chatted to Wilby on the phone to discuss the editing of the next New Statesman piece. Wilby was a kind and honest editor, we liked him and felt bad about some of the fierce emails he had received that had been copied to us. He responded graciously, but as you know, George, by mainstream standards this was completely impossible behaviour on our part. It just isn’t done to cause a flood of complaints to be sent to the editor publishing your work.

We put both Wilby and Kampfner’s names at the bottom of another alert in May 2005. This may have been the last straw. Wilby was replaced by Kampfner, who rejected our next submission – that turned out to be the end of our regular column. So in deciding whether you should feel aggrieved, you can compare the above with Shone’s comment:

“In other words, Medialens were concerned about holding onto their column. Direct ‘full-frontal’ criticism of the NS would endanger that.”

The irony of Shone’s argument is that we weren’t concerned about holding onto, or losing, the column. We made almost no effort to get it going again after our submission was rejected (Kampfner did publish a piece by us a year later, in 2006). We have never tried very hard to be published in the corporate media – we prefer to encourage people to look outside the mainstream for honest material. That’s one reason why we have rejected numerous invitations to appear on the BBC, particularly BBC2’s Newsnight, but also on BBC1, BBC radio, ITV, CNN, and others. Shone is just wrong on every level.

A Milestone In Moral Depravity – Media Lens And the Guardian

It is telling, in fact shameful, that Shone, who claims to be so meticulous, forgot to mention the far more pertinent example (certainly from your point of view): our record of criticising the Guardian in and out of the Guardian.

Of course we have criticised the Guardian endlessly in our alerts – both directly and implicitly as part of the corporate media system. But what about our criticism of the Guardian in the Guardian?

In the summer of 2004, then Guardian comment editor Seumas Milne invited us to submit a piece on media coverage of Iraq — he appeared to have it in mind to publish a piece quickly during the quiet ‘silly season’ when many MPs and journalists were away. We agreed on the condition that the article would include serious criticism of the Guardian. It may be that this delayed publication — after an agonising process, the piece finally appeared in the depths of winter, on December 15!

While we were negotiating publication of the article, we put these names at the bottom of our September 29, 2004 alert:

Write to Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger:
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk

Write to Seumas Milne, Guardian comments section editor:
Email: seumas.milne@guardian.co.uk

These comments appeared directly above:

“As for The Guardian? Well, clearly, it would rather remain part of some grotesque agreement between reasonable gentlemen of the establishment. It wouldn’t do for the paper to be +too+ critical [of Blair].

Tens of thousands of [Iraqi] dead, hundreds of thousands of injured and grieving — a vast illegal act of mass murder. But for our ‘liberal’ press a vague gesture in the direction of an apology is a ‘milestone’ in Blair’s rehabilitation. This is, itself, a milestone in moral depravity — urbane, well-heeled and well-spoken — of the most lethal kind.”

Who knows, perhaps this helps explain why so many of our queries on the fate of our proposed article went unanswered by Milne, and why it took four months to reach the public.

Here’s some of what we published in the December 15 Guardian article:

“Of 12,447 Guardian and Observer articles mentioning Iraq in 2003 on the Guardian Unlimited website, Ritter was mentioned in only 17, mostly in passing. Denis Halliday, who set up the UN’s oil-for-food programme in Iraq, and who blamed the US and British governments for the huge death toll of Iraqi civilians under sanctions, was mentioned in two articles. His successor, Hans von Sponeck, who also resigned in protest at sanctions, received five mentions. The Independent mentioned Ritter only eight times in 5,648 articles on Iraq in 2003. Ritter’s disarmament claim received fewer than a dozen brief mentions in the Guardian the year before.

“The failure of the liberal media, including the Guardian and Independent, is vital to this debate because, while they are consistently more open than their conservative counterparts, they set the boundaries of permissible dissent. In the case of Iraq, those boundaries helped create a disaster.”

And:

“We would argue that the media’s failure on Iraq was not really a failure at all, but rather a classic product of ‘balanced’ professional journalism. The modern conception of objective reporting is little more than a century old. There was little concern that newspapers were partisan so long as the public was free to choose from a wide range of opinions. Newspapers dependent on advertisers for 75% of their revenues, such as the Guardian and Independent, would have been regarded as independent by few radicals and progressives in, say, the 1940s.”

You can read the rest here.

We have never been invited back — the pieces we‘ve offered have been rejected, our emails unanswered. A month after our Milne-commissioned piece appeared, we wrote in the New Statesman:

“The Guardian comment editor, Seumas Milne, has even had the gall to complain that the elections ‘are routinely described by the BBC as Iraq’s first free and democratic elections’.

How convenient to take a free shot at the media’s favourite punchbag, when not just Milne’s own paper, but his entire industry, is pumping out exactly the same crass propaganda.”

We noted in the media alert version of this piece that Milne replied to our criticism:

“!!”

We commented:

“The confusion is understandable. Milne helped us publish an article strongly criticising Guardian performance in the Guardian itself in December — no mean achievement on his part. The unwritten media rule is that you back off from criticising people who help publish your work in this way.”

Obviously, we knew Milne would see what we wrote in the New Statesman (and probably the alert).

Shone comments: “One wonders why Medialens were so hostile towards Milne.”

It’s worth re-reading what we wrote. Was it in fact ‘hostile’, or simply the kind of honesty that is not tolerated by the media? But isn’t it interesting that it is interpreted as hostility?

Perhaps Shone should wonder what our criticism of Milne says about his charge that we are hypocrites. In fact, it is a good example of us living up to the standards he describes but which we do not in fact demand of journalists. As you know, it really is not done to publish high-profile criticism of a powerful gatekeeper who has recently opened his doors — most writers would do anything to avoid upsetting someone who has given them such an opportunity. As you also know, a foot in the door like that can potentially lead to a long, lucrative media career. So this was career-suicidal behaviour, as we well knew. It’s worth reflecting, again, that Shone somehow forgot to mention any of this in his blog.

Should you feel aggrieved, George? Should Wilby? Should Milne? To be honest, we’re not sure. It’s true that we have been asking the impossible, putting people in difficult situations. But it seems to us that this is vital if we are to break the silence and reveal some truths about how the media stifles honest criticism.

The problem is that, as a result of this silence, the public believe they are being given a reasonably accurate version of the war in Iraq, of Afghanistan, of climate change, and so on. The next time the media insist that, this time, an attack on a defenceless Third World country really is vital, the public will likely find it credible. The stakes are high, George — higher than your personal discomfort.

It may be hard to believe, but we really don’t like putting people like you, someone we respect and admire, on the spot. We honestly don’t do it with any hatred or vindictiveness. On the other hand, we are very happy to burn bridges, if doing so helps cast a light into some dark corners of the propaganda system.

In the final analysis, we are all on the spot — the world is not changing fast enough. Again, if you are aggrieved, it’s nothing compared to the real grief of millions of people surviving in the wreckage of Iraq, or the grief so many of us feel at the destruction of the climate and planet. Perhaps feeling uncomfortable is a price we all have to pay for progressive change.

Best wishes

David Edwards and David Cromwell

A Guardian leader saluted the nation: “Few now sang England Arise, but England had risen all the same.”²

The editors predicted that, by 2007, Blair’s triumph would be seen as “one of the great turning-points of British political history… the moment when Britain at last gave itself the chance to construct a modern liberal socialist order.”²

The Observer assured readers that the Blair government would create “new worldwide rules on human rights” and implement “tough new limits on arms sales.”

This, after all, was the dawn of Blair’s “ethical” foreign policy.

It was a dawn of the dead – Blair left behind him the almost unimaginable horror of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A rare poll conducted by Ipsos last January of 754 Iraqi refugees in Syria found that “every single person interviewed by Ipsos reported experiencing at least one traumatic event in Iraq prior to their arrival in Syria.”

UNHCR estimated that one in five of those registered with the agency in Syria over the previous year were classified as “victims of torture and/or violence.” The survey showed that fully 89 per cent of those interviewed suffered depression and 82 per cent anxiety. This was linked to terrors endured before they fled Iraq – 77 per cent of those interviewed reported being affected by air bombardments, shelling or rocket attacks. Eighty per cent had witnessed a shooting… and so on.

John Pilger was a lonely voice in 1997 warning that Blair was a dangerous fraud, a neocon in sheep’s clothing. As Pilger later pointed out, the media could hardly plead ignorance:

Blair’s Vichy-like devotion to Washington was known: read his speeches about a new order led by America. His devotion to Rupert Murdoch, who flew him and Cherie Booth around the world first class, was known. His devotion to an extreme neoliberal Thatcherite economics was known…³

Over the past two weeks — one decade and three wars later — the same media have been insisting, as one, that US president-elect Barrack Obama is another “new dawn”. A Guardian leader observed:

They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world…

Today is for celebration, for happiness and for reflected human glory. Savour those words: President Barack Obama, America’s hope and, in no small way, ours too.

In the Guardian’s news section, Oliver Burkeman described the victory as “historic, epochal, path breaking”. But there was more:

“Just being alive at a time when it’s so evident that history is being made was elating and exhausting.”

In 2003, the Guardian’s foreign editor, Ed Pilkington, told us:

“We are not in the business of editorialising our news reports.”⁴

Someone forgot to tell Burkeman, indeed the entire Guardian news team. At times like these, the media’s claims to balanced coverage seem to belong to a different universe. Over the last two weeks, the public has been subjected to a one-way delusional deluge by the media. The propaganda is such that comments made by independent US presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, appear simply shocking:

What we’re seeing is the highest level of resignation and apathy and powerlessness I’ve ever seen. We’re not talking about hoopla. We’re not talking about ‘hope’. We’re not talking about rhetoric. We’re not talking about ‘rock star Obama’. We’re talking about the question that is asked everywhere I go: ‘What is left for the American people to decide other than their own personal lives under more restrictive circumstances year after year?’ And the answer is: almost nothing.⁵

Nader says of Obama: “This is show business what you’re seeing.” The crucial point: “Obama doesn’t like to take on power.”⁵

But our media, passionately committed to ‘balance’ though they claim to be, are not interested. Their view (or so they claim): Obama’s victory is a wonderful, transformational moment for the world.

The message is enhanced by precisely the abandonment of any pretence of impartiality. This might be termed the ‘Get Real!’ stratagem of propaganda swamping. The suggestion is that the truth is so obvious, so marvellous, that it is churlish to be concerned with balance. When the whole media system is screaming at us to be overjoyed, something is wrong — life is just not that straightforward.

The same version of events has been repeated right across the media. The Times’s leading warmonger under Bush-Blair-Brown, Gerard Baker, commented: “there haven’t been many days preceded by more energy and freighted with much greater historic significance than this one”.⁶

The BBC’s Justin Webb wrote:

“On every level America will be changed by this result – its impact will be so profound that the nation will never be the same.”

David Usborne gushed for the non-editorialising news pages of the Independent:

“As tears wetted a thousand cheeks in the Chicago crowd, it was clear that the significance of Mr Obama’s victory may take some while to sink in.”

How to communicate the impact?

“Call it the demise of cynicism or the end of apathy. The country that pretends to be the standard-bearer of the democracy and presumes, indeed, to export it to the other countries around the world was living up to its own standards.”

Jon Snow of Channel 4 News did not disappoint:

Hello history (to use the word of the times). What a staggering and indescribable moment this is. Barack Obama’s graceful acceptance of what had seemed both inevitable and impossible is up there equalling any political event since the downing of the Berlin Wall and the release of Nelson Mandela.⁷

And the basis for this staggeringly important moment?

“Even after so many months of speech-making it’s still not clear what are the concrete changes that may now ensue and in particular, there are some big foreign policy areas where Obama is not promising a hugely different tack from Bush…”⁷

As we will see below, the amazing fact is that this eruption of media hype is based on essentially nothing. Obama has had little to say about what he will do, and what he has said has been depressing for anyone hoping for genuine change. Matthew Parris summed it up in the Times:

Here we have a handsome, dashing and intelligent man, a man with generous instincts and a silver tongue; but a man with no distinctive plan for government that he has seen fit to share with us; a daring opportunist; somebody we may one day judge as a sort of Tony Blair with brains. And here we go again, all over again, hook, line and sinker.⁸

The former Europe minister and arch-Blairite, Denis MacShane, also unwittingly supplied a note of caution:

“I shut my eyes when I listen to this guy [Obama] and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.”⁹

Obama And Iraq

As discussed above, the media’s propaganda swamping on Obama – of which we have sampled only a fraction – is based on almost nothing at all. Tariq Ali commented on Democracy Now!:

As for what the policies are going to be, the situation is pretty depressing. I mean, Obama, during his campaign, didn’t promise very much, basically talked in clichés and synthetic slogans like ‘change we can believe in.’ No one knows what that change is. In foreign policy terms, during the debates, what he said was basically a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies. And in relation to Afghanistan, what he said was worse than McCain…

Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Observer:

“Iraq and Afghanistan are the sharp end of the partnership between Britain and the United States. Senior members of the British government quite candidly confess: ‘We don’t have a particularly clear view about what they want to do.’”

And yet, in the face of Obama’s silence, and flat rejection of progressive policies, the media has sought to portray him as an all-new “dawn”. Thus, Jonathan Freedland wrote in his open letter to Obama:

“You have promised to… end the war in Iraq.”¹⁰

In the same newspaper, Julian Borger described Obama‘s goals: “US troops will be pulled out of Iraq in the next 16 months…”)

A Times leader asked: “How quickly can the United States military withdraw from Iraq?”

We doubt any journalist on the Times actually believes Obama is intending to withdraw US troops from Iraq (in the intended meaning of the term).

In the Guardian, Jonathan Steele supplied a more realistic appraisal:

… his position contains massive inconsistencies… he has not repudiated the war on terror. Rather, he insists that by focusing excessively on Iraq, the Bush administration ‘took its eye off the ball‘. The real target must be Afghanistan and if Osama bin Laden is spotted in Pakistan, bombing must be used there too.

Steele commented on the number of troops Obama is planning to keep in Iraq:

Officials on his team say it could number as many as 50,000 troops. Even if much of this force remains on bases and is barely visible to Iraqi civilians (much as the 4,500 British at Basra airfield are), it cannot avoid symbolising the fact that the occupation continues.

Obama: Hawk

John Pilger — who was right about Blair in 1997 and who is surely right about Obama now — also rejects the mainstream consensus:

Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates.

Obama, after all, has supported Colombia’s “right to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders.” He has promised to continue America’s fierce economic strangulation of Cuba. He has promised to support an “undivided Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital.

In August, Obama said he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government:

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

He has also said: “We will kill Bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaida.”

ZNet’s Michael Albert commented last week:

My guess is, sadly, that within one week, literally one week, Obama’s staff and cabinet choices will make decisively evident that without mass activism forcing new outcomes, change will stop at the surface. I fervently hope I am wrong.¹¹

Albert appears to have been vindicated. Vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a pro-war Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, helped push through NAFTA and favoured the war on Iraq. Alexander Cockburn writes of him:

He’s a former Israeli citizen, who volunteered to serve in Israel in 1991 and who made brisk millions in Wall Street. He is a super-Likudnik hawk, whose father was in the fascist Irgun in the late Forties, responsible for cold-blooded massacres of Palestinians.

In a co-authored book, Emanuel wrote:

“We need to fortify the military’s ‘thin green line’ around the world by adding to the U.S. Special Forces and the Marines, and by expanding the U.S. army by 100,000 more troops.”

Nader comments on Obama:

“What he’s basically doing so far is giving the Clinton crowd a second chance. Rahm Emanuel? He’s the worst of Clinton. Spokesman for Wall Street, Israel, globalization.”

Conclusion: Relaunching The Brand

We are to believe that the US political system that Ralph Nader accurately describes as “a two-party dictatorship in thralldom to giant corporations,” has produced a staggeringly different, progressive individual. And yet Nader has described how he was himself locked out of the election. He was not allowed to participate in the televised debates and lack of media coverage consigned his campaign to oblivion. He wrote to Obama:

Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys… Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?

It is no accident that the entire media system is so fervently announcing “historic” change. The American and British political brands have been badly battered and bloodied by utter disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by the fiscal chaos of the “credit crunch”. The insanity of greed-driven militarism enforcing catastrophic ‘solutions’ has become all too obvious, as has the provision of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us.

And so the American political brand must be rebirthed, resold, relaunched as a fresh start under new management.

We are being put through a crash-course in “Learning to love America again,” as the Telegraph put it.¹²

A leader in the Times on November 5 could hardly have stated the message more clearly:

“The American nation will replenish the confidence that it has lately lost. In the eyes of the world, the slate will be clean and the pretext, always spurious, for anti-Americanism has been removed.”

1. Neal Ascherson, ‘Through the door he can begin to create a freer land,’ Independent, May 4, 1997.
2. Leader, ‘A political earthquake,’ Guardian, May 2, 1997.
3. John Pilger, ‘Blair’s bloody hands,’ March 4, 2005.
4. Email, November 15, 2003.
5. Interview, RealNews.com, November 4.
6. Baker, ‘Amid the silence, citizens will make history with their sacred rite,’ The Times, November 4, 2008.
7. Snowmail, November 5, 2008.
8. Matthew Parris, ’Calm down! He’s not President of the World,’ The Times, November 8, 2008.
9. Tom Baldwin, ‘Blair team look in mirror of history,’ The Times, November 8, 2008.
10. Freedland, ‘A few thoughts on how to handle the world’s most potent political weapon,’ Guardian, November 5, 2008.
11. Albert, ‘Obama Mania?’, ZNet, November 7, 2008.
12. Iain Martin, ‘The election of Barack Obama,’ Daily Telegraph, November 6, 2008.

In Part 2, we hosted journalist Jonathan Cook’s splendid analysis in response. Cook’s main point was that media managers rarely have to take such extreme measures because few journalists “make it to senior positions unless they have already learnt how to toe the line.”

An interesting question arises, then, in the age of the internet: To what extent will these same ultra-sensitive media companies tolerate public criticism? For example, will they allow visitors to their websites to post material that is critical of their journalism, and perhaps even damaging to their interests? Last month, we tested the limits of dissent on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free (CiF) website.

On September 20, we posted a message on CiF in response to an article written by Guardian journalist Emma Brockes. Brockes had commented wryly on Tania Head, a 9/11 survivor, “of whom it has been alleged that she was not on the 78th floor of the South Tower on September 11th as she claimed, but may have been in Spain at the time…”

Brockes added:

“But well below the level of mental illness a lot of low-level fakery is actively embraced and rewarded.”

We posted the following comment:

“This is from the same journalist [Brockes] who wrote in October 2005:

“‘[Noam] Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.’”

In our post, we described Chomsky’s outrage at the suggestion that he had denied that the Serb killings of Bosnians at Srebrenica in 1995 constituted a massacre. In 2005, Chomsky wrote to us of Brockes’s article:

“Even when the words attributed to me have some resemblance to accuracy, I take no responsibility for them, because of the invented contexts in which they appear… her piece de resistance, the claim that I put the word ‘massacre’ in quotes. Sheer fabrication.”

Chomsky described his treatment by Brockes and the Guardian as “one of the most dishonest and cowardly performances I recall ever having seen in the media.” (See our media alerts: here and here)

We were interested to see how these comments would be received by the Guardian website. In the event, our message remained in place for 48 hours but was then deleted. The site moderator explained in an email:

“The article that Medialens replied to was about emotional fakery and its role in American political culture. The comment that was removed did not address this topic but instead raised a past journalistic error by the author.” (Email to Media Lens, September 23, 2008)

In fact, while Brockes +had+ discussed emotional fakery, focusing on “self dramatisation”, she had also written: “fakery no less shameless goes on every day in the political debate and the way we the audience internalise it. McCain flatly contradicts himself within the space of a single day.”

Political fakery and self-contradiction were exactly the themes of our post, but it was deleted as “off topic” by the Guardian gatekeepers.

Only a handful of comments had been posted in response to Brockes’s article. When we and one or two other people posted messages protesting the deletions, these were also deleted and someone called the Community Moderator shut down the debate, writing: “This discussion will now close, as it has mostly been off topic.” A final message appeared: “Comments are now closed for this entry.”

The website shows five messages deleted alongside just nine posts remaining. Other posts had been removed altogether.

Self-Deceits Held In Common — Groupthink

We have seen how the propaganda system is filtered by a range of carrot and stick pressures: professional training, selection for obedience, promotions and demotions, sackings, legal pressures, and the rest. The final piece of the jigsaw is much more elusive and mysterious.

In his book Vital Lies, Simple Truths, psychologist Daniel Goleman examined the human capacity for self-deception. According to Goleman, we build our version of reality around key frameworks of understanding, or “schemas”, which we then protect from conflicting facts and ideas. The more important a schema is for our sense of identity and security, the less likely we are to accept evidence contradicting it. Goleman wrote:

Foremost among these shared, yet unspoken, schemas are those that designate what is worthy of attention, how it is to be attended to – and what we choose to ignore or deny… People in groups also learn together how not to see – how aspects of shared experience can be veiled by self-deceits held in common.¹

Goleman concluded: “The ease with which we deny and dissemble – and deny and dissemble to ourselves that we have denied or dissembled – is remarkable.”

Psychologist Donald Spence noted the sophistication of this process:

“We are tempted to conclude that the avoidance is not random but highly efficient – the person knows just where not to look.”²

This tendency to self-deception appears to be greatly increased when we join as part of a group. Groups create a sense of belonging, a “we-feeling”, which can provide even greater incentives to reject painful truths. As psychologist Irving Janis reports, the ‘we-feeling’ lends “a sense of belonging to a powerful, protective group that in some vague way opens up new potentials for each of them.”³

Members are thus reluctant to say or do anything that might lessen these feelings of security and empowerment. In this situation, even pointing out the risks surrounding a group decision may seem to represent an unforgivable attack on the group itself. This is ‘groupthink’. Individual self-deception, combined with groupthink, helps explain why journalists are able to ignore even the most obvious facts.

In our September 16 Media Alert, we wrote that the Independent had devoted 153 words in the first two weeks of September to the flooding catastrophe in Haiti. By that time, 1,000 people were reported killed with 1 million made homeless out of a population of 9 million.

In response, the Independent’s former Washington correspondent, now Asia correspondent, Andrew Buncombe, wrote to us:

Dear Davids, Hello and best wishes. Hope all is well. Your latest alert about Haiti is as thought-provoking as ever but I think there are a couple of clear errors you’ve made that ought to be cleared up. Firstly you say The Independent did not report the hurricanes raging down on the country and that “the Independent has not mentioned Haiti since September 5. But the paper has at least helped explain its own prejudice”. That simple point clearly is not true. Guy Adams filed on September 7 a page lead pointing out the chaos facing untold thousands. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/haiti-in-crisis-after-tropical-storm-claims-more-than-500-lives-921716.html

But beyond that you also claim “This indifference has led to an appalling level of non-reporting, not just of the latest floods, but also of the killing of unarmed civilians by United Nations forces (Minustah), the Haitian National Police, and death squads”. You say a raid in Cite Soleil in July 2005 was reported only by a few US newspapers but that is not the case. The Independent reported on the raid and revealed evidence collated by Kevin Pina that unarmed civilians were killed.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/peacekeepers-accused-after-killings-in-haiti-500570.html

This was followed up in Feb 2007 by more details of civilians being killed by UN troops.

You’re correct in saying that Haiti does not get as much coverage as the US but your claim that the paper has not reported on Haiti, its problems and its ongoing challenges is not true. A simple search on Google for articles about Haiti over the last few years would quickly show that. Best wishes, Andy Buncombe

Andrew Buncombe
Asia Correspondent
The Independent

We replied on September 21:

Dear Andrew

Many thanks for your email. You’re right about Guy Adams’ September 7 article. For some reason, that wasn’t picked up by our LexisNexis search. We note, though, that the piece devoted 360 words to the disaster in Haiti. At the time we wrote the alert, that figure could have been added to the 153 words mentioning Haiti in the paper that month. That would have totalled 513 words for a 16-day period when perhaps 1000 people died and utter catastrophe befell the island.

You write:

“You say a raid in Cite Soleil in July 2005 was reported only by a few US newspapers but that is not the case.”

In fact we weren’t commenting on UK reporting in that section. We were describing research presented in Dan Beeton’s report on +US+ media performance: ‘Bad News From Haiti: U.S. Press Misses the Story.’ We wrote:

“… only a few US newspapers mentioned the incident. These mostly portrayed the incident as a successful UN attempt to eliminate gang members – reports of civilian deaths were ignored.

“The US press has given similar treatment to atrocities committed by the Haitian National Police.”

We thought it was clear that we were referring to Beeton’s analysis solely of the US press, but perhaps we could have been clearer.

It’s hard not to reflect on the deeper significance of your response. You’re right that the Independent devoted 513 rather than 153 words to the devastation of Haiti from September 1-16. But, really, so what? Would you be focusing on this tiny difference in assessing the Independent’s performance if you were not working for the paper? Wouldn’t a dispassionate, rational observer join with us in criticising the Independent’s appalling indifference to the disaster this month rather than arguing that “your claim that the paper has not reported on Haiti, its problems and its ongoing challenges is not true”? We did not argue that the Independent has “not reported on Haiti”. We argued that its performance, particularly this month in offering a few hundred words – less than one word per death – was pitiful. We have a great deal of respect for you. But isn’t your response on this occasion an example of a kind of corporate ‘groupthink’?

Best wishes

David Edwards and David Cromwell

It is painful for a journalist to be aware of both his or her employer’s shortcomings and his or her powerlessness to remedy them. As Daniel Goleman has noted, “when one can’t do anything to change the situation, the other recourse is to change how one perceives it.”⁴

This, finally, is the key human trait that enables “brainwashing under freedom” – journalists are able to perceive as important only that which allows them to thrive as successful components of the corporate system. The price is high, as Norman Mailer noted:

“There is an odour to any Press Headquarters that is unmistakeable… the unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly in the service of a machine.”⁵

1. Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths – The Psychology of Self-Deception, Bloomsbury 1997, p.158.
2. Ibid, p.107.
3. Ibid, p.186.
4. Goleman, Ibid., p.148.
5. Mailer, The Time of Our Time, Little Brown, 1998, p.457.