This obviously has profound implications for media performance, as even the corporate media are sometimes willing to accept. Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson notes in the Financial Times: ‘Behind their journalistic missions, most news organisations have always been commercial operations that sell audiences to advertisers.’¹

Media corporations are also typically owned by wealthy individuals or giant conglomerates, and are legally obliged to subordinate human and environmental welfare to maximised revenues for shareholders.²

The consequences for democracy are normally ignored. But again, the truth sometimes pops up. After giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry in April 2012, the owner of the Independent, Evgeny Lebedev, tweeted: ‘Forgot to tell #Leveson that it’s unreasonable to expect individuals to spend £millions on newspapers and not have access to politicians.’

Even a Guardian report had to note: ‘It was a funny and refreshingly honest message after all the recent humbug and hypocrisy from media magnates about not wanting to influence the political class.’

A less refreshingly honest morsel was served up by Brian Leveson himself when he said: ‘The majority of journalism is people doing their job honourably with dedication, fearlessly and entirely in the public interest.’ (our emphasis)

Imagine if Leveson had noted that the majority of journalism is fearlessly doing its job ‘in the corporate interest’. It would have elicited mayhem among the politico-media classes.

Perhaps we’re being a tad unfair to Leveson, given that he appeared to let slip that he supports media activism. He said that internet-based scrutiny is ‘leading to greater accountability for journalists. People will study them, and I think there’s no reporter — no decent reporter — in the land who would not welcome this extra scrutiny.’

Or so one would like to think. Alas, it is not quite our experience over the last eleven years of being blanked, blocked, abused and dumped beyond the pale of media ‘respectability’; even by people who very much like what we’re doing but who would rather not be tarred with the same brush.

The Thumb-Sucking 5-10 Per Cent Rule

The Leveson inquiry has exposed the profound influence of corporate owners on media reporting. The Guardian’s Nick Davies, whose reporting of the Milly Dowler phone-hacking scandal has been justly praised, claimed in his book, Flat Earth News, that the cumulative effect of owners and advertising was no more than 5-10 per cent:

‘Journalists with whom I have discussed this [i.e. what Davies calls “the retreat from truth-telling journalism”] agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference.’³

As we have pointed out, these numbers are contradicted even by the fact that so many aspects of the modern newspaper have evolved in response to the demands of advertisers and corporate owners.

Jonathan Cook, a former Guardian journalist, has been keeping a beady eye on the Leveson inquiry evidence challenging Davies’ 5-10 per cent claim. For example, Harold Evans, a former Rupert Murdoch editor at the Sunday Times, described to Leveson how, in 1981, Murdoch rebuked him for reporting gloomy economic news and ‘not doing what he [Murdoch] wants, in political terms’. Evans says that Murdoch came to his home and the two ‘almost ended up in fisticuffs over a piece on the economy.’

Evans added:

Murdoch would also haul in senior staff for meetings to tell them to alter their coverage, including the editorial line of the leader columns and telling the foreign editor to “attack the Russians more”.

No wonder former Sun editor David Yelland described how editors ‘go on a journey where they end up agreeing with everything Murdoch says … “What would Rupert think about this?” is like a mantra inside your head’.

Cook also pointed out two articles ‘that as good as admit the obvious: that Murdoch decided what parties his papers would back in return, of course, for political support for his business interests.’

The first described how, in 2009, James Murdoch, deputy chief operating officer of News Corp, had told David Cameron, then Tory leader of the Opposition, that the Sun would switch its support in the upcoming general election from Labour to the Conservatives. This announcement was made shortly after Jeremy Hunt, then the Tory’s shadow culture secretary, had visited News Corp offices in the US.

A second article reported that Murdoch was ‘attracted by the idea’ of Scottish independence and thought that Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, was a ‘nice guy’. Murdoch ‘cleared the way’ for the Scottish edition of the Sun to endorse Salmond’s Scottish National Party at the Scottish elections in spring 2011, ‘just as [Salmond] was promising to lobby for News Corporation to take control of BSkyB.’ The SNP won a landslide victory in the Scottish parliamentary elections on May 5. Salmond admitted that he had been ‘happy’ to make a direct call to culture secretary Jeremy Hunt to support Murdoch’s controversial attempt to take complete control of the satellite broadcaster.

But this wasn’t just a one-off; it was — and remains — a crucial part of the political process. As Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin told Leveson, News International bosses ‘could be very demanding’. Referring to then Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, charged last week with conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice: ‘If you are on the same side as her, you have to see her every week. This was how it worked.’

Letwin added: ‘The realpolitik is that you have to get on with people who run newspapers. Labour did the same.’

Indeed, in 1995, opposition leader Tony Blair flew halfway round the world to curry favour with Rupert Murdoch at the luxury Hayman Island resort in Queensland, Australia. Addressing senior News Corporation executives, the Labour leader pledged an end to the ‘rigid economic planning and state controls’ of the ‘Old Left’ and declared that ‘the battle between market and public sector is over.’ Two years later, after 18 years of supporting the Tories, Murdoch used the Sun to officially endorse Blair and New Labour who then won a landslide victory at the 1997 general election. In 2011, Blair even became godfather to Murdoch’s youngest child.

And Murdoch isn’t alone in casting a shadow over the political process. Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that ‘he and other politicians became too close to too many newspaper proprietors and executives.’ So politicians have been bending to the will of media owners, and media owners have been influencing, and even directing, what their own editors and journalists do.

Jonathan Cook told us why he believes it’s important to document examples of senior journalists revealing the extent of proprietorial interference:

‘Davies’ book [‘Flat Earth News’] was so influential, especially with other journalists, because it propped up the lie journalists like to tell themselves and others that the problem of the “profession” is essentially a lack of funding and proper care from media owners. They prefer that assessment for two obvious reasons: first, journalists want more money invested in their papers because they hope it means promotions and wage rises; and second, it helps to avert their gaze from the reality that editorial independence is, and always was, a myth.⁴

Cook also told us:

It’s really about time Davies retracted that bit of nonsense from his book. The problem is that, were he to do so, he could no longer justify his argument that media failure is the result chiefly of economic pressures rather than structural flaws.⁵

A Private Conversation Between Elite Groups

Peter Oborne, chief political commentator at the Daily Telegraph, is no raving leftie. But as a political conservative, he had some astute observations to make to Leveson on the corrupt state of politics and media in this country.

Oborne said that when he arrived on the political reporting ‘scene’ he was ‘staggered’ by the closeness of politicians and journalists:

It was ceasing to be a conversation between activists and politicians but between the media and the politicians. The News International annual party at the Tory and Labour conference was an extraordinary power event to which people were excluded. Unfortunately I never got in, but you got the entire cabinet and all the influence brokers and the senior members of the media class, and it was a very important statement I felt about how Britain was being governed.

He continued:

And then you got the astonishing business of the senior News International people sitting just behind the Cabinet. They were the VIPs in the chamber, I believe really important media types were there as well, they were brought into the inner sanctum. I felt this was a perversion of our democracy, it was starting to become a private conversation between elite groups rather than a proper popular engagement.

He described the politico-journalism collusion as a ‘conspiracy against their [newspapers’] readers’. When challenged by Leveson to justify such a blunt assertion, Oborne responded:

That’s exactly what was going on. [...] In order to report during that time you had to get close to the people who ran new Labour, there were very few of them. [...] People who tried to report objectively and fairly were bullied and victimised and not given access to information. People who were part of the circle were favoured and of course there was a price for that. Very hard to be an independent observer, to keep your integrity in those circumstances.

Political reporting, he said, had become ‘private deals, private arrangements, between media and politicians.’ Collusion between politicians and the media helped to explain why the public was so ‘grievously misinformed’ about Iraq in the run-up to war. And we would add that it also helps explain why the public has been grievously misinformed about the post-invasion death toll in Iraq which likely exceeds one million, with four million refugees, in a country that has been utterly devastated.

1. ‘News industry can survive in the digital age,’ Financial Times, March 21, 2012.
2. See Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Constable, 2004.
3. Flat Earth News, Chattus & Windus, 2008, p. 22.
4. Email, April 26, 2012.
5. Email, April 25, 2012.

The Federation of American Scientists estimates that India has a stockpile of 80-100 nuclear weapons while North Korea has less than ten. North Korea originally signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty on nuclear weapons (NPT) but withdrew in 2003.

Like Israel and Pakistan, also nuclear powers, India has never signed the NPT. Despite this, the US has supported the development of nuclear weapons in all three countries – India receiving particular support from George W. Bush and Obama. The 2008 India Civilian Nuclear Agreement — an agreement of cooperation between India, the US, and other providers of nuclear technology — is linked with plans to build dozens of nuclear plants in India, a country that exploded five nuclear devices at its Pokhran test site in 1998. Environmental journalist Gar Smith writes:

While this scheme will generate a lot of global cash-flow for the nuclear marketers and their government boosters, it could deal a death blow to nonproliferation hopes by allowing India to become the first country to buy nuclear materials without being a party to the NPT. In April 2010, Washington signed off on a deal that permits India to reprocess its own nuclear fuel. The arrangement, however, has raised fears in neighboring Pakistan, which is now expected to embark on a ‘significant nuclear military buildup’.

Meanwhile, the US government regularly lambasts North Korea for its nuclear weapons programme and, of course, Iran for an alleged nuclear weapons programme that, according to the 16 US intelligence agencies, does not exist.

As Noam Chomsky comments:

Small wonder that outside the West few can take the US charges against Iran very seriously…¹

The headline for the BBC article on India was neutral enough:

India test launches Agni-V long-range missile.

The headline for the article on North Korea struck a different tone:

UN “deplores” North Korea botched rocket launch.

The introduction to the Korean piece continued with the same emphasis:

The UN Security Council has deplored the launch by North Korea of a rocket which broke up shortly after take-off.

A statement issued after closed-door talks said the launch was in breach of two Security Council resolutions…’

The introduction to the India piece was positive, even celebratory:

India has successfully launched a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile able to carry a nuclear warhead, officials say…

India said the launch was “flawless” and the missile had reached its target…

With this, India joins an elite nuclear club of China, Russia, France, the US and UK which already have long-range missiles, although with a much greater range. Israel is also thought to possess them.

‘It was a perfect launch. It met all the test parameters and hit its pre-determined target’, SP Das, director of the test range, told the BBC. He confirmed the missile had flown more than 5,000km before reaching the target.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh congratulated the scientists for the “successful launch” of the missile.

If anyone on Planet Earth had anything negative to say about the launch, the BBC was unable to find them.

The primary source for views on the Indian launch were Indian. By contrast, North Korean opinion was buried in the last of five sections in the article. Perhaps no humanising comments from named North Korean officials or experts were available – the BBC provided only two bland, anonymous sentences from ‘North Korea’s state news agency KCN.’

Ask A World Policeman

The article on North Korea presented the missile launch as a threat eliciting punishment:

Earlier, Washington accused the communist state of threatening regional security. It said North Korea had isolated itself still further from the outside world.

The US has also cancelled a proposed food aid deal with Pyongyang.

A US National Security Council spokesman said they would look at additional sanctions if Pyongyang continued its ‘provocations’.

As for the Indian launch:

The BBC’s Andrew North in Delhi says Indian officials deny it, but everyone believes the missile is mainly aimed at deterring China…

The North Korean missile, then, was portrayed as a threat; the Indian missile as a deterrent. Additionally, the BBC commented: “Many outside the country saw the launch as an illegal test of long-range missile technology.” The sentence could apply to either launch – we will leave readers to guess in which article it appeared.

The article on North Korea repeatedly referenced US sources: “US ambassador Susan Rice”, “Washington”, “A US National Security Council spokesman”, “Washington” (again), and finally “White House spokesman Jay Carney”. When media discussion centres on global “Bad Guys” it is   US opinion that matters. This not so subtly portrays the US as the actual and rightful World Policeman. One might reasonably wonder what on earth events on the Korean peninsula ever had to do with the United States.

The North Korea piece lined up the denunciations, here White House spokesman Jay Carney:

North Korea is only further isolating itself by engaging in provocative acts, and is wasting its money on weapons and propaganda displays while the North Korean people go hungry.

Nothing along these lines appeared in the article on India, a country with 57 billionaires and one-third of the world’s poor. In January, India’s Premier Manmohan Singh called malnutrition in the country “a national shame” as he released a major survey that found 42 per cent of children under five were underweight. One of the NGOs that produced the report commented that, measured by the prevalence of malnutrition, India is “doing worse than sub-Saharan Africa”.

To round off the criticism, the BBC article on North Korea cited South Korea, the North’s main enemy:

South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-Hwan accused the North of a ‘clear breach of the UN resolution that prohibits any launch using ballistic missile technology’.

No mention was made of the Pakistani view of India’s launch. There was also no word at all on the view from “Washington” or the US more generally.

The silence is understandable. As discussed, while preaching against nuclear proliferation to countries like North Korea and Iran, the US and Britain have been working hard to arm both India and Pakistan.

In September 2003, Britain’s BAE Systems announced the sale of 66 Hawk jets to India in a £1 billion package. This constituted 10 times the value of annual UK development aid to India. In July 2010, a further 57 aircraft were sold in a deal worth £700,000,000 described by The Times of India as ‘a quantum jump for Indo-British military ties’.

The Hawks, which can also be used as ground-attack aircraft, are used to train Indian pilots to fly more powerful jets, including 139 BAE Systems Jaguar bombers built under licence. The Ministry of Defence accepts that Jaguars could deliver India’s nuclear weapons. The Indian government receiving these jets has fought three wars with Pakistan in the last 70 years.

In 2003, the Guardian provided the sensible emphasis in a piece entitled:  “5,000 jobs safe as India buys Hawks”.

Similarly, in March 2005, the press reported that the United States had agreed to sell two dozen F-16 nuclear-capable jet fighters to Pakistan. US Senator Larry Pressler commented in The New York Times:

Pakistan… is a corrupt, absolute dictatorship. It has a horrendous record on human rights and religious tolerance.²

It could be coincidence that, with important arms contracts and strategic alliances at stake, the BBC should fail to muster a single criticism of Indian nuclear missile technology. It could also be coincidence that the BBC demonises and lambasts an enemy of the same state-corporate interests. But, in truth, the pattern is so obvious, so consistent, over years and decades. We can debate the precise mechanisms corrupting BBC performance – the fact that senior managers and trustees are Establishment grandees selected by the government of the day. Or we can focus on the role of the entire corporate media system in furthering state-corporate power – system-wide corruption that generates industrial strength pressure to conform on the less overtly corporate BBC. Whatever the reasons, there is no question that the BBC heavily promotes the interests of power at the expense of honesty, critical thought and compassion.

1. Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, Hamish Hamilton, 2010, p.220
2. Pressler, “Dissing Democracy in Asia”, The New York Times, March 21, 2005

The excellent News Sniffer website exposed how the Guardian hurriedly fixed political editor Patrick Wintour’s ugly analysis of Galloway’s 10,140 majority win, with a staggering swing of 36 per cent from Labour to the Respect party. Wintour’s shoddy journalism had initially focused on how the constituency’s ‘Muslim immigrant community’ had largely abandoned Labour. The offensive trope of ‘immigrant’ Muslims appeared three times in his piece. And Galloway’s popular call for the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan, and ‘a fightback against the job crisis’, was disparagingly cast as ‘fundamentalist’.

It was shocking to see such elitist disdain for majority British views and for ‘immigrant’ communities expressed by a senior Guardian journalist. Someone on the newspaper, perhaps spotting the danger of the nation’s flagship ‘liberal’ newspaper appearing so illiberal, acted swiftly to hide the evidence. Too late, News Sniffer was on the trail. This is what Wintour wrote:

‘It appeared that the seat’s Muslim immigrant community had decamped from Labour en masse to Galloway’s fundamentalist call for an immediate British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and a fightback against the job crisis.’

This was amended to:

‘It appeared that the seat’s Muslim community had decamped from Labour en masse to Galloway’s call for an immediate British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and a fightback against the job crisis.’

Further key changes are easily visible here.

‘The Muslim Vote’

It is customary for the media to cast an honest, uncompromising political voice as ‘controversial’ and ‘maverick’ (or worse). And journalists did not disappoint. On the News at Ten, celebrity presenter Fiona Bruce, reportedly on a BBC salary of half a million pounds per year, referred blithely to ‘controversial ex-Labour MP George Galloway’. (March 30, 2012). The British public will wait in vain for her to refer to the ‘controversial’ Prime Minister David Cameron or the ‘controversial’ President Barack Obama.

In a News at Ten ‘analysis’, the BBC’s Iain Watson reported, with the broadcaster’s version of impartiality, that Galloway had compared his victory to the Arab Spring and ‘cheekily suggested he was challenging the entire British establishment’. (March 30, 2012)

But perhaps Galloway’s suggestion was accurate, ‘cheeky’ or no. Galloway was, in fact, pretty devastating in challenging the British media establishment in interview after interview. On Channel 4 News, Midlands correspondent Darshni Soni asserted that Galloway’s ‘fiery rhetoric on Iraq and Afghanistan specifically targeted young Muslims’; as though only ‘young Muslims’ should be concerned about Iraq and Afghanistan. (‘“Young Muslims defied elders to vote for Galloway”’, C4 News, March 30, 2012)

Soni tried to trip up Galloway:

Soni: ‘But what do you say to people who say you played that race card – you specifically targeted young Muslim men?’

George Galloway: ‘Well, I think it was Labour that put up the Pakistani Muslim candidate, not us. So that’s a ludicrous charge, to be honest.’

Soni: ‘But you talked a lot about Iraq, Afghanistan.’

Galloway: ‘Well, Iraq and Afghanistan are not issues only for Muslims.’

Also on Channel 4 News, Cathy Newman sought, like so many before her, to outwit Galloway — only to come out of the encounter with egg on her face. (‘Cathy Newman interviews George Galloway’, C4 News, March 30, 2012)

Newman: ‘George Galloway, you’ve described this as the most sensational upset in history. I think you got a little carried away – there were two previous results with bigger swings. But it is pretty sensational nevertheless. What do you put it down to?’

Galloway: ‘No I don’t think I was exaggerating, if you’ll forgive me, I’m a bit of a student of these matters. No party to the left of Labour has ever taken a Labour seat in a period when Labour has been in opposition.’

Newman pressed on: ‘You’re defining your terms very clearly and quite narrowly, but within those terms a sensational victory – what do you put it down to?’

Galloway responded amicably: ‘I don’t know why you’re being so churlish about this. I know more about left-wing history than you do, I assure you. But anyway, I put it down to a tidal wave of alienation in the country, and not just in Bradford, against the Tweedledee-Tweedledum politics of the major parties.’

This is surely right. When much that matters is so clearly going wrong in this country and the world at large, no wonder the public is thoroughly sick of the fodder that is dished out as ‘responsible’ policies, debate and reporting.

Galloway continued: ‘I think we saw what I described last night as “a Bradford Spring” moment – a kind of uprising, a peaceful democratic uprising of especially young people.’

Newman responded with barely disguised disdain: ‘Isn’t it slightly presumptuous or even arrogant though to describe a … to compare a by-election victory with a revolution that has claimed tens of thousands of lives across the Arab world?’

Galloway exposed the biased stance of C4 News: ‘Well I can see you and I are not getting on very well and probably that’s a sign that I should go and do one of the many other interviews that are waiting for me. You obviously weren’t listening or you’re not hearing me …’

Newman: ‘I’m hearing you perfectly well…’

Galloway: ‘…I said a peaceful democratic uprising, a peaceful democratic uprising – that’s what I think it was. You evidently don’t. We’ll see if it comes to anything. Thanks very much – because I really do have a lot of very important interviews to do.’

As one of our regular readers later reminded us on the Media Lens message board, the encounter was reminiscent of Jeremy Paxman’s remarkable May 2005 interview with Galloway after he had won the Bethnal Green and Bow seat from the war-supporting, Blairite MP, Oona King. In a dismal lowlight of a long BBC career, Paxman repeatedly asked Galloway:

‘Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?’

Galloway rightly disparaged Paxman’s question as ‘preposterous’ saying that: ‘I don’t believe that people get elected because of the colour of their skin. I believe people get elected because of their record and their policies.’

There was more to come from the BBC. In an extraordinary segment on BBC Radio Five Live, reporter Anna Foster fired a series of hostile and loaded questions at Galloway. Just hours after his electoral victory, Foster kept asking why he had come to Bradford – an issue that he rightly said he had dealt with on numerous occasions before the election. Galloway took her to task for focusing on ‘the’ Muslim vote, as though Muslim voters were a homogeneous mass:

‘This is very incendiary and inflammatory language which the BBC keep using.’

After giving Foster several more minutes of his time, Galloway rightly described the interview as ‘a hatchet job’ and left the studio, leaving the BBC reporter flabbergasted.

Later that day on BBC2’s Newsnight, reporter Peter Marshall recycled the same discredited language: ‘It’s said you’ve relied very heavily on the Muslim vote. I mean, you yourself have said in the past that you used (sic)… you have the Muslim vote…’

Galloway responded: ‘I really reject this concept of “the” Muslim vote. Muslims are individuals just like everyone else. You wouldn’t say that there’s a “Christian vote” because Christians vote in all sorts of ways. And the Labour candidate, I remind you, was a Pakistani Muslim. So I really don’t think that’s a valid question. Every voter is an individual and every voter has to be appealed to.’

Marshall managed to include the standard description of Galloway as ‘a singular figure, a political maverick’ who ‘in triumph’ is ‘unrepentant’. What he was supposed to be ‘unrepentant’ about wasn’t made clear. Perhaps for appearing on Celebrity Big Brother, pretending to be a cat licking milk from Rula Lenska’s cupped hands: stock footage that news broadcasters are seemingly obliged to repeat whenever Galloway is mentioned.

The Wolf Man

The Observer played its part as well, publishing not just one but two anti-Galloway comment pieces. The first, by Andrew Rawnsley, set the tone, referring acerbically to Galloway’s ‘blushing modesty which makes him such an appealing character’. This was a dig at the Respect politician supposedly acclaiming Bradford West ‘the most sensational victory in British political history’. But, shooting himself in the foot, Rawnsley had got the quote wrong. Galloway had called it ‘the most sensational result in British by-election history’, not ‘political history’ – a crucial distinction. As we have seen, Galloway had clearly explained the basis for his claim.

For Galloway to draw any kind of comparison with the Arab Spring was, said Rawnsley, ‘a very advanced form of narcissism’. The Observer columnist then added the sly comment that Galloway had ‘declined to offer his fusion of Marxism and Islamism to voters at the five previous byelections of this parliament’. Whatever counts as a ‘fusion of Marxism and Islamism’ was not spelled out. It was instead left hanging in the air as something to be regarded by right-minded people as dangerously anti-capitalist and un-Christian; perhaps even unpatriotic and anti-British. But arguably the most blatant propaganda element of the Observer piece was the accompanying sinister-looking photograph of Galloway, reminiscent of Lon Chaney Jr as The Wolf Man.

By an amazing coincidence – or not – a second Observer hit piece by Nick Cohen deployed a similarly sinister photograph of Galloway. The Observer’s picture editor had obviously been busy scouring the pictorial archives and struck gold not once, but twice. The comment piece also had a cartoon-like flavour. For example, Galloway’s ‘claim’ that his by-election victory was the ‘Bradford spring’ exhibited, Cohen said, ‘contemptible willingness to exploit the suffering of others for the purposes of self-aggrandisement’ which ‘no politician can beat’. No politician? Not even Cohen’s hero Tony Blair, who exploited the deaths of millions in the Middle East for his own self-aggrandisement as a ‘peace maker’?

Almost in a parody of himself, Cohen wrote that: ‘Galloway and others on the far left believe that Muslims can replace the white working class that let them down so badly by refusing to follow their orders to seize power.’

One had to check the date of publication. Yes, it was published on April 1. But, nonetheless, Observer readers were forced to accept that this was indeed not a spoof piece by a spoof Cohen.

The attitude was summed up by the title of a Liberal Conspiracy blog, run by Sunny Hundal: ‘When populism is dangerous for democracy.’ Hundal, the Guardian‘s ‘blogger of the year’ in 2006, was himself busy on Twitter. He referred to Galloway in responding to a questioner: ‘I don’t want any part of a left that supports dictators thanks. Maybe you do.’

We were intrigued by this and responded: ‘Yet you write that Obama’s re-election “is worth fighting for.” Does Obama not support, indeed arm, dictators?’

The following day, Hundal replied. Here are some highlights from the subsequent exchange:

Sunny Hundal (SH): ‘answer to that question is simple: as Us Prez Obama can’t easily call for dictators to go. But Galloway isn’t leader: he can.’

Media Lens (ML): ‘You can’t reject George Galloway for dictator “support” and then back Obama who arms them, actually helps them kill.’

SH: ‘can you name me one dictator that one Obama has cheerleaded for?’

Writer and activist Ian Sinclair replied:

‘Mubarak “is a stalwart ally… a force for stability and good” – Obama to BBC, 2009 http://bit.ly/H2ZeLg’

We responded to Hundal:

ML: ‘Simple questions 1) Has Obama armed dictators? 2) Is that more or less important than what he/Galloway says about dictators?’

SH: 1) ‘Has he personally sanctioned arming of dictators? No. They can buy weapons from China/Russia too, as Libya did.’

SH: ‘he [Obama] didn’t support Mubarak.’

We replied with a quote from 2011 in The Times on US aid to Egypt: ML: ‘”the Mubarak regime is still receiving $1.3 billion of military aid each year from America.” (The Times, January 31, 2011)’

SH: ‘Just for your info, since you guys set yourself up as a major source of info and critique: “military aid” is not guns/ammo.’

ML: ‘True. Do F-16 jets, M-1A1 tanks, Harpoon, TOW, Hellfire, and Stinger missiles count? http://tinyurl.com/5rwx7zf’

SH: ‘might help if you recognised that most of it referred to stuff over a decade, not during Obama. Now, answer my question?’

ML: ‘Details here: http://tinyurl.com/2ekorm9 May 2009 Apache attack helicopter sale here: http://tinyurl.com/7djfdzl‘

And indeed Hundal’s position was completely untenable. To sample at random, the Washington Post reported last December:

‘The Obama administration on Thursday announced an arms deal with Saudi Arabia valued at nearly $30 billion, an agreement that will send 84 F-15 fighter jets and assorted weaponry to the kingdom.’

And so on. Hundal wriggled and dug himself ever deeper. For us, it was another encounter with the curious capacity for ‘selective inattention’ found at the intellectual fringe otherwise known as ‘the mainstream media’. For Hundal, Galloway’s words really are far worse crimes than Obama’s active participation in the arming and diplomatic protection of murderous dictators who use his support to kill large numbers of people.

Closing Remarks

In our 2005 media alert, Ambushing Dissent, also analysing media treatment of Galloway, we noted how ‘across the spectrum, “rogue” thinkers, politicians and parties are relentlessly smeared and mocked by the elite media. The effect is as inevitable as it is intended – to persuade the public to revile and turn away from radical voices threatening established privilege and power.’

The response to Galloway’s latest electoral victory from the Guardian, the Observer, Channel 4 News and the BBC piles on the evidence. It shows – once again – that the supposedly liberal media, purveyors of ‘open journalism,’ will fight tooth and nail to neutralise anyone who challenges the establishment status quo.

And yet it could hardly be more obvious that the British political system has degenerated into a grotesque, neo-feudalist fraud representing the same elite interests under different brand names. Our politics is structurally addicted to greed-based ‘humanitarian’ militarism, to exacerbating the catastrophic threat of climate change, and to denying the public any serious choice on the major policy issues of the day. An honest media would welcome any small sign of hope that the iron grip of this corrupt and oppressive system might be subject to serious challenge.

Together, politics and media combine to provide an astonishingly consistent form of reality management controlling public perception of conflicts in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Alastair Crooke, founder and director of Conflicts Forum, notes how the public is force-fed a “simplistic victims-and-aggressor meme, which demands only the toppling of the aggressor”.

The bias is spectacular, outrageous, but universal, and so appears simply to mirror reality. Ahmad Barqawi, a Jordanian freelance columnist and writer based in Amman, said it well:

I remember during the “Libyan Revolution”, the tally of casualties resulting from Gaddafi’s crackdown on protesters was being reported by the mainstream media with such a “dramatic” fervor that it hardly left the public with a moment to at least second-guess the ensuing avalanche of unverifiable information and erratic inflow of “eye witnesses” accounts.

Yet the minute NATO forces militarily intervened and started bombing the country into smithereens, the ceremonial practice of body count on our TV screens suddenly stopped; instead, reporting of Libyan casualties (of whom there were thousands thanks only to the now infamous UNSC resolution 1973) turned into a seemingly endless cycle of technical, daily updates of areas captured by NATO-backed “rebel forces”, then lost back to Gaddafi’s military, and again recaptured by the rebels in their creeping territorial advances towards Tripoli…

How is it that the media’s concern for human rights did not extend to the victims of NATO bombing campaigns in the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Sirte? How come the international community’s drive to protect the lives of Libyan civilians in Benghazi lost steam the minute NATO stepped in and actually increased the number of casualties ten-fold?

It is a remarkable phenomenon — global media attention flitting instantaneously, like a flock of starlings, from one focus desired by state power to another focus also desired by state power.

But the bias goes far beyond even this example. The media’s basic stance in reporting events in Libya and Syria has been one of intense moral outrage. The level of political-media condemnation is such that media consumers are often persuaded to view rational, informed dissent as apologetics for mass murder. Crooke writes:

Those with the temerity to get in the way of “this narrative” by arguing that external intervention would be disastrous, are roundly condemned as complicit in President Assad’s crimes against humanity. They are confronted by the unanswerable riposte of dead babies — literally.

Monopolising The First Draft Of History

Just as the West has a near-monopoly on high-tech violence, so the Western media has a near-monopoly in creating the ‘first rough draft of history’. Consider this headline in The Times last month: “Moral Blindness; Russia and China acted for self-serving motives in vetoing the Security Council’s condemnation of the bloodshed in Syria.{¹

Times readers were assured that the violence – which, by curious coincidence, was said to have peaked just as the UN vote was taking place — was enormous: “Without warning, cause or compassion, the Syrian Army opened fire on the centre of Homs in the night, killing at least 200 people and leaving hundreds more maimed and wounded.”

As we discussed at the time, this was the “first rough draft of history” across the media. A second, sharply contradictory draft is already emerging, but only at the media margins. Jonathan Steele, formerly chief foreign correspondent at the Guardian, recently wrote of Russia and China in the London Review of Books:

The Western media have largely caricatured them as defenders of the regime thanks to their vetoes of the UN Security Council resolution on Syria. But in the days before the vote on 4 February diplomats in New York had been working with two separate drafts, trying to find a compromise text. Far from siding with Assad, the Russian draft differed little from the Moroccan one the West supported. It condemned the authorities’ “disproportionate use of force”. It called for an immediate ceasefire. The two substantive differences were that the Russian draft said the political process should start “without preconditions” while the Western-backed draft supported the Arab League’s call for Assad to transfer power to his vice-president before a dialogue could begin. In the event of non-compliance, the Western draft threatened “further measures”. The Russians had no such clause. For reasons that are still not clear, the West decided to ambush the Russians and Chinese and put the Moroccan draft to a sudden vote just before Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, was due to visit Assad to conduct negotiations. The West knew that in its regime-changing form the Russians and Chinese would have no choice but to veto the resolution. If the Russians had been less diplomatic, they might have put their own draft to a sudden vote. We might then today be shouting at the West for vetoing a solution.

As for the Times’ and other media’s endlessly repeated, but unverified, claims of 200 dead in Homs, Steele cites a source who said he “started having doubts about the media coverage when al-Jazeera claimed two hundred people died on the day the UN Security Council resolution was debated. My friend in Homs said it was more like sixty”.

The influential risk analysis group, Stratfor, reports that “most of the opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue”. Emails from Stratfor published by WikiLeaks argued that Syrian government massacres against civilians were unlikely because the “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario. Regime forces have been careful to avoid the high casualty numbers that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds”.

Reuters recently profiled the key source for much mainstream reporting of casualties, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in an article titled, “‘Syrian shop-keeper wages lonely war from English city.”  The report notes of the lone warrior, Rami Abdulrahman:

Thousands of miles away from home, in a small rented house in Coventry, Abdulrahman runs Syria’s most prominent activist group which has become central to the way the uprising is being reported – and understood – in the world.

When Human Rights Watch recently reported “kidnappings, the use of torture, and executions by armed Syrian opposition members”, the activist and filmmaker Gabriele Zamparini asked: “So, why weren’t we informed of this by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights? What are they observing?” (Email to Media Lens, March 20, 2012) Two more questions the media will doubtless not be asking.

It is not outrageous that Abdulrahman should be saying whatever he likes about the conflict. It is outrageous that the BBC, the Guardian and the New York Times are presenting him as a primary source for hard evidence.

As discussed, media outrage has typically been communicated at a high pitch of damning condemnation. And yet casualties in Libya under Gaddafi and in Syria now are likely far below those caused by Nato’s war in Libya. They are certainly minor events compared to the searing holocaust inflicted by the West on Iraq over more than two decades at the cost of more than 2 million lives. Nevertheless, while moral outrage is turned on like a tap in response to the crimes of official enemies,”our” crimes – horrors for which we are morally accountable as democratic citizens – elicit only murmurs of mild concern. Once again, in an instant, the media flock alters direction in a way that just happens to favour state interests.

The groundwork persuading us to accept this bias is being laid on a daily basis. As Western demands for Syrian regime change reached a peak in early March, a Guardian photo spread was titled “Dictators’ Wives – Their husbands have run some of the most brutal regimes of the Arab world, but present and former first ladies presented a different image to the world”.

The first six of these photos, fully half of the dozen on display, focused on Asma al-Assad, wife of the Syrian official enemy du jour. If Guardian readers didn’t know that Assad was being portrayed by the US-UK governments as the latest Hitler, Saddam, Milosevic, and Gaddafi, they could have guessed from this piece. Notably absent from the remaining pictures were the dictators’ wives of surviving Western allies in countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain and Yemen.

A week earlier, the Guardian had published: “The Arab world’s first ladies of oppression”. Again, the photo beneath the title featured “Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma”. An Independent article asked: “So, what do you think of your husband’s brutal crackdown, Mrs Assad?”

We accept that Assad is a ruthless dictator. And, of course, politicians, and arguably their spouses, should be subjected to serious challenge. But can we imagine anything comparable being directed at the wives of other men running two of ‘the most brutal regimes’ in the world – Barack Obama and David Cameron?

By contrast, the Guardian “Picture of the day” on January 25, included this comment: “The first lady shines in sapphire at the state of the union address, surrounded by a sea of dark suits.”

The piece added: “Michelle Obama doesn’t do trends. Instead she wears clothes that convey a message but never overpower her.”

A Guardian review of last week’s meeting between Obama and Cameron in Washington, observed:

Catwalk season might be over, but Washington has gallantly rushed in to fill the vacuum. This week, DC is playing host to a fascinating geopolitical fashion show featuring an all-star cast and headlined by Michelle Obama and Samantha Cameron

Try imagining a British journalist asking: “So, what do you think of your husband’s brutal drone campaign, Mrs Obama?”

“We Are Not Investigative Reporters”

A foundation stone of structural journalistic bias is the assumption that it is the role of ‘balanced’ journalism to defend democracy by uncritically reporting the thoughts and deeds of elected leaders. In the aftermath of the Iraq war, then ITN political editor (now BBC political editor), Nick Robinson, wrote:

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.²

By contrast, challenging what “those in power” are doing or thinking is said to be the task of less high-profile news journalists. In reality, they also often merely echo officialdom.

Thus, two of the Guardian’s senior news reporters, Patrick Wintour and Julian Borger, recently reported David Cameron’s claim that “Iran is planning an inter-continental nuclear weapon” that “would threaten the west”. Wintour and Borger failed to offer a single fact or source to challenge this preposterous claim that so closely resembled the lies that preceded the war on Iraq in 2002-2003 (after complaints, the Guardian amended the article).

Or consider that Reuters reported:

U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said on Thursday she was devastated by the destruction she saw in Baba Amr district of the Syrian city of Homs and she wants to know what happened to residents there as result of an assault by government forces.   “I was devastated by what I saw in Baba Amr yesterday,” Amos told Reuters TV after leaving a meeting with ministers in Damascus.  “The devastation there is significant, that part of Homs is completely destroyed and I am concerned to know what has happened to the people who live in that part of the city”.

Reuters did not mention that Valerie Amos is the same Baroness Amos who was made a life peer by Tony Blair in 1997, and made a cabinet minister by him in 2003, replacing Clare Short after she resigned over the Iraq war. Amos said in May 2003:

It is absurd to suggest that we invented, exaggerated or distorted evidence for our own ends. There have been successive United Nations Security Council resolutions about Iraq’s WMD. We have evidence that Iraq used its WMD against its own people. These are the facts. ³

Amos insisted that the Government’s dossier on WMD in Iraq had been “thorough and accurate”.  She commented: “On the 45-minute claim, it is absolutely clear from reading the Hutton report that the Government did not dramatise the evidence>”⁴

In truth, it is left to a tiny handful of “crusading” journalists buried in the ‘quality’ press to offer a heavily compromised challenge to power.

Additionally, the fact that big media corporations are owned by wealthy individuals, or even larger corporations owned and run by wealthy people, means that high-profile journalists tend to be selected on the unspoken assumption that they will support elite versions of the world. Unsurprisingly, then, we find that the leading political correspondents of major broadcast and print media tend to be highly sympathetic to the official view. The investigative journalist I.F. Stone wrote:

The reporter assigned to specific beats like the State Department of the Pentagon for a wire service of a big daily newspaper soon finds himself a captive. State and Pentagon have large press relations forces whose job it is to herd the press and shape the news. There are many ways to punish a reporter who gets out of line; if a big story breaks at 3 a.m, the press office may neglect to notify him while his rivals get the story. There are as many ways to flatter and take a reporter into camp – private-off-the-record dinners with high officials, entertainment at the service clubs.

The BBC’s Nick Robinson commented recently:

David Cameron will become the first world leader to be welcomed aboard Airforce One by President Obama so that both men can travel to the crucial swing state of Ohio. The pin up of the global left and the leader of the British right will add the latest image to the photo album of the Special Relationship.

He added: “Last week President Obama had the opportunity to look Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu in the eye and judge how close he is to launching a war. David Cameron will want to know what he saw.”

This mythologising of leaders as virtual Hollywood heroes — and the depiction of policy as emerging from powerful individuals rather than powerful groups — urges the public to defer to leaders portrayed as far more than mere representatives of the people.

The undiscussed, system-supportive foundation of professional journalism adds a guaranteed second promotional layer reinforcing officialdom’s version of the world. Politicians can simply report the threat of a terrible impending massacre in Libya and the press will report them saying it — over and over again.

Compromised international organisations like the United Nations and even some well-intentioned but naïve human rights groups, can also be depended on to reinforce the official view. The UN, for example, is not, as presented, a divinely independent body free from the taint of realpolitik. It is subject to superpower control achieved through manipulation, threat, punishment and reward. If the UN reinforces the official view, the media can cite this as “independent” confirmation of what the United States and Britain are claiming. Right-wing think tanks and less high-profile “journalists of attachment” – some of them out and out state stooges – also add their shrieks to the swelling chorus insisting: “Something must be done!”

Perceiving an apparently rock solid consensus across the political, media and NGO spectra, the best compassionate instincts of many media consumers will prompt them to accept calls for ‘humanitarian intervention’ to obstruct the crimes of official enemies.

The danger is clear, then – the “victims-and-aggressor meme” can become insulated against facts, against even discussion of the facts, by a kind of press-button, structural propaganda.

1. Leading article, The Times, February 6, 2012
2. Robinson, ‘Remember the last time you shouted like that?” I asked the spin doctor,” The Times, July 16, 2004
3. Paul Waugh, “Rumsfeld changes tack by insisting that WMD will be found”, Independent, May 31, 2003
4. Catherine Macleod, “War president Bush changes tack on WMD”.  Herald, February 9, 2004

Israeli intelligence were convinced that their strike… had ended Saddam’s program. Instead [it prompted] covert funding for a nuclear program code-named “PC3” involving 5,000 people testing and building ingredients for a nuclear bomb…¹

In response to the attack, UN Security Council Resolution 487 was passed 15-0, on June 19, 1981, with no-one opposing and no-one abstaining — not even the United States. It is worth quoting the Resolution at some length:

Fully aware of the fact that Iraq has been a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons since it came into force in 1970, that in accordance with that Treaty Iraq has accepted IAEA safeguards on all its nuclear activities, and that the Agency has testified that these safeguards have been satisfactorily applied to date,

Noting furthermore that Israel has not adhered to the non-proliferation Treaty…

Considering that, under the terms of Article 2, paragraph 4, of the Charter of the United Nations: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations”,

1. Strongly condemns the military attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct;

2. Calls upon Israel to refrain in the future from any such acts or threats thereof;

3. Further considers that the said attack constitutes a serious threat to the entire IAEA safeguards regime which is the foundation of the non-proliferation Treaty;

4. Fully recognizes the inalienable sovereign right of Iraq, and all other States, especially the developing countries, to establish programmes of technological and nuclear development to develop their economy and industry for peaceful purposes in accordance with their present and future needs and consistent with the internationally accepted objectives of preventing nuclear-weapons proliferation;

5. Calls upon Israel urgently to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards;

6. Considers that Iraq is entitled to appropriate redress for the destruction it has suffered, responsibility for which has been acknowledged by Israel…

Readers may be wondering why they have not seen or heard more about Resolution 487 during a period of intense speculation that Israel might launch a similar attack, involving the same violation of international law, on Iran. We can all, of course, remember the endless political and media references to UN Resolutions 1441 and 687, said to be relevant to the US-UK attack on Iraq in March 2003. The likes of Tony Blair and Jack Straw never stopped reminding the public of their crucial significance. We will return to media coverage of Osirak and Resolution 487 below.

‘Getting There’: An Exchange With Jonathan Marcus

Last week, the BBC published an article by Defence Correspondent Jonathan Marcus under the title, ‘How Israel might strike at Iran.’

Like a tourist guide, the piece listed Israeli aircraft under the banner ‘Getting There – Aircraft, Details, Task’ and identified ‘Potential targets’, including Iranian nuclear energy facilities (as discussed in our previous alert, there is currently no evidence that Iran is even planning to attempt to build a nuclear weapon).

The nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz is a clear target. Marcus commented: ‘The facility is underground, making bunker-busting munitions essential.’

The military site at Parchin was also mentioned:

IAEA inspectors were prevented from visiting the site in February 2012 as they sought to clarify the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear programme.

In an article also published last week titled, ‘How the Media Got the Parchin Access Story Wrong,’ investigative journalist Gareth Porter wrote that ‘explicit statements on the issue by the Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA and the language of the new IAEA report indicate that Iran did not reject an IAEA visit to the base per se but was only refusing access as long as no agreement had been reached with the IAEA governing the modalities of cooperation’. (Our emphasis)

Porter added:

But not a single major news media report has reported the significant difference between initial media coverage on the Parchin access issue and the information now available from the initial IAEA report and Soltanieh [Iranian Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh].

Returning to the BBC analysis, the ‘Task’ for each Israeli weapon system was described. However, when it came to Iranian defences, instead of ‘Task’, Marcus used the word ‘Threat’, thus presenting the imagined conflict from an Israeli perspective. Of course the Iranians might well perceive Israeli ‘Tasks’ as ‘Threats’. The media monitoring website News Unspun noted the biased language, complaints followed, and the BBC changed ‘Threat’ to ‘Efficacy’.

On February 27, we wrote to Jonathan Marcus about his article:

Hi Jonathan

Regarding this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17115643

Presumably the legal issues surrounding an Israeli attack, and the possibility of major civilian casualties, don’t merit a mention. Amazing to see such a close copy of the ‘toys for boys’ journalism that preceded the war on Iraq, which claimed 100,000s, perhaps a million, human lives. That ought to be sobering.

Best wishes

David Edwards

Marcus responded the same day:

Well that I suppose sounds an incisive point but when I am asked by my editors to write a military assessment of Israel’s capacities to carry out such a mission, I speak to the air power experts and write the piece.

There are indeed many other aspects to this story and I am sure they are being coveted and will be covered extensively over the coming weeks and months.

This is not “toys for boys”- go to a wargaming exhibition if you want that – this is a military analysis – nothing more, nothing less.

JM

Further exchanges took place on the same day:

Thanks Jonathan. You wrote:

‘Only a few days ago, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen Martin Dempsey, said that an Israeli attack would not be prudent. Such a strike, he said, “would be destabilising and would not achieve their long-term objectives”.’

What’s the difference between citing a US general on the imprudent nature of a strike and citing an expert on international law on the illegal nature of a strike? Dempsey was talking about political consequences – it ‘would be destabilising’ – which could also justify mention of possible civilian casualties, which would certainly be destabilising.

As an independent journalist, you could include this material, or suggest it to your editors for inclusion, or protest if they took it out.

Best

David

Marcus replied:

The piece dealt with the subject that was requested, which is why the General was quoted. Indeed there would have been a prominent USAF general (retd) cited in the piece but he was not able to respond in time, though that probably wouldn’t have made you any happier.

The other issues you mention, not least the legality of such a strike, were not the issue here. I daresay that I will probably be asked to do something on that subject in due course.

While discussing military matters the piece did not give any sense that this would be an easy nor an un-problematic undertaking. Indeed one of the people interviewed gave a pretty blunt view of the desirability of such an attack.

Your glib toys for boys reference annoyed me since I think it rather betrays your own prejudices. The freedoms you and I enjoy – me to broadcast what I believe is a fair assessment – and you to write in and criticise it – were maintained by “boys with toys” as you call them.

Your implication is that the piece is in some sense “war-mongering” which I entirely disagree with – for all I know you may be a battle-scarred recipient of the VC – but I have in the past seen some fighting reasonably close-up. It is not pleasant. But I know what wars are about and – if I may speak personally for a moment – have no enthusiasm for them.

That’s it – you’ve had my two responses (on my day off as well – there’s public service). You should be glorying in the fact that we have a BBC and especially the World Service – celebrating its 80th birthday this year), rather than always carping and complaining. But you are of course entitled to your opinion, as I am to provide my informed assessment.
Regards
JM

We responded:

Thanks Jonathan. Sorry if you were annoyed by the ‘toys for boys’ comment. I meant to suggest that it is wrong and dangerous to discuss military possibilities as a kind of technical issue distinct from political and humanitarian concerns. As I mentioned, you did refer to political issues, but you haven’t explained why these were included when the related issues of legality and possible civilian casualties were not.

In his analysis of obedience in modern society, the psychologist Stanley Milgram remarked on the growing ‘tendency of the individual to become so absorbed in the narrow technical aspects of the task that he loses sight of its broader consequences,’ such that he ‘entrusts the broader tasks of setting goals and assessing morality to the… authority he is serving’. (Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.25)

It seems to me that your piece was an example of what Milgram was warning against. He pointed out that, finally – regardless of what is ‘requested’ of us – we are all morally responsible for our own actions. If BBC editors ask for a purely technical analysis of a possible future conflict, they should be resisted.

Best wishes

David

Marcus replied:

There will be a follow up piece later this week looking at at least of the issues you raise. this one happily was the most looked at page today so there is clearly interest.

I am not going to get into the sociology of the media – It gives me indigestion.
JM’

We answered:

That’s good to hear, thanks.

Best

David

We didn’t mean we were glad to hear that ‘sociology’ gives Marcus indigestion. We were grateful for his lengthy, if somewhat gruff, responses. He deserves credit for responding at all (so many BBC journalists do not). We look forward to his article ‘looking at at least [some?] of the issues’ we raised. If he mentions Osirak, and especially Resolution 487, he will have reinvented himself as a media outlier.

So how extraordinary would a Marcus mention of these issues be? Recall that June 7, 2011 marked the 30th anniversary of Israel’s historic raid on Osirak – the world’s first attack on a nuclear facility. And yet the LexisNexis media search engine records just eight mentions of Osirak in all UK national newspapers in the last 12 months. On the day of the anniversary itself, the attack was mentioned in single-sentence, ‘On this day in history’ comments in the free London newspaper Metro and in the Paisley Daily Express. The words ‘Osirak’ and ‘Resolution 487’ produced zero results for all available dates in all print media.

1. Woodward, State of Denial, Simon & Schuster, 2006, p.215.

On February 4, Western politicians and journalists responded with outrage to the Russian and Chinese vetoing of a UN security council resolution calling for Syrian president Bashar Assad to step down as part of a ‘political transition’. UK foreign secretary, William Hague, said:

More than 2,000 people have died since Russia and China vetoed the last draft resolution in October 2011. How many more need to die before Russia and China allow the UN security council to act?

‘Those opposing UN security council action will have to account to the Syrian people for their actions, which do nothing to help bring an end to the violence that is ravaging the country. The United Kingdom will continue to support the people of Syria and the Arab League to find an end to the violence and allow a Syrian-led political transition.

The corporate media took the same view. A leading article in the Independent commented:

Hillary Clinton described the vetoing of the UN resolution as a “travesty”. She is right. But this cannot be the international community’s last word.

Curiously, while Hague talked of the West’s determination ‘to find an end to the violence’, and the media railed against the Russians and Chinese for failing to seek the same, almost no-one noticed that the resolution had itself subordinated the possibility of a ceasefire to the demand for regime change.

The draft resolution did call ‘for an immediate end to all violence’. But it specifically demanded ‘that the Syrian government… withdraw all Syrian military and armed forces from cities and towns, and return them to their original home barracks’.

This one-sided demand that only Syrian government forces should withdraw from the streets closely resembled the Machiavellian device built into UN Resolution 1973 on Libya, passed on March 17, 2011.

This also called for “the immediate establishment of a cease-fire” supported by “a ban on all flights” in Libyan air space. But crucially, the determination was added “to take all necessary measures… to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi…”

This clearly had nothing to do with the mere banning of flights. Indeed, the authorisation to protect civilians by “all necessary means” transformed Nato planes from neutral monitors of Libyan air space into a ground-attack air force for “rebel” fighters.

Far from bringing an end to the violence, UN Resolution 1973 unleashed overwhelming Western force in pursuit of regime change, in a war that was fought to the bitter end. To ensure the right outcome, Western and other powers supplied special forces and weapons, simply ignoring the resolution’s call for “strict implementation of the arms embargo” and “excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory”. In short, the resolution resulted in a massive escalation in violence. Seumas Milne noted in the Guardian last week:

When it began, the death toll was 1,000 to 2,000. By the time Muammar Gaddafi was captured and lynched seven months later, it was estimated at more than 10 times that figure. The legacy of foreign intervention in Libya has also been mass ethnic cleansing, torture and detention without trial, continuing armed conflict, and a western-orchestrated administration so unaccountable it resisted revealing its members’ names.

The New York Times also reported last week:

The country that witnessed the Arab world’s most sweeping revolution [sic] is foundering’ with a government ‘whose authority extends no further than its offices’ and where ‘militias are proving to be the scourge of the revolution’s aftermath’.

Militia violence is rife – Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimates 250 separate militias in the city of Misrata alone. Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director at HRW, said:

‘People are turning up dead in detention at an alarming rate. If this was happening under any Arab dictatorship, there would be an outcry.’

On January 26, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announced its decision ‘to suspend its operations in detention centers in Misrata’. Detainees ‘are being tortured and denied urgent medical care’:

MSF doctors had been increasingly confronted with patients who suffered injuries caused by torture during interrogation sessions… In total, MSF treated 115 people who had torture-related wounds…. Since January, several of the patients returned to interrogation centers were again tortured.

MSF general director Christopher Stokes commented:

Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions.

As ever, violence for which the West shares responsibility has been met with indifference and quickly forgotten. According to the media database Lexis-Nexis, Stokes’ comments were mentioned once in half a dozen newspapers on January 27, with no follow up. Ironically, Bouckaert’s comments on the absent “outcry” have themselves been ignored.

As a result, the post-war disaster in Libya has given journalists little pause for thought on the merits of the West’s latest “humanitarian intervention” in Syria. Facts have to be recognised as real and important to have an impact.

“Further Measures”

Returning to the vetoed UN resolution, the one-sided demand that Syrian government forces withdraw, but not anti-government fighters, was combined with the demand that the Syrian government “facilitate a Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system” – regime change by any other name – “in an environment free from violence, fear, intimidation and extremism”. The draft text promised “to review implementation of this resolution within 21 days and, in the event of non-compliance, to consider further measures”.

The trap was clear enough – Syrian forces would have been ordered back to barracks. If the fighters had continued fighting and government forces had responded, this would have constituted “non-compliance”, opening the way for “further measures”, including foreign intervention leading to regime change. This would have given Syrian fighters every motivation to continue the violence in hopes of triggering the kind of Western intervention that destroyed Gaddafi and that they have been openly seeking.

None of this should come as a surprise. For the West, a peaceful solution in Libya (as in Iraq) was perceived as an obstacle to the actual goal, regime change. Milne observed last August:

If stopping the killing had been the real aim, Nato states would have backed a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement, rather than repeatedly vetoing both. Instead, UN Resolution 1973 ‘has since been used as Nato’s fig leaf to justify the onslaught against Gaddafi and deliver regime change from the air.

Consider, then, that we have strong evidence that the vetoed resolution on Syria would have escalated violence in pursuit of regime change (an illegal aspiration under international law). We have the clear example of Libya, from just last year, of very similar machinations producing regime change, a ten times increase in violence, and massive post-war chaos and violence.

If this isn’t enough to question the “black and white” portrayal of the Russian and Chinese veto as a “travesty”, we can consider the filmed testimony of former Nato chief, General Wesley Clark, when he recalled a conversation with a Pentagon general in 2001, a few weeks after the September 11 attacks:

He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.’

Clark added:

They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.

He recounted a conversation he had had in 1991 with Paul Wolfowitz, then US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who told Clark: ‘we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us’.

In response, Clark said he asked himself: ‘the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s not to deter conflicts?’

Clark’s conclusion will be blindingly obvious to future historians, if not to contemporary journalists:

[T]here are always interests. The truth about the Middle East is, had there been no oil there, it would be like Africa. Nobody is threatening to intervene in Africa. The problem is the opposite. We keep asking for people to intervene and stop [violence]. There’s no question that the presence of petroleum throughout the region has sparked great power involvement.

It is hard to imagine Clark being dismissed as a crazed conspiracy theorist lacking “insider” knowledge – he was Nato chief, after all. But his account has been ignored – talk of a hidden agenda of realpolitik challenges the Manichean view of the world that makes “humanitarian intervention” possible. We can find only one mention of Clark’s comments in all UK national newspapers – by Clark himself in an article for The Times in 2003.²

In light of the above facts and arguments, it is interesting to consider the comments of UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, who condemned the Russian and Chinese veto as “disastrous for the Syrian people”. The failure to agree on collective action, he said, had “encouraged the Syrian government to step up its war on its own people”.

But honest analysis suggests serious room for doubt – the vetoed resolution might itself have been disastrous for the Syrian people. With these words, the UN secretary-general told us much about his own position. Indeed, the near-unanimity in outrage that has characterised so much commentary, despite obvious holes in the reasoning, is symptomatic of a widespread conformity that defers to “pragmatic” considerations rather than to common sense.

It is interesting, also, to consider in more detail the response of the corporate press.

1. Aryasura, The Marvelous Companion, Dharma Publishing, 1983, p.305
2. Clark, “Iraq: Why it was the wrong war on the wrong enemy for the wrong reasons,” The Times, October 23, 2003

Former Guardian and Observer journalist, Jonathan Cook, shares our incredulity:

It really is astounding that we still need to talk about this as though it is controversial – though, of course, we do.

Everyone accepts that the mainstream media are businesses. As such they are out to maximise profits, increase their brand visibility and market share, and to develop the best possible public image they can (though this last aim usually takes a back seat to the other commercial imperatives if they conflict). This is true for all large businesses…

With that context, we can see that Seumas Milne – however nice, open-minded, progressive he is as an individual – cannot speak honestly about the media or his role in it. It’s rather like the scene in Ricky Gervais’ film The Invention of Lying when the Cola rep tastes his company’s drink in a TV promotional ad and admits (because he is incapable of lying), “Oh, that’s rather sweet”. it’s funny precisely because we know that’s exactly what no Coca Cola employee could ever dare do publicly. It would be career suicide. Milne and Monbiot’s situation is no different.  (Email to Media Lens, January 25, 2012)

Further support for our attempt to boost public discussion came from a rather surprising source: Michael White, the Guardian’s assistant editor. In a piece titled, “Media Lens shows it doesn’t get the whole picture”, White wrote that our latest alert “is largely devoted to badmouthing the Guardian.”

The pejorative use of ‘badmouthing’ signalled that however reasoned and well-referenced our criticism of the Guardian might be it was, as usual, to be dismissed as angry invective. The familiar litany of stock mainstream responses to our work was rolled out: We don’t “do subtle”. Rather, we exhibit ‘strident conceit’, “narcissism”, and “mean-spirited nit-picking”. We are also “naïve”’, guilty of  “artlessly framing” our own narrative “as truth”. Ours is a “childishly apocalyptic polemic”. We think we “know how the world works” but we “may grow out of that”. Affable, but, in fact, effortlessly patronising, White noted that Media Lens was set up in 2001 by “a couple of bright and determined young graduates”. Mature students, perhaps, given that we were both a year shy of 40 at the time. As with so much mainstream reaction over the years, White saw what he wanted to see – nothing really meriting serious attention. But as many readers observed, he was paying us attention at some length – something didn’t add up!

“This week’s attack,” White continued, “focuses on colleagues of mine, specifically George Monbiot and Seumas Milne, two of the Guardian’s more radical leftwing contributors. In effect, Media Lens is saying, they trim their sails and pull their punches to accommodate their paymasters, their presence in the paper’s Comment columns little more than a gesture to pluralism or dissent.”

He added:   “OK, if you say so. Most people have to trim their views at one time or another, though I have watched journalists smuggling dissenting opinions into even the Murdoch press with admiration for years.”

Yes, most people have to trim their views. But media omissions and bias go far beyond trimming, and far beyond the self-restraint required in everyday life. As we will see below, our point is that whole areas of thought and discussion are demonstrably off the agenda for corporate journalists with disastrous consequences for our species. If this is a grand claim, it is one that predicts that it will be perceived as grandiose by journalists and media consumers trained to view even the most pathological aspects of our society as ‘normal’.

It seems our “nit-picking” focus also ignores the blocks on reactionary views. Describing himself as “an elderly herbivore of moderate opinions”, White complained that it had been difficult to place a defence of Blair in the paper when the former prime minister first gave evidence to the Chilcot inquiry:

There was a distinct lack of pluralism in the media that day, but I doubt if Media Lens spotted it.

This could be a sign of the Guardian’s intolerance. Or a sign that even it has abandoned its attempts to defend the indefensible (having urged citizens to vote for Blair, even after his worst crimes had been thoroughly exposed, in 2005).

This, White’s solitary red-herring, was supposed to undermine our detailed argument that the corporate nature of the mass media tends to produce performance that defends and furthers the goals of the corporate system. Apropos of nothing much, White completed his fairy tale account of mainstream radicalism with the estimation that Channel 4′s Jon Snow “does more good for progressive attitudes than half a dozen Pilgers”. Ironically, it was our own unpleasant confrontation with the reality of Snow’s self-professed ‘pinko-liberalism’ that helped motivate us to start Media Lens.

But White’s real ‘worry’ about Media Lens “which disinclines me to seek wisdom on its site very often is that it betrays the narcissism of small difference that is so destructive on the left.”

Again, despite serious evidence supplied over ten years, White dismisses our critique as trivial – the “narcissism of small difference,”

Jonathan Cook concluded his reaction to White’s article:

What to do when an “irritant” unsettles you? Unleash the ad hominems – lots of references to how “childish” you are – while trying to shore up his and the Guardian’s credentials as worldly and self-deprecating. It’s a master-class in how to belittle an argument and avoid dealing with it entirely.

As for the “they may grow out of it”, doesn’t that cut both ways? I was one of the lentil-eating Guardianistas in my early 20s and a devoted Michael White wannabee in my 30s, when I was working there. I’m now 46, seen a bit of the world, and sense I may be nearly all grown-up. And my verdict: they’re starting to run scared.

Keep up the good work.  (Email to Media Lens, January 27, 2012)

Readers Respond – And The Return Of Monty Python

Scores of readers responded in the Guardian Comments section below White’s online article. To his credit, White also joined in, describing the responses as ‘a decent spread.’  In truth, White received a pummelling – responses favoured our position by about 10 to 1.

While White’s five follow-up posts elicited a grand total of four ‘Recommend’ clicks from readers, by far the most popular comment, recommended by 82 readers, is this one:

If medialens are so “wrong” and naive and “don’t get it” then why the long article?

The reason is that they are right.

Assange smears, Iran nukes lies, Chavez smears, silence on the sky high obscene pay of the guardian executives and editor, the tax avoidance of the gmg [Guardian Media Group], all examples of Guardian hypocrisy.

The guardian gives the impression of being radical yet it is just a slightly less right wing media outlet publishing pro war establishment propaganda.

Why didn’t the guardian call the illegal Bombing of Libya, the terrorism we support and create in Syria, the war crimes in iraq, the war crimes of Israel, the war crimes in Afghanistan, the illegal murders and torture in Pakistan by the USA, all by the name they are. War crimes. And call for those that carried them out and those who printed propaganda about them, to be tried for crimes against humanity? Because it was and is complicit.

The guardian is yet another establishment outlet and medialens exposed you and you don’t like the truth. Hence the smear article here.

In one post, White responded to a reader who had challenged him to justify his use of “nit-picking” to describe Media Lens:

Nit-picking”? This started with my surprise that ML thinks it helpful to go after two Guardian colleagues whose views are more closely aligned with ML’s own that most of us are. I’m not the only person posting on this thread who has had this feeling.

That strikes me as both “naive” and lacking “the bigger picture” though it is common enough among small groups – left, right and centre – who feel they have a unique and righteous insight into virtue. It’s the Popular Front of Judea joke in the Monty Python sketch in Life of Brian.

The Monty Python sketch did provide an amusing satire on left infighting. But like the standard association of ‘Big Brother’-style thought control with totalitarian regimes, the idea that toxic infighting is the preserve of leftists – a sign of their naïve, unworldly idealism – is an ironic product of mainstream propaganda. Thought control is far more important in ostensibly free societies like our own, while totalitarian regimes rely far more on force. Similarly, mainstream intolerance is such that progressive, compassionate ideas and aims are efficiently shredded and thrown out. Thus, for all its disagreements, the left has made far more progress in developing enlightened, compassionate analyses than the mainstream.

Consider, for example, that the left does not simply seek and demand more for the poor as a response to the insatiable greed of elite bankers. Rather, it calls for a society based on respect and compassion for all, rooted in the enlightened position that the suffering of every individual is of exactly equal importance (some, rightly, extend this compassion to all sentient beings).

Note also that while petty infighting based on rivalry, clashing egos and the like, is, of course, needlessly destructive, some disagreements on key issues can be a vital part of a process of development and maturation.

Imagine if three characteristics follow from the fact that the mass media is corporate in nature; i.e., that it is profit-maximising, owned by parent corporations and/or wealthy individuals, heavily dependent on corporate advertising, on subsidised state and business news sources, and so on. Imagine if this means that:

1) The corporate media are deeply dependent on, and closely allied to, other corporations responsible for promoting environmental and human rights disasters, tyrannies, wars and other horrors around the world.

2) Profit-maximising within this fiercely competitive media system – requiring, as it does, that the business be sold hard to both readers and advertisers, and to corporate and state allies with the power to heavily punish and reward – makes any criticism from vulnerable, employed journalists extremely threatening, unpopular and unlikely.

3) As a result, even ‘liberal’ journalists avoid criticising the corporate product in any way in front of the all-important customers and advertisers. Moreover, they feel reluctant to criticise other ‘liberal’ media corporations (potential future employers). They also feel reluctant to criticise the corporate media system as a whole for fear of being tarred as a liability, ‘one of them’, by all potential employers.

Theory is one thing, but if we are to test the truth of these claims honestly, we simply have to do so in reference to the performance of the best journalists. In this case, to ask if even Milne, Fisk and Monbiot have seriously discussed whether a corporate media system is able to report honestly on the corporate system is not ‘nit-picking’ or ‘naïve’ infighting at all. It is an important attempt to show that discussion on key issues is currently shut down right across our culture.

In an age of impending climate disaster – when corporate media are doing such a good job of presenting the suicidal status quo as ‘normal’, and all but ignoring the astonishing and massive corporate efforts to prevent vital action on climate change – this discussion might actually be considered crucial to human survival.

If we are right, then Milne and Monbiot are making a terrible mistake in encouraging readers to perceive this pathological – even anti-life – media system as a source of hope. To lead hope down a blind corporate alley at this late stage may prove to be the final nail in the coffin.

Post Script

Seumas Milne has responded to an email from us asking whether Michael White speaks on his behalf. Milne told us: “of course he doesn’t”, adding that he didn’t know White would respond. He also told us, and a number of readers, that he is still some way off full fitness, that he still intends to answer our original points and he apologises for not having done so. We sent him our sincere best wishes for a full recovery. We note, however, that Milne’s failure to respond to our challenges pre-dates his recent health problems, stretching back to 2001.

George Monbiot has not responded to our alert.

One of the aspects of journalism that we find particularly fascinating is the extent to which even the best, most honest, or most radical journalists can push back the mainstream walls enclosing media debate. How dissenting are they really permitted to be? And how might their presence in the media underpin the public’s perception of a “free press”?

As we noted in Newspeak in the 21st Century, the journalist Jonathan Cook addressed these points in an eye-opening reply to one of our media alerts. Cook, who previously worked for the Guardian and the Observer, agreed with us that the most consistently challenging voices are systematically filtered out of the mainstream. He asked:

How is it then, if this thesis is right, that there are dissenting voices like John Pilger, Robert Fisk, George Monbiot and Seumas Milne who write in the British media while refusing to toe the line?

But as Cook himself observed, this tiny group almost entirely exhausts the list of writers who can be said to confront the established consensus from a progressive perspective.

Cook continued:

That means that in Britain’s supposedly leftwing media we can find one writer working for the Independent (Fisk), one for the New Statesman (Pilger) and two for the Guardian (Milne and Monbiot). Only Fisk, we should further note, writes regular news reports. The rest are given at best weekly columns in which to express their opinions.

With the exception of Pilger, none of these journalists “choose, or are allowed, to write seriously about the dire state of the mainstream media they serve”. It is important, Cook added, that we recognise both the positive and negative roles these individuals play:

However grateful we should be to these dissident writers, their relegation to the margins of the commentary pages of Britain’s “leftwing” media serves a useful purpose for corporate interests. It helps define the “character” of the British media as provocative, pluralistic and free-thinking – when in truth they are anything but. It is a vital component in maintaining the fiction that a professional media is a diverse media.

Consider Seumas Milne, for example. Since September 2011, we have been trying to engage with him to debate these vital issues. Milne is a regular high-profile Guardian columnist and an associate editor of the paper. Indeed, he was the paper’s Comment editor at the time of the September 11 attacks, motivating his Guardian retrospective as the 10-year anniversary approached last year. (“9/11: A “babble of idiots”? History has been the judge of that”.)

The thrust of Milne’s proud boast was that the Guardian had bravely hosted a ‘‘full range of views” that had been “blanked” by most other media, attracting hostility and even vitriol from right-wing quarters. But this was a selective and conveniently self-serving assessment, closer to corporate marketing than honest accounting, as we put to him in an email two days later:

Hello Seumas,

Hope things are good with you. I thought your article on Monday was well-written and made good points. But it was also highly contentious in places and it can’t go unchallenged. I hope you’ll be willing to respond openly to this email, please.

You wrote that, following 9/11, the Guardian ‘comment pages hosted the full range of views the bulk of the media blanked; in other words, the paper gave rein to the pluralism that most media gatekeepers claim to favour in principle, but struggle to put into practice. And you said that you published “articles joining the dots to US imperial policy or opposing the US-British onslaught on Afghanistan”.

It may well be that you were able to do a better job of including voices of dissent than any other trusted pair of hands at the Guardian would have managed. But how many of these dissenting voices really ‘joined the dots’ in the way that Noam Chomsky does so well and so consistently? How many critical pieces in the Guardian portrayed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq accurately as wars of aggression, as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg trials? How many pointed out that Bush, Blair, senior government politicians and military commanders should, by those agreed standards, be tried for ‘the supreme international crime’? How many analysed the invasions and wars as an integral part of the West’s longstanding attempts at global control and subjugation of peoples and natural resources, consistent with the demands of corporate-led capitalism? How many joined the dots by examining the role of the corporate news media, including the BBC and the Guardian, in enabling these wars of aggression? How many questioned the core assumption promoted by Western states that ‘we’ are the ‘good guys’?

Perhaps you’d be able to point to a handful of such comment pieces. But sadly they were swamped by a deluge of news propaganda, complacent ‘journalism’ and supine commentary elsewhere in the Guardian.

As I said at the start, your article was not totally wide of the mark. But it also fits with the relentless marketing of the Guardian as a supposedly open and power-scrutinising flagship newspaper of fearless journalism. The evidence that we’ve presented in two books (Guardians of Power and Newspeak) and hundreds of media alerts in the past ten years clearly shows otherwise.

Best wishes
David (Cromwell)
(Email, September 7, 2011)

The issue of marketing is highly relevant here. As Milne himself noted, “the most heartening response to the breadth of Guardian commentary after 9/11 came from the US itself where there was a dramatic increase in readership of the Guardian’s website. In fact, “traffic on the Guardian’s website doubled in the months after 9/11, driven from the US.” This is highly attractive to advertisers wishing to target relatively affluent and educated consumers. Indeed, ironically, the Guardian appears far more comfortable publishing the views of US dissidents writing on US issues, rather than their UK counterparts writing on UK issues. This makes good business sense, attracting US readers without stepping on too many powerful domestic toes here in the UK.

Almost three weeks later we still hadn’t heard back from Milne, so we nudged him. He apologised and said that he’d been on holiday “and then came straight back into party conferences. Will reply when have a window.” (Email, September 27, 2011)

Almost two months later, during which time he’d continued to publish articles in the Guardian, we asked him when he might reply. He told us that he’d been “operating a bit below capacity” after recovering from an operation, “so everything takes longer than usual, but will try and send something in next week or two”. (Email, November 22, 2011). We replied at once, sincerely wishing him a full recovery.

Just over two weeks later, and not having heard from him, we emailed Milne again following a piece he’d published on the rising threat of war against Iran:

Hi Seumas,

Hope you’re recovering well from your recent op. Good to see your new article on Iran. But a glaring omission is the media’s own role in stoking the flames; not least your own newspaper, the Guardian. Here’s a tiny sample:

• A recent Guardian editorial asserting: ‘It really is time to drop the pretence that Iran can be deflected from its nuclear path.’
• Julian Borger’s blog, with an appalling accompanying photograph helpfully depicting a giant mushroom cloud.
• Julian Borger again, giving prominence to a quote from an unnamed ‘source close to the IAEA’.
• And let’s not forget Simon Tisdall, in a disgraceful Guardian front page story in 2007.

Did you see our recent media alert on Guardian (and other) coverage [on Iran]?

It’s pretty clear why, as a Guardian regular, you’re not at liberty to criticise your own paper’s dismal record. It’s another example of the media silence that you’ve yet to address in my initial challenge [of September 7, 2011].

Why does this abysmal media performance appear to feature so low down in your list of priorities? It brings to mind the four-month wading through treacle, when you were the Guardian’s comment editor, to finally publish our piece that was critical of the Guardian over Iraq.

I hope you’ll be able to engage with this argument soon. (Email, December 8, 2011)

Four days later, with no response from Milne, we emailed him again and asked when he might be able to tackle the points we’d been trying to raise with him over the previous three months.

Still no response.

In the meantime, on December 19, 2011, Milne published a good historical analysis titled, “The “Arab spring” and the west: seven lessons from history”.

Milne’s case studies of British imperialism and media propaganda focused on the 1930s (Libya and Palestine), the 1950s (Iraq, Libya, Iran, Tunisia, Syria and Egypt) and the 1960s (Aden).

Welcome as this article was, we have yet to see an equivalent Guardian piece from Milne, or anyone else on the paper, examining the West’s recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, how they fit into the age-old imperialist framework and, crucially, the role played by corporate news media, including the Guardian, in paving the propaganda path; and then allowing politicians to get off the hook afterwards. Readers may recall, for example, the Guardian’s shameful editorial calling for Tony Blair to be re-elected in 2005.

We recognise that Seumas Milne was no doubt under pressure after a recent operation (although he was continuing to publish articles regularly). But even bearing this in mind, not to respond to the issues in our initial email after four months, despite repeated promises to do so, is disappointing.

George Monbiot As Don Quixote: Tilting At Safe Target

As we saw at the beginning of this alert, the Guardian’s George Monbiot is one of very few mainstream journalists who is regarded as fearlessly honest and progressive. His many supporters would surely expect that he would be willing and able to tell the unadorned truth about the media.

As he launched into a recent article under the stirring title, “The corporate press are fighting a class war, defending the elite they belong to”, it looked like readers were in for something special:

Have we ever been so badly served by the press? We face multiple crises – economic, environmental, democratic – but most newspapers represent them neither clearly nor fairly. The industry that should reveal and expose instead tries to contain and baffle, to foil questions and shut down dissent.

Monbiot continued:

The men who own the corporate press are fighting a class war, seeking, even now, to defend the 1% to which they belong against its challengers. But because they control much of the conversation, we seldom see it in these terms. Our press re-frames major issues so effectively, it often recruits its readers to mobilise against their own interests.

It’s not just Rupert Murdoch and his crooks, we were told. All the corporate barons who corrupted our political system must be unmasked.

And – alas – there was the fatal flaw in his approach. Perching on a horse and pointing a blunt lance at “corporate barons”, while overlooking the systemic failings of the whole corporate media system, is symptomatic of many a failed quest. The knight-errant Monbiot is no different in this regard from a multitude of other commentators writing for the corporate press.

Thus, Monbiot was happy to make jabs at the Mail, Express and Telegraph newspapers for their puff pieces on celebrities and pathetic attacks on the weak in society. And he was keen to hurl deprecations at the weekly Spectator magazine for its ignorance on climate change. These are all easy right-wing media targets. But with just a passing comment about the BBC, and nothing at all about the supposedly “liberal press” – not least his own paper, the Guardian – the valiant adventurer missed the most important targets.

There was not a single word in Monbiot’s article about the Guardian’s scandalous 2005 support for Blair’s re-election; the paper’s war-mongering over Iran (take a special bow, Simon Tisdall); Monbiot’s thoughts on Western intervention in Libya and Syria (his mutism on these vital issues has been stunning); the Guardian’s crippling dependence on advertising (which he has, to his credit, discussed in the past, albeit in limited fashion: see here and here); and the paper’s corporate and establishment links.

One astute reader, somehow evading the over-zealous censoring Guardian ‘moderators’ on the ‘Comment is Free’ website, noted accurately:

And just like Ed Miliband, the Guardian merely pretends to confront the elite in the silly Kabuki theatre of British politics.

The truth is, at bedrock ,you are all pro capitalist market fundamentalists. Some of you are open about it. Others, like the Guardian and Ed Miliband, fake opposition.

We asked the experienced journalist and film-maker John Pilger for his response to Monbiot’s article. He told us candidly:

Since George Monbiot completed his Damascene conversion and decided the likes of Fukushima were good for the planet, and that smearing those who challenged other orthodoxies might be fun, he has barely drawn breath. His latest crusade is journalism itself — the corruption of “the entire corporate media”. The headline over his Guardian piece on 13 December read: “The corporate press are fighting a class war, defending the elite they belong to.” A given, surely. As the public has become more and more media savvy, many people understand this, just as they understand that articles like Monbiot’s are part of the problem.

He attacks Murdoch, the Mail, the Telegraph, the “sleazy crooks”, but not a splenetic word is directed towards the most influential corporate media in modern Britain: the BBC and the Guardian, the “new establishment”, as Max Hastings wrote.

Not a word reminds us of how the greatest, wanton slaughter of the new century – in Iraq – was so often subtly (and not so subtly) supported and apologised for in the pages of his own newspaper. (“The remarkable extent,” opined a Guardian leader on 25 March 2003, “to which US and British forces are attempting to reduce the risk of civilian casualties in the Iraq campaign is probably unprecedented.”)

Not a word from Monbiot reminds us that two credible studies found that the BBC — despite the Gilligan episode — had been virtually a Blair government mouthpiece in the run up to the bloodbath. In fact, both the BBC and the Guardian used their reputations to maintain Blair at a level of respectability long after his lies and high crimes were evident.

When Monbiot complains that the “corporate press” has “hobbled progressive politics, he is dead right. His omissions serve the same purpose. (Email, December 24, 2011)

Far from being an “unreconstructed idealist, a professional trouble-maker”, as his Twitter bio would have it, Monbiot is a Guardian man, a corporate lightning rod conducting the raw energy of outrage and dissent down to the safe little ‘box’ of the Guardian website. There his readers are regaled with state propaganda, corporate adverts and assailed by the poisonous, system-supportive beliefs of his corporate colleagues. The corporate system got us into this disaster and the corporate media is the last place to encourage people to look for answers.

Patrick Cockburn noted in the Independent:

While the identity of those carrying out the assassinations remains a mystery, it is most likely to be Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad…

The Sunday Times published a meticulous account of the planning and execution of the attack provided by “a source who released details’ on the actions of ‘small groups of Israeli agents” operating inside Iran.¹

Julian Borger’s article in the Guardian warned against “Goading a regime on the brink”.

We wonder if the Guardian would have described the Iranian assassination of scientists on US or Israeli streets as ‘goading’. We also wonder if Borger would have described these as terrorist attacks.

Using the media database Lexis-Nexis we have been able to find just one example of a UK journalist describing Roshan’s assassination as an act of terror – New Statesman‘s senior political editor Mehdi Hasan writing in the Guardian. Otherwise, almost all references have been limited to the use of the word by Iranian officials behind scare quotes. (After challenges from Media Lens and other activists, Borger did publish a rare example of non-Iranian use of the term.)

By contrast, in October, the US accused Iran of recruiting a used car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, as part of a terrorist plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a restaurant in Washington, DC. In that case, journalists had no qualms about using the word terror without inverted commas. Karen McVeigh reported in the Guardian:

Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalised US citizen, was arrested last month, and stands accused of running a global terror plot that stretched from Mexico to Tehran.

The Daily Mail:

An extraordinary terrorist plot has been foiled – which would have seen the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. murdered on American soil.

The Telegraph:

Iranian government officials were accused by the Obama administration of plotting a string of deadly terrorist attacks on American soil.

On Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald posted numerous similar examples from the US media. The alleged Arbabsiar plot was subsequently debunked by analyst Gareth Porter.

As Greenwald observed, “accusing Israel and/or the U.S. of Terrorism remains one of the greatest political taboos”. Responding to a Media Lens reader who had suggested, not unreasonably, that “a terrorist is one who brings terror to another person”, Channel 4′s Alex Thomson wrote:

Your definition of a terrorist as one bringing terror is nonsensical as it would encompass all military outfits’ including ‘the Royal Fusilliers [sic].²

Is that really so absurd? After all, following the murderous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill wrote to Bomber Command:

It seems to me that the moment has come that the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.³

Presumably, then, one can argue that the RAF is a terrorist organisation.

Returning to last week’s assassination, while no-one has yet suggested that Iran is now obliged to bomb Washington, Borger argued:

If Americans had been killed in the Georgetown restaurant that was supposedly the target [of the debunked Arbabsiar ‘plot’], the Obama administration would have been obliged to respond militarily.

In similar vein, the aptly-named James Blitz asked in the Financial Times:

But even if an immediate military conflict… is averted, this still leaves a wider question: how much longer can Israel and the US wait before they bomb Iran’s nuclear sites?

The day after Roshan’s killing, Andrew Cummings, formerly an adviser on the Middle East and US affairs in the UK cabinet office national security staff, commented in the Guardian on ‘the risks’ of ‘this audacious approach’ – he meant the murdering of scientists. The sub-heading explained:

The death of another Iranian scientist has led to criticism of such actions, but Tehran’s refusal to co-operate leaves little alternative.

Cummings clarified:

What many people fail to recognise, though, is that a covert campaign, while rife with physical, diplomatic and legal risks, is the lesser of many evils.

And yet, as Patrick Cockburn noted:

The US has found no evidence

Tehran is trying to make a nuclear bomb, though US politicians [and US-UK journalists] often speak as if this was an established fact…

The US National Intelligence Estimates on Iranian nuclear progress, the collective judgement of all the US intelligence organisations, said there was no evidence Iran had been trying to build a bomb since 2003. The Defence Intelligence Agency concluded that Iran’s nuclear weapons programme at that time was directed against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and when he was overthrown by the US, it was ended.

Compare this with Blitz’s version:

Some western intelligence agencies believe Iran will bide its time a little longer and enrich more uranium – but will not take the big strategic decision to race for the bomb in 2012. Still, in every other respect, the auguries are not good.

Again by contrast, Greg Thielmann, a former US State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst, told veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh last year: ‘there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb’.

Readers might respond that Cummings and Blitz are entitled to their baseless views, and the Guardian and FT are perfectly entitled to publish them – that’s what free speech is all about. We agree.

But a problem arises when we try to imagine the Guardian publishing a piece justifying the Iranian killing of a US scientist on a US street one day after he had been murdered. And try imagining the FT hosting an opinion piece that asked: ‘How much longer can Iran wait before launching its bombers against the US and Israel?’

Tawergha – ‘Get Out, Black Animals’

One might think that a corporate media system would act independently of the state – there is no formal mechanism of control. But as the ingrained bias sampled above indicates, this often turns out not to be the case. With regard to human rights, for example, corporate media typically do not simply pick a subject and lavish it with attention. Rather, political power selects an issue, frames the coverage, and media corporations jump on the bandwagon.

Type a household name like ‘Halabja’ into the UK media database search engine Lexis-Nexis, for example, and it produces more than 1,800 references to Saddam Hussein’s 1988 gassing of Kurds. Similarly, the words ‘Srebrenica’ and ‘massacre’ generate nearly 3,000 hits. Both issues have been afforded vast, impassioned coverage.

In truth, for Western commentators, the importance of these horrors is most often rooted, not in the scale of suffering inflicted, but in their utility for justifying the West’s military interventions. Thus an editorial in the Independent observed of Libya:

Concern was real enough that a Srebrenica-style massacre could unfold in Benghazi, and the UK Government was right to insist that we would not allow this.⁴

A Times editorial commented:

Without this early, though sensibly limited, intervention, there would have been a massacre in Benghazi on the scale of Srebrenica.⁵

Of course, media concern for human rights could be sincere – journalists are human beings, after all, and human beings often do care about the killing of civilians. But then the record requires some explanation.

Consider the massacre of 53 Libyans at the hands of ‘rebel’ fighters in Sirte last October. The Daily Telegraph reported:

Human Rights Watch said 53 people appeared to have been shot dead in a hotel in the centre of the city when it was under the control of fighters from Misurata. The badly decomposed bodies, some with their hands bound behind their backs, were found in a garden of Hotel Mahari.⁶

According to Lexis-Nexis, the word ‘Mahari’ generates a total of eight articles mentioning the massacre across the entire UK press, with one mention since October. Widening the search to ‘Sirte’ and ‘killing’ produces a few additional mentions.

Or consider the fate of the dark-skinned Tawergha people, former slaves brought to Libya in the 18th and 19th centuries. Until recently, some 31,000 of them lived in a coastal town, also named Tawergha, 250 km east of the capital Tripoli. The UN news agency IRIN reported the ethnic cleaning of the town by Nato-backed forces:

Their town sits empty – doors hanging open and homes burned; the sign leading to the city has been changed to New Misrata and its population told not to return.

As for the people:

In an abandoned Turkish company compound on Airport Road in Tripoli, more than 1,500 displaced Tawergha spend their days brushing away flies and watching their children play with toy guns amid piles of rubbish.

Here, women and children have huddled around on the uncovered mattresses they sleep on, weeping. They arrived in early November after a physically and emotionally draining journey from Tawergha, having been displaced by armed men every time they settled somewhere new.

Every one told of a father, son or brother who is either dead or in jail…

[One] young woman told stories of Tawergha detainees receiving electric shocks, having cold water poured on them and being burned with cigarettes by the revolutionaries from Misrata who were holding them. “This is Abu Ghuraib, not Libya!… We have done nothing wrong. If they continue to beat us and attack us for no reason, it will become a cycle,” she said.

A rare, excellent mainstream article by Åsne Seierstad in The Times supplied additional details:

“Slaves,” says graffiti on a wall. On a road sign, the town’s name has been scribbled over. “Misrata,” it says now. The commander of the local victors, Ibrahim al-Halbous, had already said it: “Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata.”

The article continued:

“Brigade for cleansing of black slaves,” proclaims one scribbled message on a wall along the road to Misrata. “Hairdresser. Free haircut,” says another. Large sections of the town are in ruins after the battles.

Seierstad found that Tawerghans were still not safe even in Tripoli:

Seven or eight people live in each room, in corridor after corridor, barrack after barrack.

But the construction site has no guards, and the avengers from Misrata can enter even here. They arrive at night. The men sleep fully clothed, ready to flee. Some nights earlier, an armed gang arrived at 2am. “You are all going to die,” they shouted. “Get out, black animals.”⁷

Last summer, the then Prime Minister of Libya’s National Transitional Council, Mahmoud Jibril, said:

When it comes to Tawergha, in my view, this is nobody’s business but the people of Misrata’s. This cannot be dealt with according to theories and textbooks about national reconciliation in South Africa, Ireland or Eastern Europe.⁸

Using a different spelling, the Telegraph has so far supplied one sentence:

Tawarga has been forcibly emptied of residents by rebels and looted.⁹

The sentence doesn’t appear in the online version.

A Guardian article barely hinted at the ethnic cleansing, reporting merely that Tawarga’s “mostly black population fled in August when rebel forces captured it”.

Chris Stephen described the ethnic cleansers’ attitude towards Tawargans as a “gripe”.

Seumas Milne mentioned Tawerga in a single sentence.

According to Lexis-Nexis, the Independent has published two articles focusing on the atrocity – a substantial piece in September and a further 102 words in November, totalling 867 words.

Curiously, The Times has published the most significant mentions. In addition to Seierstad’s piece, Andrew Gilligan published a substantial report: ‘The ghost town where rebels took their revenge’ in September. ¹⁰  A later article reported ‘The expulsion of the entire 30,000 population of Tawarga, a satellite town of Misrata…”¹¹

James Hider also commented briefly in October:

The town of Tawarga was accused by neighbouring Misrata of siding with Gaddafi’s forces, and is now all but deserted and largely ruined.¹²

Since Seierstad’s article on December 3, there have been no mentions in any UK newspaper of this clear case of ethnic cleansing by Western-backed forces. As ever, media outrage splutters and falls away when the West is implicated in a crime against humanity. And as ever, this could hardly contrast more starkly with the incandescent “something must be done!” outrage in response to the crimes of official enemies. Lexis-Nexis finds no mention of any British or American politician commenting on Tawergha’s fate, and finds no mentions in any editorials. Now imagine the coverage if Iran, or Syria, or North Korea had been responsible.

Commentators sometimes lament the fact that the “mainstream” media system is “controlled” by profit-seeking corporations. It is not; it is made up of corporations. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Media companies are key elements of a corporate system that utterly dominates politics.  In reality, US-UK military interventions are state-corporate military interventions. It ought to come as no surprise that the corporate media propagandises on behalf of its own interventions and works hard to hide the ugly consequences from a public with the power to resist.

1. Marie Colvin and Uzi Mahnaimi, “Israel’s secret war,”  Sunday Times, January 15, 2012
2. Forwarded to Media Lens, February 25, 2005
3. Blitz, Bombing and Total War, Channel 4, January 15, 2005
4. Leading article, “The mission that crept,” Independent, July 29, 2011
5. Leading article, “Death of a dictator,” The Times, October 21, 2011
6. Ben Farmer, “Libya will be a “moderate” Muslim nation, country’s interim leader insists,” Telegraph, October 25, 2011
7. Åsne Seierstad, “Four months ago, 30,000 people lived in this town. So where did they go?” The Times, December 3, 2011
8. Seierstad, ibid
9. Richard Spencer; Ruth Sherlock; Rob Crilly, “Gaddafi’s son flees to Niger as rebels make more gains,” Telegraph, September 12, 2011
10. The Times, September 11, 2011
11. Libya Tom, “Murder and rape campaign brings revenge to ghost town,” The Times, September 29, 2011
12. James Hider, “Where there was unifying hatred, now there is a vacuum,” The Times, October 22, 2011

With the Kyoto Treaty due to expire in 2012, the so-called ‘international community’ has failed abysmally to fulfil its commitments to protect the planet. This should surprise no-one. As senior NASA climate scientist James Hansen pointed out after the previous climate summit in Mexico in 2010, UN talks are “doomed to failure” since they do not address the fundamental physical constraints of the Earth’s climate system and how to live within them.

Public concern about climate change continues to rise. According to the latest Eurobarometer opinion poll (October 2011), 68% of Europeans polled consider climate change a very serious problem (up from 64% in 2009). Altogether 89% see it as a serious problem (either “very serious” or “fairly serious”). On a scale of 1 (least) to 10 (most), the seriousness of climate change is ranked at 7.4, against 7.1 in 2009.

Meanwhile, media interest in the subject has crashed. Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University describes a “collapse of any significant coverage of climate change in the [US] media. We know that 2010 was a record low year, and 2011 will probably look much the same. If the media doesn’t draw attention to the issue, public opinion will decline”.

In his authoritative Climate Progress blog, Joe Romm notes, for example, that the New York Times “cut coverage sharply since its peak in 2006 and 2007”.

Equally disturbing is the variation in media performance across the globe. A wide-ranging Reuters study on the prevalence of climate scepticism in the world’s media – Poles Apart – The international reporting of climate scepticism – focused on newspapers in Brazil, China, France, India, the UK and the USA. The periods studied were February to April 2007 and mid-November 2009 to mid-February 2010 (a period that included the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen and “Climategate”). Remarkably, the study concluded that climate scepticism is “predominantly an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon”, found most frequently in US and British newspapers:

In general the UK and the US print media quoted or mentioned significantly more sceptical voices than the other four countries. Together they represented more than 80% of the times such voices were quoted across all six countries.

The study concluded:

In general, the data suggests a strong correspondence between the perspective of a newspaper and the prevalence of sceptical voices within it, particularly in the opinion pages. By most measures (but not all), the more right-leaning tend to have more such voices, the left-leaning less.

But in all ten UK newspapers studied, there was an increase “both in the absolute numbers of articles with sceptical voices in them and the percentage of articles with sceptical voices in them”.

And so we find that Britain and the US – the two countries responding most aggressively to alleged “threats” to human security in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – are also the two countries least interested in responding to the very real threat of climate change.

“Capitalism Is Trampling On Journalism”

As the Reuters study suggests, media reporting is heavily influenced by editorial stance which, in turn, is heavily influenced by commercial interests. In October, the former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt told the Leveson inquiry into the culture and ethics of the British press the truth about the UK’s newsroom culture:

In approximately 900 newspaper bylines I can probably count on fingers and toes the times I felt I was genuinely telling the truth, yet only a similar number could be classed as outright lies. This is because as much as the skill of a journalist today is about finding facts, it is also, particularly at the tabloid end of the market, about knowing what facts to ignore. The job is about making the facts fit the story, because the story is almost pre-defined.

Laid out before you is a canon of ideologically and commercially driven narratives that must be adhered to. The newspaper appoints itself moral arbiter, and it is your job to stamp their worldview on all the journalism you do… The ideological imperative comes before the journalistic one – drugs are always bad, British justice is always soft.

Peppiatt noted:

Tabloid newsrooms are often bullying and aggressive environments, in which dissent is simply not tolerated. It is difficult to stand up and walk out the door with a mortgage to pay, knowing another opportunity is unlikely to be waiting beyond.

The issue that is not being discussed by Leveson is the extent to which these observations generalise to the “quality” corporate media, and why. By contrast, in soft-pedalling the level of interference from owners and advertisers, the Guardian’s Nick Davies wrote:

“Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference.”¹

Compare this with corporate escapee Peppiatt’s unfettered conclusion:

Capitalism is trampling on journalism.

A prime example of this trampling was supplied by the high-profile BBC series Frozen Planet, narrated by David Attenborough, focusing on life and the environment in the Arctic and Antarctic. British viewers will see a total of seven episodes, the last of which, “On Thin Ice”, deals with the threat of climate change.

However, viewers in some other countries will only watch six episodes. This is because the BBC packaged the series in such a way that the climate change episode was an “optional extra” that foreign networks could choose to reject. And reject it they did – of 30 networks across the world that have bought the series, 10 have opted not to buy the episode on climate change. Most notable among them is the United States, the world’s leading contributor both to climate crisis and disinformation about the problem.

A spokesman for Greenpeace said:

It’s a bit like pressing the stop button on Titanic just as the iceberg appears.

Climate change is the most important part of the polar story, the warming in the Arctic can’t be denied, it’s changing the environment there in ways that are making experts fearful for the future.

The BBC’s helpful packaging of “Frozen Planet” generated little interest in the media, although some praise. Lord Leach of Fairford, the Tory peer and former director of the British Library, commented:

I don’t think what Attenborough has to say about climate change is worth listening to. He’s very endearing but I don’t think there’s any truth to what he says – he has no idea about it. The fact is you can be jolly nice to monkeys but it isn’t the same as knowing what you’re talking about on climate change.

Leach added: “It’s quite right to cut the episode.”

Journalist John Gibbons covered the issue of climate change for the Irish Times for two years. He wrote his last, damning column in February 2010:

Ireland’s most senior climate expert, Prof John Sweeney of NUI [National University of Ireland] Maynooth, acknowledged last week that climate-change deniers were “winning the propaganda war”. Chief among them, he added, were deniers from the ranks of journalism and lobbying.

Hang on a minute, you might ask, aren’t journalists supposed to be the good guys, the ones who investigate, not propagate, scams? Well, yes and no. “A media and telecommunications industry fuelled by advertising and profit maximisation is part of the problem,” [Justin] Lewis and [Tammy] Boyce [of the Cardiff School of Journalism] point out.

Gibbons stated the obvious:

Millionaire “journalists” have a profound yet undeclared personal vested interest in the consumption-driven economic status quo upon which their wealth is predicated. As, of course, do billionaire media proprietors. They in turn seek out affirmation of their own biases, and ridicule dissenters.

While The Media Fiddles, 2010′s Monster Increase Burns

While public concern grows and media coverage collapses, the climate change problem is going through the roof. According to a recent study by the US Department of Energy, the global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record in 2010. The world pumped about 564 million more tons of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009, an increase of 6 per cent. The latest figures mean that levels of greenhouse gases “are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago”, USA Today reports.

Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past, said:

It is a “monster” increase that is unheard of.

Granger Morgan, head of the engineering and public policy department at Carnegie Mellon University, said of the new figures:

Really dismaying. We are building up a horrible legacy for our children and grandchildren.

So why is nothing being done about the problem? In a new study, Who’s Holding Us Back?, Greenpeace reports:

The corporations most responsible for contributing to climate change emissions and profiting from those activities are campaigning to increase their access to international negotiations and, at the same time, working to defeat progressive legislation on climate change and energy around the world.

While making public statements that “appear to show their concern for climate change”, these corporations are fighting fiercely to prevent action. This helps explain, Greenpeace notes, “why decisive action on the climate is being increasingly ousted from the political agenda.

They add:

These polluting corporations often exert their influence behind the scenes, employing a variety of techniques, including using trade associations and think tanks as front groups; confusing the public through climate denial or advertising campaigns; making corporate political donations; as well as making use of the “revolving door” between public servants and carbon-intensive corporations.

In the US alone, approximately $3.5 bn is invested annually in lobbying activities at the federal level. In recent years, Royal Dutch Shell, the US Chamber of Commerce, Edison Electric Institute, PG&E, Southern Company, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and ConocoPhillips all made the top 20 list of lobbyists. The climate campaign organisation 350.org estimates that 94 per cent of US Chamber of Commerce contributions went to climate denier candidates.

Groups like the American Petroleum Institute, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Australian Coal Association, often campaign directly “against measures that would cut greenhouse gas emissions, or run campaigns in support of unfettered fossil fuel energy”.

Attempts by the EU to increase its emissions reductions target for 2020 from 20 per cent to 30 per cent has been undermined by the heavy lobbying of carbon-intensive interests, including BASF, ArcelorMittal and Business Europe.

Tzeporah Berman, Co-director of the Climate and Energy Program at Greenpeace International, says that this latest study “shows beyond a doubt that there are a handful of powerful polluting corporations who are exerting undue influence on the political process to protect their vested interests”.

Two years ago, we challenged James Hansen to sum up governments’ responses to the threat of climate change in a single word. He chose “misleading”. Why misleading? Because “it’s mostly greenwash”, he told us. (Email, June 18, 2009)

We then asked him to give a rough figure to indicate how far he felt governments had moved towards tackling climate change. Would he say that governments were 1%, 20%, 50%, 70%,… of the way there? We knew this was imprecise, but we wanted to get an idea of his gut feeling. He responded:

0%, because they are starting down a wrong track, requiring 1-2 decades to reset. “Goals” for emission reduction, cap-and-trade with offsets, while continuing to build more coal-fired power plants and developing unconventional fossil fuels is a disastrous path. It is meant to fool people, even themselves. A strategic approach would instead recognize the geophysical boundary conditions, specifically that coal emissions must be rapidly phased out.

He added some disturbing analysis:

“The fundamental economic requirement concerns the price of (cheap, subsidized) fossil fuels relative to alternatives (energy efficiency, renewables, and other carbon-free energies) — there must be a rising price on carbon emissions (a fee, at the coal/oil/gas source or port of entry). As that price rises and the competition ensues we would reach a point where alternatives suddenly take off and we move beyond the dirty fossil fuel era. The fear that this will in fact occur is what drives the fossil interests who have totally taken control of our governments’ actions.

Even the cautious and conservative International Energy Authority has now warned that under currently planned policies “rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.”

Be in no doubt, the corporate takeover of government policy really has taken humanity to the very edge of the climate abyss.  Naturally enough, the corporate media is keen to avoid honestly addressing an issue that so violently conflicts with its profit-maximising agenda, its need for endless economic growth, its heavy dependence on corporate advertising.

We need to Occupy Wall Street, of course – we need to win back our governments from corporate control. But we also need to occupy the media space that for so long has been monopolised by Wall Street’s propaganda arm. We need to occupy the corporate media system that is fiddling the same idiotic tune even as our world – this precious, threatened planet on which we depend for our very survival - burns.

1. Davies, Flat Earth News, Vintage 2008, p.22

BBC News reported the UN chairperson saying that the talks had ‘saved tomorrow, today’.

But nothing substantive had changed. Carbon emissions, already at their peak, will continue to increase for at least the next eight years, pushing humanity closer to the brink of climate collapse. Rather than address the madness of a global system of corporate-led capitalism that is bulldozing us to this disaster, the corporate media mouthed deceptive platitudes.

A Guardian editorial assured readers that the Durban deal is ‘better than nothing’, and that:

There are times when inching forward can look like progress [...] a moment when it is cheerier to think of how bad things might have been than to rate the success of the final outcome.

Adopting the standard, but discredited, establishment framework to explain the treacly mire hindering serious action on climate, this vanguard of liberal journalism opined: ‘There is an unvarying conflict of interest in the fight against climate change between developed and developing economies.’

No hint there that the conflict is, in fact, between the elite corporate 1% and the 99% of the global population that are their victims.

The Independent, another great white hope of liberal journalism, told its diminishing band of readers that the Durban outcome is ‘an agreement that gives new cause for optimism.’ Indeed, it ‘is an enormous advance on the position now.’

An editorial in The Times (‘A Change of Climate’, December 12, 2011) conformed along similar lines while also taking care to kick the forces of rationality in the teeth:

Scientists and activists will complain that Durban’s only commitment is to more talks and that any agreement will not become operational until 2020. But these campaigners have often proved poor advocates, either exaggerating or misusing data to make their case or showing an unwise disdain for the realpolitik and compromises essential for any deal.

Climate scientists will be dismayed that an ostensibly responsible paper like The Times would make a sneering reference to the unfounded ‘Climategate’ claims of climate data manipulation. But perhaps readers will appreciate the irony that The Times is itself, of course, an enthusiastic practitioner of corporate ‘realpolitik’.

‘A Crime Of Global Proportions’

We are not suggesting that critical comment was entirely missing from press coverage. That would take absurd levels of totalitarian media control. The Guardian managed to find space on its website, if not in the print edition, for the Guardian’s head of environment, Damian Carrington, to write in his blog:

Unlike the economic debt currently transfixing the attention of world’s leaders, it appears possible to them that we can put our climate debt on the never-never.

The loans in euros, dollars and pounds will be called in within days, weeks, and months. But the environmental debt – run up by many decades of dumping carbon dioxide waste in the atmosphere – won’t be due for full repayment before 2020, according to the plan from Durban.

This ‘ecological debt’, Carrington added, ‘will inevitably transform into a new economic debt dwarfing our current woes. [...] Cleaning up the energy system that underpins the global economy is inevitable, sooner or later. If not, true economic armageddon awaits, driven by peak oil, climate chaos and civil unrest.’

Friends of the Earth were permitted their token quote in the Guardian, scant reward for decades of soft-pedalling its criticism of the corporate media: ‘This empty shell of a plan leaves the planet hurtling towards catastrophic climate change.’

Unfiltered by corporate news editors, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a statement pointing out that, in Durban, the world’s governments

by no means responded adequately to the mounting threat of climate change. [...] It’s high time governments stopped catering to the needs of corporate polluters, and started acting to protect people.

UCS added:

Powerful speeches and carefully worded decisions can’t amend the laws of physics. The atmosphere responds to one thing, and one thing only – emissions. The world’s collective level of ambition on emissions reductions must be substantially increased, and soon.

In a powerful article on Independent Online, based in South Africa, there were stronger messages still. The environment group Earthlife Africa said the decisions resulting from the Durban summit would result in a 4^oC global average temperature rise which would mean an average increase of 6^oC-8^oC for Africa. This would lead to an estimated 200 million deaths by 2100.

No wonder that Nnimmo Bassey, chairman of Friends of the Earth International, said: ‘Delaying real action until 2020 is a crime of global proportions.’

He continued:

An increase in global temperatures of 4ºC, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, small island states, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide. This summit has amplified climate apartheid, whereby the richest 1 percent of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99 percent.

Karl Hood of Grenada, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, responded to the Durban deal with damning words: ‘Must we accept our annihilation?’

Aubrey Meyer, originator of the ‘contraction and convergence’ policy that would, if adopted by the UN, reduce greenhouse gases to safe levels, was also scathing: ‘The islands are being annihilated and we all are now become their assassins. We have informally known this but with this “Durban-Deal” we all have now formally crossed that threshold.’

Janet Redman, of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, spoke the unadorned truth that is so painful, if not impossible, for the corporate media to acknowledge: ‘What some see as inaction is in fact a demonstration of the palpable failure of our current economic system to address economic, social or environmental crises.’

The Eightfold Nay: The Great Unmentionables Of Climate Coverage

In our book, Newspeak in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2009), we listed the key issues that would be at the heart of debate on the climate crisis in a truly free press:

1. The inherently biocidal, indeed psychopathic, logic of corporate capitalism, structurally locked into generating maximised revenues in minimum time at minimum corporate cost. Because corporations are legally obliged to maximise profits for shareholders, it is in fact illegal for corporations to prioritise the welfare of people and planet above private profits. How can this simple fact of entrenched corporate immorality not be central to any discussion that is relevant to the industrial destruction of global life-support systems?

2. The proven track record of big business in promoting catastrophic consumption regardless of the consequences for human and environmental health. Whether disregarding the links between smoking and cancer, junk food and obesity, exploitation of the developing world and human suffering, fossil fuel extraction and lethal climate change, factory farming and animal suffering, high salt consumption and illness, corporations have consistently subordinated human and animal welfare to short-term profits.

3. The relentless corporate lobbying of governments to introduce, shape and strengthen policies to promote and protect private power.

4. The billions spent by the advertising industry to sell consumer products and ‘services’, creating artificial ‘needs’, with children an increasing target.

5. The collusion between powerful companies, rich investors and state planners to install compliant, often brutal, dictators in client states around the world.

6. The extensive use of loans and tied aid that ensnare poor nations in webs of crippling debt, ensuring that the West obtains or deepens control of their resources, markets and development.

7. The deployment of threats, bribery and armed force against countries that attempt to pursue self-development, rather than economic or strategic planning sanctioned by ‘the international community.’

8. The lethal role of the corporate media in promoting the planet-devouring aims of private power.

One searches in vain for any sensible and sustained discussion of any of these issues in the corporate media; never mind all of them taken together.

No wonder then that, for all the warm words of political ‘commitment’, we are headed for unprecedented desperate times ahead.

Relying on ‘evidence provided by more than 10 member states as well as its own information’, the IAEA said Iran had carried out activities ‘relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device’.

Having looked deeply into the claims, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh commented this week in an interview with Democracy Now!:

But you mentioned Iraq. It’s just this — almost the same sort of — I don’t know if you want to call it a “psychosis,” but it’s some sort of a fantasy land being built up here, as it was with Iraq, the same sort of — no lessons learned, obviously.

Indeed, informed skepticism in the corporate media has been muted or non-existent – the image of Iran as a ‘nuclear threat’ has yet again been imposed on the public mind. Any reasonable news reader and viewer would find it extremely difficult to question the emphatic declarations offered right across the media ‘spectrum’.

Thus, a Guardian editorial asserted:

It really is time to drop the pretence that Iran can be deflected from its nuclear path.

Two days earlier, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Julian Borger, anticipated the report’s publication on his ‘Global Security Blog’ with a piece titled ‘Iran “on threshold of nuclear weapon”’. The accompanying photograph helpfully depicted a giant mushroom cloud during a 1954 nuclear test over Bikini Atoll. His article was linked prominently from the home page of the Guardian website.

In a later article, Borger gave prominence to a quote from an unnamed ‘source close to the IAEA’:

What is striking is the totality and breadth of the information [in the IAEA report]. Virtually every component of warhead research has been pursued by Iran.

Presumably all-too-aware of increased public skepticism in the wake of Iraq, the anonymous source continued in the Guardian:

The agency has very, very, high confidence in its analysis. It did not want to make a mistake, and it was aware it had a very high threshold of credibility to meet. So it would not be published unless they had that high level of confidence.

In similar vein, a New York Times report opened with:

United Nations weapons inspectors have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device,” and that the project may still be under way.

The Daily Telegraph declared its version of the truth unequivocally in a leader titled ‘Iran’s nuclear menace’. It noted that the IAEA report ‘has for the first time acknowledged that Tehran is conducting secret experiments whose sole purpose is the development of weapons.’

Presumably drawing on clairvoyant powers, the editors added:

Indeed, the IAEA has known for years that Tehran was building an atomic weapon, but has been reluctant to say so.

The title of an editorial (November 10, 2011) in The Times was similarly categorical and damning: ‘Deadly Deceit; Iran’s bellicose duplicity is definitively exposed by an IAEA report’:

Tehran’s decade-long nuclear programme is obviously not intended purely for generating electricity. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed this week that it has credible evidence that Iran has worked on the development of nuclear weapons.

The editorial stamped this with the required emphasis:

This will sound, and is, a statement of such banality that it ought not to need saying.

And then continued without a shred of uncertainty:

The IAEA report is extensive and understated. Founded on intelligence sources from ten countries, it explains in detail how Iran has established a programme to develop the technologies for a nuclear weapon. Its findings are entirely consistent with all that has been known and exposed before. Indeed, the IAEA is late in stating them.

For anyone relying solely on corporate news media coverage, the case against Iran was closed. All that remained was to decide the necessary course of international action: ramped-up ’diplomacy’, international sanctions and perhaps – the threat was left ‘lying on the table’ – war.

What is so breathtaking is that the apparent consensus on Iran, like the case against Iraq, is a fraud.

Burying The Cable – WikiLeaks And IAEA Chief Yukiya Amano

One of the stunning omissions in corporate media coverage of the IAEA report are the WikiLeaks disclosures concerning IAEA chief, Yukiya Amano. According to a US Embassy cable from a US diplomat in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, Amano described himself as “solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program”.

Amano’s predecessor as IAEA chief was Mohammed ElBaradei who had refused to bow before US war-mongering, and who was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As ElBaradei came to the end of his term in 2009, the Americans sensed an opportunity to work with someone more compliant. They lobbied successfully on Amano’s behalf. Following his election as IAEA chief, a US cable reported on a meeting with him:

This meeting, Amano’s first bilateral review since his election, illustrates the very high degree of convergence between his priorities and our own agenda at the IAEA. The coming transition period provides a further window for us to shape Amano’s thinking before his agenda collides with the IAEA Secretariat bureaucracy.

This ‘very high degree of convergence’ would presumably be useful in hyping the alleged ‘nuclear threat’ of Iran.

A US mission cable from Vienna commented that Amano was ‘DG [Director-General] of all states, but in agreement with us.’

The Guardian reported the Amano cable in a blog back in November 2010, but not in the paper itself. Our newspaper database search revealed that not a single UK national newspaper has mentioned the WikiLeaks cable revealing that Amano is ‘solidly in the U.S. court’ in coverage of the latest IAEA report. The sole exception we could find anywhere in the UK print media was an article in the New Statesman by Mehdi Hasan.

Rather than report this vital evidence from WikiLeaks, the British media have either tried to silence or vilify its founder, Julian Assange. This is a truly damning indictment of the ‘free press’.

By contrast, Seymour Hersh is a rare voice of rationality exposing this latest propaganda hype. On Democracy Now!, Hersh commented of former US Vice-President Dick Cheney:

Cheney kept on having the Joint Special Operations Force Command, JSOC — they would send teams inside Iran. They would work with various dissident groups — the Azeris, the Kurds, even Jundallah, which is a very fanatic Sunni opposition group — and they would do everything they could to try and find evidence of an undeclared underground facility. We monitored everything. We have incredible surveillance. In those days, what we did then, we can even do better now. And some of the stuff is very technical, very classified, but I can tell you, there’s not much you can do in Iran right now without us finding out something about it. They found nothing. Nothing. No evidence of any weaponization. In other words, no evidence of a facility to build the bomb. They have facilities to enrich, but not separate facilities for building a bomb. This is simply a fact. We haven’t found it, if it does exist. It’s still a fantasy.

Hersh said that Iran did look ‘at the idea of getting a bomb or getting to the point where maybe they could make one. They did do that, but they stopped in ’03. That’s still the American consensus. The Israelis will tell you privately, “Yes, we agree.”’

He described the new IAEA report as ‘not a scientific report, it’s a political document’, noting that ‘Amano has pledged his fealty to America.’

Amano had been ‘a marginal candidate’ for the position of IAEA chief but the US wanted him in place:

We supported him very much. Six ballots. He was considered weak by everybody, but we pushed to get him in. We did get him in. He responded by thanking us and saying he shares our views. He shares our views on Iran… it was just an expression of love. He’s going to do what we wanted.

In a blog on The New Yorker website, Hersh added that one of the classified US Embassy cables from Vienna described Amano as being “ready for prime time”. The cable also noted that Amano’s “willingness to speak candidly with U.S. interlocutors on his strategy … bodes well for our future relationship”.

In his Democracy Now! interview, Hersh pointed out that his blog piece was thoroughly researched and checked by The New Yorker, and that it included expert testimony shunned by the major newspapers:

These are different voices than you’re seeing in the papers. I sometimes get offended by the same voices we see in the New York Times and Washington Post. We don’t see people with different points of view… And I get emails, like crazy, from people on the inside saying, “Way to go.” I’m talking about inside the IAEA. It’s an organization that doesn’t deal with the press, but internally, they’re very bothered by the direction Amano is taking them.

Hersh cited Robert Kelley, a retired IAEA director and nuclear engineer who previously spent more than thirty years with the US Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons programme:

He noted that hundreds of pages of material appears to come from a single source: a laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the I.A.E.A. by a Western intelligence agency, whose provenance could not be established. Those materials, and others, “were old news,” Kelley said, and known to many journalists. “I wonder why this same stuff is now considered ‘new information’ by the same reporters.” ’

An assessment of the IAEA report was published by the Arms Control Association (ACA), a non-profit organisation campaigning for effective arms control. Greg Thielmann, a former US State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst, who was one of the authors of the ACA assessment, told Hersh:

There is troubling evidence suggesting that studies are still going on, but there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb. Those who want to drum up support for a bombing attack on Iran sort of aggressively misrepresented the report.

The BBC ‘Notes’ Privately That There Are Dissenting Views

On November 9, 2011, a BBC news piece carried a side bar ‘analysis’ by James Reynolds, the BBC’s Iran correspondent. We wrote to him the same day:

I hope you’re safe and well there. In your analysis which is included in the BBC News article ‘UN nuclear agency IAEA: Iran “studying nuclear weapons”’, you note that:

‘The agency stresses that the evidence it presents in its report is credible and well-sourced.’

You then add:

‘Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dismissed the IAEA as puppet of the United States. His government has already declared that its findings are baseless and inauthentic.’

You attribute such views to Iran, an officially-declared enemy of the West. A more balanced approach might be to report that a US Embassy Cable published last year revealed that Yukiya Amano, the IAEA director general, is ‘solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision’.

And according to a recent New York Times report: ‘the Obama administration, acutely aware of how what happened in Iraq undercut American credibility, is deliberately taking a back seat, eager to make the conclusions entirely the I.A.E.A.’s, even as it continues to press for more international sanctions against Iran.’

Shouldn’t these crucial facts be noted in your analysis?

The NYT report continues:

‘When the director of the agency, Yukiya Amano, came to the White House 11 days ago to meet top officials of the National Security Council about the coming report, the administration declined to even confirm he had ever walked into the building.’

Isn’t all this relevant in assessing the context, realpolitik and implications of the IAEA report? Can you not find critical commentators outside the Iranian government whom you can quote?

Given the stakes involved, would you perhaps consider addressing the above points in your analysis in future, please?

Many thanks.

Rather than address any of the above points, Reynolds emailed back:

thanks for your message. I appreciate your comments and insight.

(Email, November 9, 2011)

Just over a week later, a new BBC piece appeared in which the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany claimed to have ‘deep and increasing concern’ over Iran’s nuclear programme. We emailed Reynolds again (November 18, 2011):

Have you considered interviewing sceptical and informed commentators?

For example, you could approach the experienced investigative journalist Gareth Porter. He says that the recent IAEA report’s ‘dubious intelligence [is being] used as pretext for tougher sanctions’:

Porter’s analysis is backed up by Robert Kelley, a nuclear engineer who has carried out IAEA inspections. Kelley believes that ‘the report misleads and manipulates facts in [an] attempt to prove a forgone conclusion.’

He also says that the IAEA report ‘recycles old intelligence and is meant to bolster hard liners.’

Shouldn’t you also be including such important and informed views in your reporting for BBC News?

Not hearing from him, we nudged Reynolds on November 21 when he again avoided addressing the points made:

I received your message – thanks. I shall reflect on the points you raise.

It is always important for me to hear from licence-fee payers – the lifeblood of the BBC.

(James Reynolds, email, November 21, 2011)

We tried once more to elicit a response from the BBC’s Iran correspondent that actually addressed the points put to him:

I appreciate your reply.

But with the resources of the BBC at your disposal, you surely cannot be unaware of the informed commentators and important points presented to you [in the previous emails]. It is notable that you do not appear to have included them in any of your BBC reports to date. Why not?

Nor have you reported – although I may have missed it -  that IAEA chief Yukiya Amano is regarded by the US, according to a WikiLeaks cable, as ‘solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.’

Why remain silent about this astonishing fact? Isn’t this crucially relevant for public understanding of what is happening over Iran? Perhaps there are editorial reasons that are making it difficult for you to properly report these vital issues? (Email, November 22, 2011)

To no avail.  The response was even more terse this time:

points noted. (James Reynolds, email, November 22, 1011)

Curiously, ‘the lifeblood of the BBC’ deserves no better than this.

Can journalists really have forgotten the propaganda offensive that predated the March 19, 2003 invasion of Iraq – a tsunami of disinformation in which they were accomplices? Have they really learned nothing? What gives them the right to absolve themselves and to start with a clean slate now that Iran is the next hyped ‘threat’?

Surely now more than ever – as the spectre of yet another war in the Middle East looms, perhaps the greatest conflagration yet – it is vital that journalists should be wary of repeating propaganda claims over Iran.

The title of an article in the Sun declared: ‘Dead dog.’ (October 24, 2011)

The Daily Star reported that Gaddafi’s son Mutassim had been filmed smoking a cigarette and drinking water shortly after being captured. The paper took up the story:

But in graphic images that have baffled UN investigators, he is then shown dead, lying next to Mad Dog, with bullet holes in his neck and stomach.

In his report, “Mad Dog” “was the name journalist Gary Nicks used to refer to the executed Libyan leader. Nicks continued: ‘New footage emerged yesterday of Mad Dog’s dying words to a baying mob.’

Gaddafi and his son were not the only victims of the mob. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that between six and ten people appeared to have been executed at the scene of the Libyan leader’s capture. Around 95 bodies were found in the immediate vicinity, many of them victims of Nato air strikes. In fact, it is clear that NATO, with the assistance of special forces (although ground troops were strictly forbidden by UN resolution 1973), had maintained a no-drive zone around Sirte: a crucial factor facilitating the murder of Gaddafi.

CBS reported 572 bodies ‘and counting’ in Sirte, including 300, ‘many of them with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head’, collected and buried in a mass grave.

HRW reported the massacre of 53 people by anti-Gaddafi fighters at the Mahara hotel in Sirte. Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at HRW, commented on the atrocity:

This latest massacre seems part of a trend of killings, looting, and other abuses committed by armed anti-Gaddafi fighters who consider themselves above the law.

The BBC covered the massacre on its News at Ten (October 24). Wyre Davies reported:

Some say Gaddafi’s home town is where transitional government forces took their revenge; collective punishment for Gaddafi’s own crimes. A vivid and graphic example of that in Sirte today. The bodies of 53 Gaddafi supporters, discovered shot with their hands tied.

The segment lasted 20 seconds, with commentary on the massacre and footage of the bodies lasting 10 seconds. As one surviving resident of Sirte asked:  “What would people in Europe and America say if Gaddafi was doing this?”

The answer is hardly in doubt — wall-to-wall coverage and volcanic outrage. Gaddafi was certainly a vicious tyrant responsible for gross human rights abuses. But callous indifference to human suffering was supposed to be the reason he was so beyond the pale, so unlike “us”.

Channel 4 anchor Matt Frei responded to the massacre in a style familiar from his years as the BBC’s Washington correspondent:

You could say even about this regime, this government, that they don’t have a second chance to make a first impression. So just how worried are they?

When “our side” is responsible, even a massacre becomes, first and foremost, a PR problem.

The response from Ian Black, the liberal Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, to the torture and extrajudicial killing of Gaddafi was a stark:  “good riddance”.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, giggled with CBS journalists as she joked about Gaddafi’s murder:  “We came, we saw, he died.”

Incongruous laughter appears to be a trait.

British prime minister David Cameron also found mirth amid the gore in a speech celebrating the Hindu festival of Diwali:

Obviously, Diwali being the festival of a triumph of good over evil, and also celebrating the death of a devil [audience laughter], perhaps there’s a little resonance in what I’m saying tonight.¹

One of our regular message board posters, Chris Shaw, expressed his “despair and horror at the footage of a 69 year old man being beaten, tortured and murdered by a mob”.² The natural response of a feeling human being, one might think.

By contrast, Andrew Gilligan wrote in the Telegraph: “the one thing Gaddafi retained to the very end was his ability to put on a show… [His] demise was as box-office as his 42-year rule”.

We suspect that most journalists are not actually unfeeling brutes. They are conformists wary of the high price they can be made to pay for even the suspicion that they might be ’apologists’ for an official enemy. A risk that has increased markedly in our age of ‘political convergence’, deprived as it is of any established mainstream political dissent.

Cameron’s First Military Victory

As ever, the broadcast media rushed to vindicate their warrior-leaders. Indeed, on August 22, the BBC’s deputy political editor, James Landale, was a month early in describing Downing Street’s satisfaction “that all David Cameron’s critics, who said that this couldn’t be done – that aerial bombardment would not work – have been proved wrong”.³

Last week, Landale’s senior colleague, Nick Robinson, brought viewers up to date, assuring them that Downing Street “will see this, I’m sure, as a triumphant end”. (News at Six, October 20, 2011) Robinson added:

Libya was David Cameron’s first war. Colonel Gaddafi his first foe. Today, his first real taste of military victory.

We are living in strange times when a senior BBC journalist can portray the fighting of endless wars as the normal way of things, as though Cameron had taken some kind of prime ministerial rite of initiation.

In an interview with new UK defence secretary, Philip Hammond, BBC ‘rottweiler’ John Humphrys asked:

What apart from a sort of moral glow – and there’s nothing wrong with that – have we got out of it?⁴

The BBC’s chief political correspondent, Norman Smith, commented:

I imagine, privately, David Cameron must surely feel vindicated because the Libyan enterprise was a big political risk.⁵

As ever, an ostensibly neutral BBC reporter endorsed what he was supposed only to be reporting: Cameron “must surely feel vindicated”. How could he possibly feel otherwise?⁶

In Washington, the BBC’s Ian Pannell thought hard and joined the mainstream herd:

I think President Obama is feeling that his foreign policy strategy has been vindicated – that his critics have been proven wrong.

An editorial in the Telegraph agreed:

His death vindicates the swift action of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy in halting the attack on Benghazi and supporting the rebellion.

A Tweet from someone called Micah Zenko made more sense to us: “Qaddafi summarily executed is apt conclusion to false narrative of Libya intervention. No arms embargo, selective NFZ, boots on the ground.”

Zenco might also have mentioned the unnoticed irony that UN resolution 1973, which authorised the misnamed ‘no-fly zone’, was among other things: ‘Condemning…torture and summary executions.’

As though concluding a bed-time story, the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall commented: “The Arab spring had claimed another infamous scalp. The risky western intervention had worked. And Libya was liberated at last.”

Andrew Grice, political editor of the Independent, applauded: “Mr Cameron took risks on Libya – but they paid off… Mr Cameron proved the doubters wrong… By calling Libya right, Mr Cameron invites a neat contrast with Tony Blair.”

Murdoch’s Times observed that only the ‘political courage’ of Sarkozy and Cameron had prevented disaster at ‘the beginning of another genocide’.⁷

In Murdoch’s grim fantasy world, any nation obstructing Western corporate control is, by happy coincidence, either perpetrating or planning ‘genocide’.

Jesus And Buddha – Hang Your Heads In Shame!

The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once commented on a striking feature of modern propaganda:

It’s been largely based on denigrating somebody over there and saying we’ve got to go in and knock them out. The main awakening of the human spirit is in compassion and the main function of propaganda is to suppress compassion, knock it out. Well, it’s in public journalism all the time now, too.⁸

Compassion is a threat because it is politically incorrect, resistant to robotic demonising by the cheerleaders of hate. Compassion is a spontaneous trembling of the heart based on an awareness of shared humanity, shared suffering, shared Being. And yet, even the normally insightful Glenn Greenwald, clearly appalled by the murders in Libya, reminded readers of something he had previously written:

No decent human being would possibly harbor any sympathy for Gadaffi, just as none harbored any for Saddam.

We Tweeted him: “Jesus and Buddha hang your heads in shame!”

Greenwald replied:

I had this debate when I first wrote that – it doesn’t mean you don’t object to what’s done to them: they’re just not sympathetic.

How easily we forget that compassion - even for a vicious, hated enemy -has long been recognised as one of the highest, most precious achievements of human civilisation.

As the Buddhist sage Je Gampopa commented:

Those who are hurt by others in return for the goodness they show them, yet, despite this, still act beneficially towards them, are the finest humans in the world: people who can return good for bad.⁹

Does anyone doubt that a Jesus or a Buddha would not merely have harboured sympathy for Gaddafi but would have intervened to save his life? And who would dare claim that doing so would make them ‘apologists’ for tyranny?

Philosopher A.C. Grayling sounded a rare note of dissent:

In accepting the pragmatic case for shooting malefactors, just as we shoot mad dogs, we state that we do not wish to pay the high cost of living according to law and civil liberties. We champion our Western principles about the rule of law and the rights of individuals, we thus say, only until they become a burden and an inconvenience; and, when they do, we summarily shoot people in the head instead.

The “inconvenience” requires explanation. In truth, if they are to survive, ‘Third World’ leaders are most often obliged to prioritise Western corporate interests over the needs of local people (see our discussion of John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man). This rankles with the victims, of course, and so Western clients typically have numerous skeletons in their human rights cupboard – hidden with Western military, financial and diplomatic help. These skeletons can be brought to light in a moment, if the client strays. A compliant media is always on hand to declare the crimes “Hitlerian”, “genocidal”, “exceptional”, and surely justifying whatever violent measures Western governments deem fit for the preservation of civilisation: in reality, the preservation of their control of the target nation.

In the rush to celebrate Cameron’s ‘first taste of military victory,’ the UK media ignored or downplayed a whole host of problems with the war, including:

– The fact that even establishment think tanks like the International Crisis Group reported that NATO and the ‘rebel’ Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC), rather than the Gaddafi regime, had rejected all peace initiatives out of hand:

UNSC resolution 1973 emphatically called for a ceasefire, yet every proposal for a ceasefire put forward by the Qaddafi regime or by third parties so far has been rejected by the TNC as well as by the Western governments most closely associated with the NATO military campaign… neither the TNC nor NATO has made a ceasefire proposal of its own and there has yet to be a meaningful attempt to test Qaddafi’s seriousness or pose conditions on acceptance that would subject a putative ceasefire to effective independent supervision.¹⁰

– The fact that there was no UN mandate for regime change, even though this was very obviously NATO’s illegal aim.

– The striking lack of evidence - not least from other towns recaptured by pro-government forces - that Gaddafi planned to commit a massacre in Benghazi.

– “Rebel” estimates of 50,000 dead as a result of the war as far back as the end of August. The Guardian’s Seumas Milne is a rare, honest voice in noting that “while the death toll in Libya when NATO intervened was perhaps around 1,000-2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it is probably more than ten times that figure.” Milne added:

If the purpose of western intervention in Libya’s civil war was to “protect civilians” and save lives, it has been a catastrophic failure.

– The bombing of Libyan state TV by British aircraft in July, which reportedly killed a number of journalists and was condemned as a war crime by Reporters Without Borders, UNESCO and the International Federation of Journalists.

– The reduction of Sirte, previously a city of 100,000 people, to a smoking ruin as a result of several weeks of siege. The assault included daily indiscriminate bombing, the cutting off of water, food, medicine and electricity supplies, the shelling of a hospital, widespread looting and massacres. Aid agencies described how the attack had created a humanitarian crisis.

– The widespread racist persecution of black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans by anti-Gaddafi forces. Amnesty International reported that ‘black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans are at high risk of abuse by anti-Gaddafi forces’. (Many thanks to Peter, for providing much of this list on the Media Lens message board. A longer list is archived here)

Any horrors to come are likely to be reported in brief as the media eye swivels inexorably towards the next target of “humanitarian intervention”.

1. BBC News at Ten, October 20, 2011
2. Media Lens message board, October 24, 2011
3. Landale, BBC News at Six, August 22, 2011
4. Humphrys to Hammond, BBC Radio 4 Today, October 21, 2011; go to 3:13
5. BBC News Online, 16:34, October 21, 2011
6. Ibid.
7. Campbell, The Hero’s Journey, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, p.220
8. Leading article, Death of a Dictator, The Times, October 21, 2011
9. Gampopa, Gems of Dharma, Jewels of Freedom, Altea, 1994, p.155
10. ICG, Popular Protest In North Africa and the Middle East, (V): Making Sense of Libya, Middle East/North Africa Report N°107 – 6 June 2011, pp.28-29

The war is costing Britain £12 million per day. The same amount could employ 100,000 nurses (at £21,000 annually) and 150,000 care workers (£15,000).

A study by Brown University in the United States estimates an unimaginable combined sum of up to $4 trillion to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Afghanistan, “cautious estimates” of the total civilian death toll exceed 40,000 people, of which:

25.6%  killed by ISAF forces.

15.4%  killed by anti-government forces.

60%  killed by poverty, disease and starvation.

In particular, the horrendous killing of Afghan children in US air strikes and night raids gets scant coverage, if any, before the Western media swiftly looks away.

There are now three million refugees from Afghanistan: 30.7% of the world’s total, exceeding the figures of 16.9% from Iraq, 7.7% from Somalia and 4.8% from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

74% of the British public want the occupation to end either “immediately” or “soon”.

Very little of this reality made it into the largely uncritical coverage of the ten-year anniversary of the West’s aggression against Afghanistan.

In the conclusion to a new report for Stop the War, David Swanson provides a stunning example of the media’s systematic bias:

On August 6, 2011, numerous US media outlets reported “the deadliest day of the war” because 38 soldiers, including 30 U.S. troops, had been killed when their helicopter was shot down.

But compare that with the day of May 4, 2009, discussed in this report, on which 140 people, including 93 children, were killed in U.S. airstrikes. We are denying to each other through silence and misdirection every day that the children of Afghanistan exist. But their deaths are rising.

But the deaths of Afghan children, and the suffering of the people of Afghanistan, are seemingly of little consequence for most Western journalists who would rather focus on the “progress” and “achievements” of the Nato “campaign”.

Exchange With The BBC’s Afghanistan Correspondent, Paul Wood

In the run-up to the ten-year anniversary of the West’s invasion of Afghanistan, star presenter Fiona Bruce and her editors on the BBC News at Ten excelled themselves, as we mentioned in Part 1 of this alert:

It’s ten years this week since British forces first became involved in Afghanistan, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for Helmand province. So what’s been achieved in that time? (BBC One, October 4, 2011, italics added)

Bruce then introduced a segment from Paul Wood, former embedded BBC correspondent in Iraq, and now firmly embedded in the NATO establishment in Afghanistan. His report, later posted online, typified the media’s unquestioning acceptance of the official line on Afghanistan. We emailed him the following day (October 5, 2011):

Hello Paul,

I hope you’re safe and well there. Thank you for your report from Afghanistan on last night’s BBC News at Ten.

You introduced your report:

“Stabilising Afghanistan has cost Britain 382 lives.”

Portraying the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as “stabilising” the country echoes NATO rhetoric. How can this constitute news “balance”?

And later you ask:

“What, then, has the British army’s engagement in Helmand been for?”

In answer, you chose to include this from Lt General James Bucknall, deputy NATO commander:

“Yes, there’s been considerable sacrifice by many, many courageous people. But actually I would say, you know, look at what we’re trying to achieve, and it is to enhance our own national security. And that is, you know, a price worth paying.”

What about the views of those who do not believe it is a ‘price worth paying’? In fact, more fundamentally, why ignore those who argue, including within Britain’s own intelligence services, that UK foreign policy has endangered “national security”?

In short, where is your journalistic scepticism of the official line? Are you really so unaware of the longstanding realpolitik: namely the Western push for geostrategic dominance over the valuable resources of this region? Shouldn’t the ample evidence for this be reflected somewhere in your reporting?

If you continue to echo state propaganda, then you are emulating Pravda and Izvestia when they reported the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in comparable terms.

I hope to hear back from you, please.

Best wishes

David Cromwell

Wood replied on 7 October:

David, sorry about the delay; it has been a bit busy.  I do try to answer emails personally (and quickly) and, as you know, we do have also a complaints unit, reachable through the website.

Anyway, you could regard “stabilising” as being read with inverted commas, or without, depending on your point of view.  Let me deal at greater length with your other point, about the use of a clip by General Bucknall, who said that Britain was in Afghanistan to “enhance our own national security”.

It is certainly an argument that Britain’s national security was damaged rather than enhanced by invading Afghanistan — and one that, rightly, gets a hearing on our output.  But a report cannot go in all directions at once, and in this piece, General Bucknall was used to reply — or balance — a series of earlier criticisms of the way the Afghan campaign is going.

In Helmand, the piece showed a police chief saying that he couldn’t survive  without Nato — and bear in mind that the whole strategy is to hand over to people like him — and also a long-serving aid worker, who had reached the pretty damning conclusion that all the blood shed in Helmand had simply been to return the place to its condition before British troops arrived.

This is hardly Izvestia style propaganda in the service of the British state — as I hope any dispassionate observer would agree.

You raise a number of good points about western motives, worthy of further debate, though I hope you will forgive me if I don’t enter into a protracted correspondence.

Yours sincerely

Paul Wood
BBC Afghanistan correspondent

We replied the same day:

Thanks Paul,

I appreciate you getting back to me. Many of your BBC colleagues are all too quick to duck direct challenges, and instead divert the public into the arcane depths of the hopeless BBC complaints system.

You claim that: 

“…you could regard “stabilising” as being read with inverted commas, or without, depending on your point of view.”

I’m afraid that comes across as a cop-out in defence of poor journalism. To add ‘inverted commas’ in a spoken report on BBC News at Ten, you would have had to insert a word like “claimed” or”alleged” and say something like:

“The UK government’s alleged goal of “stabilising” Afghanistan has cost Britain 382 lives.”

You also say that:

“It is certainly an argument that Britain’s national security was damaged rather than enhanced by invading Afghanistan — and one that, rightly, gets a hearing on our output.”

But why did you not include such a relevant and crucial argument in this report? You claim that Lt General Bucknall’s assertion that Britain is in Afghanistan “to enhance our own national security” is the “balance” for criticisms of “the way the Afghan campaign is going.” That’s a revealing admission. The argument is not that there are criticisms of “the way the Afghan campaign is going“, but that you have excluded the more fundamental criticism that the invasion-occupation cannot be justified. Instead, you deploy a standard cop-out: 

“A  report cannot go in all directions at once.”

But a report like this could, and should, have been balanced on its own. Instead, you’ve decided to rely on a hand-waving appeal to balance having been achieved in some other report, somewhere else on the BBC. This is the eternal refrain from BBC journalists when challenged with serious biases and omissions. In fact, there can be no BBC news “balance” when it consistently buries the argument that the British role in the invasion-occupation of Afghanistan is wrong.

The “good points about western motives” that I made in my earlier email should be central to responsible news reporting from Afghanistan; not merely pushed aside as “worthy of further debate”.  Otherwise, you are indeed performing a useful role “in the service of the British state.”

I understand that you’re a busy reporter and that you may prefer not to become involved in a “protracted correspondence”. Or, more optimistically, you will see that there are fundamental and serious issues here that need to be addressed.

Best wishes

David

Imagine Britain had been invaded and occupied by armed forces from another region of the world with China, for example, as a significant “partner” in the “coalition”. Imagine tens of thousands of Britons had been killed, and millions had fled as refugees. This is how the Chinese state broadcaster might report the invasion ten years hence:

It’s ten years this week since Chinese forces first became involved in Britain, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for south-east England. So what’s been achieved in that time?

These were the actual words that presenter Fiona Bruce used on the flagship BBC News at Ten:

It’s ten years this week since British forces first became involved in Afghanistan, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for Helmand province. So what’s been achieved in that time? (BBC One, October 4, 2011, italics added)

This is BBC ‘impartiality’ in action. These words were a prelude to a piece by Paul Wood, the BBC’s Afghanistan correspondent, that was a model of Pravda-style propaganda which we will examine further in Part 2.

Meanwhile, in a shameful editorial, the Guardian burnished its credentials as a hand-wringing liberal supporter of the war. Readers were told that the war that had been “unavoidable” and that “we’ had then stayed in the country ‘through all the twists and turns imposed by events”, struggling with “the incoherence of our own changing policies, for reasons which have become less and less understandable.” The paper sighed that “an anniversary of this kind has a sobering effect” in that “we hugely overestimated the capacity of our military, diplomatic and intelligence establishments to change other societies.” This “hubris was most evident in the United States, but it was not absent in Britain.”

“The trouble”, claimed the editorial, “was that, once in that obscure corner, whether Iraq or Afghanistan”, coalition forces “were confronted by shrewd and ruthless opponents.” Historically, invaders do tend to be resisted by those “shrewd and ruthless” people in “obscure corners” whose land is being occupied, and whose lives, livelihoods and resources are at risk.

“Some Afghans”, however, “were indeed ‘like us’, recognisably middle class or western in their beliefs and aspirations, and the effect of our intervention may well have been to increase that number.”

The white man’s burden is surely lightened by that happy realisation. Especially because some of these people ‘like us’ – yes, the Guardian really did say that – “may have a more important role to play” in the future. Thus reassured, “we can hope we have planted seed that will bear fruit later.”

The tragedy of the Afghanistan war, asserted the Guardian, is that “we” stumbled into an age-old conflict not of our making:

The problem is not that Afghanistan is unconquerable, as some claim. It is that we, like the Russians before us, joined an ongoing conflict between different ethnicities, between modernisers and traditionalists, between social classes, and between newer and older forms of religiosity.

Now, “after 10 years of muddle and mayhem”, our “minimal common interest” – indeed, “our remaining duty”  – must be to aim at “a power-sharing settlement” involving the Taliban.

There was no hint from this supposed vanguard of critical and liberal journalism that “our remaining duty” should involve an immediate withdrawal of our forces. No hint that this country should make some attempt at restitution for the decade of “muddle and mayhem” that “we” have inflicted on yet more victims of the West’s grasping and destructive foreign policy.

The Independent’s editorial derived from a similarly tortured perspective of perplexed liberalism: “questions about what has been achieved yield far from encouraging answers” and “what little progress there has been is looking increasingly vulnerable.”

However, the editors added, “it would be a mistake to overlook the real advances that have been made”, such as “democratic elections, a written constitution and a degree of social freedom”. The paper also appealed yet again to “the issue of women’s rights – or the lack of them” as “one of the most convincing” supposed “justifications for international involvement in Afghanistan.”

There was token acknowledgement in the editorial of “Afghanistan’s vast natural resources” which, we are to believe,”could still be a source of funding and stability.” But there was only silence about the realpolitik underlying Western foreign policy; namely, that control of these huge resources was, in fact, ‘one of the most convincing’ reasons for the invasion-occupation of Afghanistan.

Instead, the editorial makes a benign-sounding but pathetic plea for the “international community” to “help realise the potential.” But for whose benefit? The corporate media would have us believe that the interests of the Afghan people would be paramount, and that they would be allowed to prosper. For the truth, we have to look elsewhere.

Turning Afghanistan Into A ‘Hub’ And ‘Conduit’ For US Interests

For example, energy analysts Shukria Dellawar and Antonia Juhasz note in a recent article in Foreign Policy in Focus, that:

Unknown to most Afghans, in January 2009 the government implemented a new Hydrocarbon Law that transforms its oil and natural gas sectors from fully state-owned to all but fully privatized.

In April 2011, the Afghanistan Ministry of Mines launched the first of what is expected to be a number of tenders for the country’s oil and gas resources. As in Iraq, the contracts include production-sharing agreements that have been strongly rejected by other major oil-producing countries in the Middle East. Why have such agreements been rejected? Because they heavily favour Western oil corporations, granting extremely long-term contracts (45 years or more in the case of Afghanistan) and greater control, ownership, and profits to the companies compared to the far more common contracts that are used for the bulk – around 88 per cent – of the world’s oil.

Dellawar and Juhasz warn that:

The Afghanistan contracts, moreover, would not require foreign companies to invest earnings in the Afghan economy, partner with Afghan companies, or share new technologies.

Crucially, Afghanistan is not only important as an energy producer, but also as a potential “energy conveyer”. Negotiations are proceeding rapidly for the vital Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline which would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India. The pipeline has long been an important objective of Western governments and fossil fuel corporations that have had their sights on the energy-rich countries of the Caspian region. Indeed, the Bush administration made completion of the TAPI a core part of its Afghanistan war strategy.

As then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher said in 2007:

One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.

Dellawar and Juhasz conclude:

If the pipeline is constructed and U.S. companies begin producing in Afghanistan, its importance to the West will only intensify, as will the desire to keep Afghanistan ‘open for business’. If Afghanistan does not have the internal capacity to provide this ‘openness’ itself, the United States and other foreign governments may feel forced to do so on its behalf – utilizing their own troops.

As ever, then, Western states and corporations are striving relentlessly to maintain control of resources and global markets, and to maximise profits for themselves, with as much force and skullduggery as they can muster. And Western media will provide intellectual cover by selling the resultant theft, slaughter and misery as “stabilisation”, “‘investment” and “the protection of human rights”.

As former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges writes:

The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a morality and virtue it does not possess. Liberals posit themselves as the conscience of the nation. They permit us, through their appeal to public virtues and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as fundamentally good.

Supine Reporting In Service To The State

Regular readers may recall an alert in 2007 which compared Soviet and recent US/UK reporting on Afghanistan. The alert was a collaboration with Nikolai Lanine, who had fought with the Soviet Army during its 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan. He had subsequently spent several years trawling through Soviet-era newspaper archives comparing the propaganda of that time with modern Western media performance.

As we pointed out then, if the claims of  impartiality and balance in modern professional journalism are to be believed, the similarities should have been few and far between. After all, Soviet-era media such as Pravda – meaning, ironically, “The Truth” – are a byword for state-controlled mendacity in the West. Instead, as the alert showed, the similarities were painfully precise.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was an unalloyed act of aggression, an attempt to crush a perceived threat to Soviet security and power. But it was portrayed by the Soviet government, and compliant Soviet media such as Pravda and Izvestia, as an act of humanitarian intervention “to prevent the establishment of… a terrorist regime and to protect the Afghan people from genocide”, and also to provide “aid in stabilising the situation and the repulsion of possible external aggression.”  Once the “terrorists” had been defeated by the Soviet army, Afghanistan would be left to become “a stable, friendly country”. Soviet “involvement” was presented as being in the best interests of the Afghan people: the focus of the Soviet government’s benevolent concern. ¹

The parallels to the media’s coverage of Western “involvement” in Afghanistan today are obvious.

Western media support for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September, was steadfast from the beginning. Ten years ago, as the bombs and missiles rained down, an Independent editorial described the “war”  — in reality, a massive attack on aThird World Country by the planet’s most powerful military force –  as “ultimately inevitable”. Moreover, “Washington had the right – indeed, the duty – to respond” and ”there was no question that the United States was justified in using armed force.” Piling up the insults to readers’ intelligence, the paper said that it was ”to the immense – and unexpected – credit of America that it approached the business of retaliation with such method, caution and responsibility.”

In fact, the US launched its brutal assault despite dire warnings by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) that more than seven million people were facing a crisis that could lead to widespread starvation if military action were initiated. In September 2001, the US government had demanded that Pakistan stop convoys of food on which much of the already starving Afghan population depended. The FAO warned of a likely ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ unless aid convoys were immediately resumed and the threat of military action terminated. Compare the grim reality with the Independent’s claim of  “caution and responsibility” underpinning the US “business of retaliation”.

Three months into the war, a rare report in the Guardian highlighted the desperation of Afghan people:

The village of Bonavash is slowly starving. Besieged by the Taliban and crushed by years of drought, people in this remote mountain settlement have resorted to eating bread made from grass and traces of barley flour. Babies whose mothers’ milk has dried up are fed grass porridge. The toothless elderly crush grass into a near powder. Many have died. More are sick. Nearly everyone has diarrhoea or a hacking cough. When the children’s pain becomes unbearable, their mothers tie rags around their stomachs to try to alleviate the pressure. “We are waiting to die. If food does not come, if the situation does not change, we will eat it [grass] … until we die,” said Ghalam Raza, 42, a man with a hacking cough, pain in his stomach and bleeding bowels.

But on the eve of war, the Guardian had told its readers:

It needs to be said as clearly and as unemotively as possible at the outset that the United States was entitled to launch a military response.

The invasion was “an act of legitimate self defence to protect our nations from further attack”.

The paper offered token words of hope that Bush and Blair’s promises of food, medicine and other supplies to Afghan civilians would be honoured. Blair tried to sweet-talk the Afghans by saying that, in the past, the West had simply “walked away” from its people. But not now:

This time round we must not repeat that mistake. This conflict will not be the end… once the conflict is over we’ve then got to sit down with people in Afghanistan and try and work out a stable and coherent way for the future… We are not going to walk away again.

This is the standard, patronising rhetoric beloved of all triumphant invaders.

As defenceless Afghan civilians were being slaughtered, the Guardian editors asserted that “nothing in the world is more important right now than that [Bush and Blair] succeed”.

The Guardian even claimed that Afghanistan had brought the storm of destruction upon their own heads:

Offered the opportunity to hand over Bin Laden and to act against his networks, and pressured to do so even by those closest to them, including Pakistan, the Afghan regime has refused. There is no question, therefore, but that a monstrous injustice against America remains unassauged [sic].

In fact, even before 11 September 2001, the Taliban had offered to present bin Laden for trial following attacks on US targets in the 1990s, “but the US government showed no interest”.

Following the 11 September atrocities, the US refused to present evidence of bin Laden’s culpability to the Taliban “presumably because”, as Noam Chomsky said in an interview at the time, “that would have suggested some limit on the imperial prerogative to act without any authority”.

How genuine the Taliban offer was may never be known. But, as Chomsky points out, the brutal US stance could be put succinctly as follows:

Hand him [bin Laden] over, or else; and if you do, we may leave you alone (overthrowing the Taliban regime was a late afterthought). No government, surely not the U.S., would ever accept such a demand, unless compelled to by the threat of extreme violence. There was, then, no alternative to such [a] threat, if that was the demand, as it was. But that offers no justification for the threat of violence, or its implementation.

As for the editorial cheerleaders, press stenographers and armchair-warrior commentators who abased themselves before Western state power, they would do well to heed the cogent summary offered by WikiLeaks:

If a journalist hides the truth they are not journalists; they are partners in the crime they are hiding.

•  Part 2 will follow shortly…

1. Lyahovsky, A.A., & Zabrodin, V.M., 1991, Taini Afganskoi Voini [Secrets of the Afghan War]. Moscow: Planeta

It was widely reported that two young men acting independently – Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22 – had been sentenced to four years in prison for trying to incite riots via Facebook in the Manchester area. This ‘despite both being of previous good character’, and despite the fact that their Facebook entries – viewed by a few hundred people – failed to generate a single rioter. Farcically, the only people waiting for Blackshaw at his gathering point were the police.

The four-year jail sentences were harsh indeed, as the Guardian noted:

If the two Cheshire men had left home and actually taken part in a riot, it is likely they would have been charged with violent disorder. The average sentence passed on the 372 people convicted of violent disorder in 2010 was just over 18 months. The 1,434 people convicted of public order offences last year got, on average, two months inside.

Normally, to qualify for a four-year sentence, a convict would have to kidnap somebody (average sentence 47 months in 2010), kill someone while drink driving (45 months), or carry out a sexual assault (48 months).

Clearly, judges felt that even failed attempts to incite disruption via social media were worse than actual participation in the riots.

Writing in the Daily Mail, columnist Melanie Phillips located the cause of the riots in:

… fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them.

This vicious behaviour is fostered by ‘a world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and physical chaos. A world where a child responds to the slightest setback or disagreement by resorting to violence.

And who can doubt that compassion and restraint in the face of disagreement offer the best hopes for a peaceful world? The 11th century Buddhist poet Ksemendra recalled the wise counsel offered to one enraged king:

Lord, do not talk like this. If you return anger for anger, anger increases. If you give hate in return for hatred, you will never be rid of your enemies. Would you put out a fire by covering it with wood? It will always rekindle… If you meditate on tolerance to overcome anger, all will become your friends. ¹

Earlier this month, Phillips commented on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks:

The real problem with the US and UK reaction to 9/11 was that they did not follow through… we should have gone on to deal with Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Saudi as well.

Did she mean ‘deal with’ their concerns and grievances in a just and even-handed way? Should the US and UK have recognised their own wrongdoing, their own responsibility for generating hatred? In clarification, Phillips quoted herself from September 2002:

The US hopes that sorting Saddam will deliver to these other states the simple message: unless you desist from terror, you’re next.

A world ‘without any boundaries or rules’, in other words, where unilaterally ‘resorting to violence’ and ‘lashing out’ is the natural response.

Journalists like Phillips, who use national media platforms like the Daily Mail (circulation 2 million) to agitate for war at a time when the decision lies in the balance, are typically garlanded with awards, not sent to the slammer.  After two years spent cold-selling Blair’s war on Iraq, David Aaronovitch, then of the Guardian, won the What the Papers Say Columnist of The Year Award for 2003. In the same year, following a similar pro-war performance, the Independent’s Johann Hari was made Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards (to his credit, Hari has since recanted his support for the Iraq war). Phillips was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996.

Politicians do even better, of course. Last month, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Tony Blair, now the Middle East Quartet’s Special Envoy, was to receive an award ‘to express Israel’s appreciation for his efforts toward Middle East peace’. A decision worthy of a different kind of Orwell Prize. Meanwhile, Channel 4 reports:

Since resigning in June 2007 Tony Blair has financially enriched himself more than any ex-Prime Minister ever. Reporter Peter Oborne reveals some of the sources of his new-found wealth, much of which comes from the Middle East.

Michael White And ‘The Big Bloke On The Next Floor’

In the immediate aftermath of the riots, Michael White, assistant editor of the Guardian, savoured the prospect of the hardship awaiting jailed rioters, including the Facebook Two mentioned above. Why?

People write all sorts of really ugly and stupid things on Facebook, Twitter, email and other anti-social media platforms (including this one), and it’s time they realised that they matter.

True enough, although the same can be said of journalists, as we have seen, including White himself. At a crucial time in January 2003, he co-authored a Guardian piece that hailed Blair as he ‘gave MPs a bravura performance in defence of his [Iraq] policy’.²

The reporters failed to mention that, ‘bravura’ or not, Blair’s speech was spectacularly dishonest. They added instead: ‘it was noticeable that when Mr Blair delivered a powerful peroration in the Commons the cheers of Labour loyalists greatly exceeded the heckling he had earlier got from his own side’.

Certainly, the Facebook Two sought to inspire social disorder, but this kind of stenography to power habitually performed by mainstream journalists has facilitated the destruction of literally hundreds of thousands of human lives. Is this mere hyperbole? Do journalists really have that kind of power? It is clear to us that they are able to shape public opinion and so make war possible. George Monbiot wrote in 2004 that ‘the falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job.  ³

White’s outrage was directed at small fry reaching a tiny audience: ‘every time I see a nasty piece on new pix, CCTV footage or film of brutal incidents on the street… I hear the R-word [retribution] tip-toeing across my brain.

I want to see riot louts punished and, if punishment also helps them turn around their otherwise futile lives, then good.

He recognised that the punishment was sometimes harsh:

… four years in prison for trying to organise a riot in Northwich or Warrington (no one turned up) is a bit excessive… Yet I’m not sorry at the thought that Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan… and Jordan Blackshaw woke up in the slammer on Thursday remembering that, no, it’s not all a bad dream. It could be like this for the next 18 months, lads. And what if that big bloke on the next floor takes a shine to you?

This gleeful hand-rubbing at the threat of male rape as welcome punishment surely also qualifies as ‘ugly and stupid’.

A reader, Murau, commented beneath the article:

Men in prison. Only subject area where jokes about rape are considered acceptable.

Another reader, Forthestate responded:

You’re quite right. It’s also disturbing that in these not infrequent, rather gloating references, there is an almost tacit assumption that rape is an acceptable part of the punishment. If it’s so widespread that it regularly produces this unseemly speculation perhaps there should be some proper journalistic attention devoted to it.

On September 14, Channel 4 News reported:

Those jailed following the riots are being victimised by existing inmates because of the decline in comfort, according to the relative of a teenager detained in Portland prison for an offence unrelated to the riots.

Channel 4’s source added:

People are having their association time cut down to an hour a day – or possibly less. I’ve heard that some of the rioters have been attacked out of sight of the wardens – in the showers.’

We asked White to comment on these reports. He responded:

Sorry to hear that, but they did think they’d get away with looting unpunished. There’s a lesson in that.

The US human rights organisation Justdetention.org works to challenge the idea that rape, including male rape, in prisons is somehow normal and even acceptable. Their website comments:

Cases of sexual abuse in detention are not rare, isolated incidents, but the result of a systemic failure to protect the safety of inmates. Victims of prisoner rape are left beaten and bloodied, contract HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and suffer severe psychological harm. Once released – and the vast majority of prisoners do eventually get out – they return to their communities with all of their physical and emotional scars.

The Italian activist and film-maker Gabriele Zamparini invited Justdetention.org to respond to White’s comments. They replied:

As you point out it is a very disturbing example of the tendency to joke publicly about and diminish the problem of prisoner rape. (Forwarded to Media Lens, August 22, 2011)

The corporate media evaluate the actions of the powerful and the powerless by different and conflicting moral standards. The powerful are judged on the basis of who they are rather than of what they do. No matter how plainly individual leaders and parties have lied, no matter how cynical their motives, no matter how many deaths they have caused, they continue to be treated as fundamentally respectable and trustworthy.

This ‘respectability’ is a function of media power as it interacts with state power. It is a form of propaganda support that is structural, all but unconditional, in essence guaranteed. The results were described by  Greek historian Thucydides:

The strong do as they can, while the weak suffer what they must.

1. Leaves of the Heaven Tree, Dharma Publishing, 1997, p.333
2. Michael White and Julian Borger, ‘Blair wins time over party divisions on Iraq with bravura performance to MPs,’ The Guardian, January 16, 2003
3. Monbiot, Our lies led us into war, The Guardian, July 20, 2004

Thus, on the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an editorial in the Independent on Sunday gushed about ‘Bush’s desire to spread democracy as an end in itself’. It was, the paper said, ‘the germ of a noble idea’. There was  ‘an idealism’ about Blair’s support for Bush. The drawback was that the execution of the righteous vision had been ‘naive, arrogant and morally compromised by torture and the abrogation of the very values for which the US-led coalition claimed to fight’.

But now we have Nato’s ‘successful’ mission in Libya to help wipe the slate clean. The paper writes that ‘the deserts of North Africa … turned out to be more fertile soil for democracy than could have been imagined.’ Libya is the great cause ‘where the idea of liberal intervention could be rescued and to an extent redeemed from the terrible mistake of Iraq.’

Note that the invasion-occupation of Iraq is described as a ‘mistake’, not the supreme international crime as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg Trials.

The horrendous murder of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian, by British soldiers ‘was a reminder of how much the Iraq war tarnished Britain’s reputation abroad.’ The implication is that Britain’s ‘reputation’ is fundamentally decent, only occasionally ‘tarnished’.

The paper concludes:

There is a hope that Britain, with a more realistic understanding of its capability, could regain some of the ethical role in the world that it lost after its mistaken response to 9/11.

In the wake of all that has happened in the past ten years (and more), it takes a committed form of self-deception to cling to the shredded image of Britain’s ‘ethical role in the world’.

In several powerful books, based on careful research of formerly secret UK government documents, historian Mark Curtis has laid bare the motivations and realpolitik of British foreign policy. Ethics and morality are notable in these internal state records by their absence. Curtis observes:

A basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are evoked, they are only for public-relations purposes. ¹

But the myth of benevolence must be maintained, even to the extent of active deception of the British public:

In every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making.  (Ibid., p. 3)

In his political work, Noam Chomsky often cites a definition of terrorism from a US army manual as:

The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.

By this definition, Chomsky points out, the major source of international terrorism is the West, notably the United States.

As for Britain, Curtis says:

The idea that Britain is a supporter of terrorism is an oxymoron in the mainstream political culture, as ridiculous as suggesting that Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes. Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida. Many of the worst offenders are key British allies. Indeed, by any rational consideration, Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. But this simple fact is never mentioned in the mainstream political culture.  ²

In Unpeople, Curtis estimates the number of deaths in the post-WW2 period for which Britain bears significant responsibility, whether directly or indirectly. He tabulates mortality estimates for all the wars and conflicts in which Britain participated or otherwise played a significant role, for example in covert operations or diplomatic support for other governments’ violence. The examples include: war in Malaya (1948-1960), war in Kenya (1952-1960), the Shah’s regime in Iran (1953-1979), Indonesian army slaughters (1965-1966), the Indonesian invasion of East Timor (1975), US aggression in Latin America (1980s), the Falklands War (1982), the bombing of Yugoslavia (1999), the bombing of Afghanistan (2001) and the invasion of Iraq (2003).

As Curtis acknowledges, estimates of deaths in any conflict often vary widely and he does not pretend to be offering a ‘fully scientific analysis’. But erring on the side of caution, he arrives at a figure of around ten million deaths in the post-war period for which Britain bears ‘significant responsibility.’ Of these, Britain has ‘direct responsibility’ for between four and six million deaths. These are shocking figures, and essentially unmentionable in corporate news and debate.

The Doublespeak Of Terror/Counterterror

One of the golden rules propping up the required self-deception of the West’s fundamental goodness is that whenever violence is inflicted by the state it is only in retaliation for violence perpetrated by our enemies. This is straight out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Edward Herman explains:

[An] important doublespeak device for rationalizing one’s own and friendly terrorism is to describe it as “retaliation” and “counter-terror.” The trick here is arbitrary word assignment: that is, any violence engaged in by ourselves or our friends is ipso facto retaliation and counter-terrorism; whatever the enemy does is terrorism, irrespective of facts. ³

The notion is so pervasive in news reporting that it is virtually invisible, like the oxygen breathed by the journalist; it is simply taken for granted. Even raising the topic for discussion in mainstream circles is beyond the pale.

Consider a recent report on the BBC News at Ten. On September 7, 2011, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner reported from outside the Houses of Parliament:

When these anti-terrorist crash barriers went up outside Parliament back in 2003, a lot of people were shocked at the time. But we’ve got used to them. They’re a part of the world we live in.

Gardner continued:

There is no clear answer as to whether we’re safer now in Britain from terrorism than we were ten years ago. We know more about the threat we’re facing but those threats have multiplied and diversified.

The mass hostage-taking and murder in Mumbai three years ago has led to joint police-SAS training and a major boost in police firepower.

Gardner granted that ‘counterterrorism is also about foreign policy’, pointing out the obvious fact that ‘Britain’s part in the Iraq invasion helped recruit countless young men to al-Qaeda’s cause, increasing the danger to Britain.’ Indeed, this was a known risk before the invasion: Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that al-Qaeda and associated groups were ‘by far the greatest terrorist threat’ to this country and that the risk would be ‘heightened by military action against Iraq’. Gardner’s report neglected to mention this.

His news item, and an accompanying article the next day at BBC News online, was framed in the necessary traditional convention: that terrorism is what they do, while ‘we’ undertake counterterrorism.

On September 8, 2011, we wrote to the BBC’s security correspondent:

Dear Frank Gardner,

I hope you’re doing well. Thank you for your report on last night’s BBC News at Ten. You rightly referred to the attacks on Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai and Oslo as examples of terrorism. But you neglected to mention any examples involving US killings of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Here is but one example from 2006 in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi. At least ten civilians – including four women and five children – were bound and executed with shots to the head.

Nor did you mention the Israeli offensive against Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, with the deaths of around 1,400 civilians (including 300 children), or the attack on a peaceful convoy led by the Mavi Marmara.

Why do you follow a script that says that violence conducted by officially-decreed enemies is ‘terrorism’, while violence inflicted by Western states or our allies is ‘counter-terrorism’?

I hope to hear from you, please.

Regards

David Cromwell

Not hearing anything back, we nudged Frank Gardner gently on September 12 via email and again two days later.  We then received an email from someone at the BBC called Paul Rasmussen:

Hello David

I understand you have been in touch about some BBC News reporting.  If you wish to make a complaint – you will need use the BBC complaints procedure – if you are not familiar with how to do this please let me know.

Yours,  Paul Rasmussen
(Email, September 14, 2011)

We responded the same day:

Hello Paul,

Many thanks for your email. Has Frank Gardner been in touch with you?

I asked Mr Gardner to respond to a perfectly fair challenge about a report he made on last Wednesday’s BBC News at Ten, and I hope he’ll feel able to do so.

Best wishes,

David

We received no reply. The following day, still not having heard from Gardner, we emailed the BBC correspondent again:

Dear Frank Gardner,

I know how busy you must be. But it’s now one week on, and it’s disappointing that you are seemingly reluctant to reply to a serious, polite and reasonable email from a member of the public. I’m not seeking to make an official BBC complaint about your report; I’m simply asking you to respond to a straightforward query.

If you would rather remain silent, it lends credence to the point that your reporting does have an ideological stance: namely, that the UK state and its allies cannot be charged with terrorism, only counter-terrorism.

I’d be grateful if you would at least try to respond to this charge directly, rather than meet it with silence or any attempt to divert it into the BBC complaints system [see here and here].

Regards,

David Cromwell (Email, September 15, 2011)

This was clearly too much for any self-respecting journalist to resist. A reply duly arrived that day from ‘Frank Gardner OBE’:

Dear Mr Cromwell

You rightly guess that I am too busy to answer the many people who write in with interesting and often excellent questions. The online version of my 9/11 report is attached. I believe it is fair, accurate and balanced but if you disagree then do please feel free to file a complaint to the BBC, backing it up with evidence. Im afraid that as with other members of the public I am not in a position to enter into a correspondence.

Yours sincerely

Frank Gardner OBE
BBC Security Correspondent

Gardner’s dismissive response, seemingly squeezed out of him, is poor fare indeed. There is no meaningful attempt to debate the serious point we put before him. If we were to respond in the same offhand way to polite challengers, and tried to shepherd them towards a Media Lens complaints department, we would be justly ridiculed.

Recall that the BBC – which is state-funded, managed by state-approved appointees, and overseen by a cosy club of establishment worthies – is always declaring itself to be scrupulously ‘impartial’. Fundamental criticism of the state is protected by this shield of  ‘impartiality’. How?  By taking for granted that ‘we’ in the West are, by definition, the ‘good guys’.

As we said at the start of this alert, the prevailing ideology holds that the West may be guilty of occasional ‘lapses’, but that it endeavours with a good heart to export democracy, uphold human rights and keep the global peace. This false and poisonous propaganda image – carefully cultivated and assiduously pushed by powerful interests – can never be seriously challenged by the state broadcaster and the corporate media generally. And certainly not when the state broadcaster’s ‘security correspondent’ has had an honour bestowed upon him by the same state.

If this was the old Soviet Union, or perhaps present-day Iran, there would be howls of mirth and outrage from respectable commentators in Britain. That it is happening right here, in this ‘beacon of democracy and free speech’, is apparently no cause for concern or even comment in ‘mainstream’ circles.

1. Unpeople, Vintage, 2004, p. 3
2. Web of Deceit, Vintage, 2003, p. 94
3. Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, South End Press, 1992, p. 44

In a piece that recalled the iconic scene from The Usual Suspects, Monbiot lined up Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, David Peterson, John Pilger, and Media Lens, as political commentators who ‘take the unwarranted step of belittling the acts of genocide committed by opponents of the western powers’.

According to Monbiot, Herman and Peterson are guilty of something called ‘genocide denial.’ Media Lens got off on the lesser charge of ‘supporting genocide denial’. As for Chomsky, Monbiot Tweeted: ‘And, to my great distress, as I rate him very highly, #NoamChomsky doesn’t come out of it too well either.’

The ‘it’ in question was Monbiot’s own investigation: think a one-man Chilcot Inquiry.

‘Genocide belittling’ and ‘genocide denial’ may sound like neutral terms, but in fact they are loaded, and aimed, in a particular direction by mainstream journalists.

Typically, someone is adjudged guilty of ‘genocide denial’ only when they question accounts of crimes committed by official enemies of the West. No-one is accused of ‘genocide denial’ if they present Iraq Body Count’s (IBC) figure of 100,000 reported civilian deaths by violence since 2003 as the likely total number of Iraqis who have died through all causes. No-one is accused if they favour IBC’s current figure over the Lancet study which estimated 655,000 Iraqi dead as a result of the war way back in 2006. The same applies to the many commentators who have rejected, or ignored, claims that US-UK-led sanctions killed more than 500,000 Iraqi children under five between 1990-2003.

Journalists can go as low as they please in estimating numbers killed in Western or Western-backed bloodbaths in, for example, Indonesia, East Timor, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yemen, Iran and Afghanistan. No-one would dream of charging them with ‘genocide denial’.

In his article, Monbiot initially focused on right-wing ‘deniers’. He then turned to the opposite end of the political spectrum:

But genocide denial is just as embarrassing to the left as it is to the libertarian right. Last week Edward Herman, an American professor of finance best known for co-authoring Manufacturing Consent with Noam Chomsky, published a new book called The Srebrenica Massacre. It claims that the 8,000 deaths at Srebrenica are “an unsupportable exaggeration. The true figure may be closer to 800.”

These words do appear in the book, but they are taken from the foreword by Phillip Corwin, formerly the UN Civilian Affairs Coordinator in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Curiously, then, Monbiot began his criticism of Herman by focusing on someone else’s words. Different contributors to a book, even editors compiling the contributions, are not normally held to have collectively asserted what any one contributor has asserted.

Monbiot added: ‘The leftwing website Media Lens maintained that Herman and Peterson were “perfectly entitled” to talk down the numbers killed at Srebrenica.’

One might, of course, debate what ‘talk down’ means. But this is what we actually wrote about what Herman (rather than Corwin) has argued:

Herman and Peterson have also written:

“There is a good case to be made that, while there were surely hundreds of executions, and possibly as many as a thousand or more, the 8,000 figure is a political construct and eminently challengeable.” (Herman and Peterson, ‘Milosevic’s Death in the Propaganda System,’ ZNet, May 14, 2006)

Herman and Peterson, then, are not denying that mass killings took place at Srebrenica. They also do not accept the figure cited by Kamm and others, but that they are perfectly entitled to do. (Media Alert, ‘Dancing On A Mass Grave,’ November 25, 2009)

Arguing that someone is entitled to debate the facts is not the same as arguing that they are entitled to falsify, mislead, wilfully deceive, or whatever ‘talk down’ was intended to suggest. Monbiot could simply have written: ‘Media Lens maintained that Herman and Peterson were “perfectly entitled” to debate the facts.’

Readers may be surprised to learn that we have never written about the Srebrenica massacre – which took place six years before we started Media Lens – other than to affirm that it was a massacre. The whole emphasis of our November 4, 2005 alert, for example, was to show that Noam Chomsky had affirmed, and not denied, as the Guardian claimed, that there had been a massacre at Srebrenica.

With regard to Herman and Peterson’s work, we checked our archives – after ten years of work on Media Lens, we found a grand total of two articles by them discussing Srebrenica posted on our website (a third mentions it in passing).

The practical implications of Monbiot’s criticism were not spelled out. Were we wrong to post the two articles? Should we delete them? What threat does our posting of Herman and Peterson’s work pose, as against the threat to free speech of banning their work from our website? After all, if taken seriously, accusations of ‘genocide denial’ could be extended to suppress other views that are unpopular with powerful interests.

We found that the US website ZNet hosts literally dozens of articles by Herman and Peterson mentioning Srebrenica. Presumably, then, it is a world-leader in ‘supporting genocide denial.’ We asked Monbiot why he has not complained to ZNet (to which he is a regular contributor), or even mentioned their role. He chose not to respond on this issue.

To be clear, we reject the right of any court, any government, indeed anyone, to apply labels like ‘genocide’ to historical events and then, not merely argue but demand that they be accepted. The assumption that human institutions are in possession of Absolute Truth belongs to the era of The Inquisition, not to serious debate. There are rare cases when hate speech which is motivated by racism and likely to lead to violence can be condemned. But presumably Monbiot was not suggesting that Herman, Peterson, Chomsky and Pilger are trying to promote hatred and violence. We asked Monbiot, but again he did not respond. Please click here to see our email to him, and here to see the response he sent on June 17.

Distinguishing Deaths From Executions

Even putting aside concerns with the term ‘genocide denial’, Monbiot’s article contains some major gaffes. For example, as indicated above, Herman does not argue ‘that the 8,000 deaths at Srebrenica are “an unsupportable exaggeration”‘. Rather, he argues that the 8,000 executions at Srebrenica are an exaggeration. Monbiot wrote to us: ‘Given that 6,500 of the victims have already been exhumed and identified, and that there is very strong evidence (as there has been for years) to suggest that a further 1,500 or so await discovery, this statement is demonstrably wrong and without justification.’

But the 6,500 victims ‘exhumed and identified’ have been identified by DNA profiling that does not identify the cause of death – Herman and Peterson are questioning how many people were executed.

Freelance journalist Jonathan Rooper worked for the BBC for some 20 years. He was a journalist in TV current affairs before moving to BBC TV News where he became head of the News Features department. Rooper wrote to us:

DNA-based identifications of persons reported missing in wartime does not and cannot address the manner of death in any of those identified. So even if the ICMP [The International Commission on Missing Persons] claimed in an email to George Monbiot on 13 June that it, the ICMP, had positively identified “6,595 of the 7,789 Bosnians [sic] reported as missing” from the Srebrenica “safe area” population after the date of its capture by the Bosnian Serb forces (i.e., after July 11, 1995), this does not support, and cannot be used to support, Srebrenica-massacre allegations [of 8,000 shot dead].’ (Email to Media Lens, June 24, 2011)

And yet Monbiot insists that the figure of 8,000 executions is ‘accepted by everyone except some extreme Serb nationalists and a small group of wilful deniers as the correct total…’

In his response to us, Monbiot was adamant: ‘To describe it as “talking down” the number of deaths [sic – executions] is in fact an understatement: it amounts to the outright disavowal of cast-iron evidence.’

Again, this is simply wrong. Even if we accept that there is ‘cast-iron’ evidence of 6,500 deaths, there is not ‘cast-iron’ evidence of 6,500 executions. Some of the dead may have been regular battlefield casualties – the point Herman and Peterson are making.

Note, also, that the standard claim for Muslim deaths in Bosnia from 1993 and for many years thereafter was about 250,000 – a figure offered by the Bosnian Muslim authorities and accepted by many journalists. However, in Bosnian Book of the Dead: Assessment of the Database, Patrick Ball et al., estimate 96,895 deaths in total for the period of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, of which 57,696 (59.6%) were military and 39,199 (40.5%) were civilian. Does that make Patrick Ball et al. guilty of the charge of ‘revisionism’ or ‘belittling’, or even ‘genocide denial’?

The ‘Inverted Commas Problem’

A second gaffe is even more remarkable. Shortly after noting that ‘genocide denial is… embarrassing to the left,’ Monbiot wrote: ‘Worse still, he places the Rwandan genocide in inverted commas throughout the text…’ The ‘text’ in question is The Politics of Genocide. The ‘he’ is Edward Herman, although the book was actually co-authored with David Peterson.

At face value, this does indeed look awful. Are Herman and Peterson denying that there was any kind of genocide in Rwanda? This recalls the worst kind of apologetics arguing that there was no Nazi Holocaust, no gas chambers, no policy to exterminate Jews.

But even a glance at The Politics of Genocide reveals that the authors are using quote marks to refer to what they call ‘the standard model’ (p.53) of the Rwanda genocide – that there was a conspiracy by Hutu to eliminate the Tutsi from Rwanda. Herman and Peterson claim that this account is ‘a propaganda line’ (p.51) that ‘turned perpetrator and victim upside-down’ (p.51). Thus, in writing of ‘the Rwanda genocide’ using inverted commas, they are referring to a particular version of what happened and proposing an alternative version of events which, they claim, better fits the known facts.

What they are not doing is suggesting that there was no genocide in Rwanda. As Peterson commented to us, if they are to be ‘accused’ of anything, it should be ‘genocide reallocation’, not ‘genocide denial’. That Monbiot could even make the accusation, which could hardly be more damning, calls into question how seriously he had studied the material he was citing.

This error closely echoes Emma Brockes’ infamous comment about Noam Chomsky in the Guardian:

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.

The Guardian was forced to accept that Chomsky had never put the Srebrenica massacre in quotation marks. Brockes’ article was deleted from the Guardian website (which Chomsky, rightly, considered unnecessary). See here.

The prize-winning former Guardian journalist, Jonathan Cook, sent us this comment on the inverted commas:

It is worth noting that Norman Finkelstein did something identical in his book “The Holocaust Industry”. He states in the Introduction:

“In the pages that follow, I will argue that ‘The Holocaust’ is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust.” (p3)

He also says in a footnote on the same page:

“In this text, Nazi holocaust [his italics] signals the actual historical event, The Holocaust [his italics] its ideological representation.”

In Monbiot’s opinion, does this make Finkelstein, whose parents were survivors of the Nazi holocaust and many members of whose family were killed in the death camps, a Holocaust denier?’ (Email to Media Lens, June 17, 2011)

Cook added:

I thought his response to you was preposterous. He’s either suddenly become remarkably dimwitted (eg. not being able to understand the distinction being made by Herman and Peterson between combat casualties and executions) or he’s not playing straight. His rationalisations are now such a mess it’s actually difficult to disentangle his various arguments and to know whom he’s accusing of what.

As discussed, Monbiot also included John Pilger as part of the ‘malign intellectual subculture’. Pilger commented:

A common recipe for smear is half or quarter truth, conflation, misrepresentation, a pinch of sneer and a dollop of guilt-by-association. Stir briskly. Chef Monbiot is a curiously sad figure. All those years of noble green crusading now dashed by his Damascene conversion to nuclear power’s poisonous devastations and his demonstrable need for establishment recognition – a recognition which, ironically, he already enjoyed. Predictably, the born-again attack as “denialists” those who continue to point out Western propaganda’s mendacious constructions and omissions. Goodbye George. (Email to Media Lens, June 29, 2011)

Conclusion

People who care about freedom of speech use the term ‘genocide denial’ with extreme caution (as discussed, on rare occasions, political commentary that promotes racism and violence can be condemned). It is most often used as a crude device to taint commentators with a version of ‘Holocaust denial’ employing a similar term.

As used in the current debate, it amounts to little more than saying: ‘I charge you with disagreeing with me. How do you plead?’ The question has no meaning because it is not a crime to disagree with someone, not least because, Enlightened Beings aside, other people can never claim to be in possession of Absolute Truth (and Enlightened Beings have nothing to fear from open debate).

So why has Monbiot turned on us rather than, say, ZNet in this way? The reason, we believe, is that we have repeatedly challenged his journalism. In November 2002, at a crucial time in a key newspaper, Monbiot advanced a preposterous scheme for overthrowing the Iraqi government. He added:

But if this option is tried and fails, and if war turns out to be the only means of removing Saddam, then let us support a war whose sole and incontestable purpose is that and only that…’ (Monbiot, ‘See you in court, Tony,’ The Guardian, November 26, 2002)

We pointed out that this was as damaging as it was absurd. There was no way for the British public to ‘support’ some kind of ‘just war’ on Iraq in this way – there were no mechanisms for applying that kind of public pressure. Moreover, there was no justification for urging the public to support war on any basis – Britain and the US had no legal or moral right whatever to wage war on Iraq. The only hope in November 2002 was to encourage as many people as possible to oppose war in all circumstances.

Monbiot responded by attacking us in his Guardian column, and we believe he has never forgiven us for pointing out his disastrous error of judgement and for our subsequent challenges of his work on Iran and the media.

Postscript

It took fully five weeks for the Guardian to publish a response to the claims Monbiot made on June 13. Herman and Peterson submitted separate pieces to different sections of the Guardian, including Comment Is Free (Katharine Viner and Matt Seaton), the op-ed page (Becky Gardiner, Gwyn Topham, Libby Brooks), the response column (Joseph Harker), as well as the Guardian‘s editor Alan Rusbridger and its ombudsman Chris Elliott. On June 21, response column editor Joseph Harker told Peterson:

‘You make a number of assertions, so we’ll look into them and get back to you.’

In the lengthy period of ‘review’ that followed, Herman was told by Becky Gardiner, editor of the Guardian comment pages, ‘that too much time has elapsed’ to publish his response to Monbiot. Natalie Hanman, the editor of the online Comment is Free (CiF) section, told Herman that there was no space to publish his 760-word response.

On July 5, Harker finally responded with five reasons explaining why he had rejected Herman and Peterson’s submissions (see here together with Peterson’s detailed responses to each of these points). These five points were presumably supplied by ‘experts’ on Srebrenica and Rwanda, possibly the same two sources that Monbiot had previously cited in his response to Media Lens. Harker invited Herman and Peterson to submit a joint response under 550 words that would fit ‘within our editorial guidelines’.

In the meantime, the Observer had published another critical piece by Nick Cohen on the ‘Chomskyan self-delusion’ of ‘west-hating’ leftists, with pointed reference to Srebrenica.

After further Guardian edits and under the slanted headline, ‘We’re not genocide deniers’, Herman and Peterson’s response finally appeared on July 19. On the same day, Herman and Peterson posted copies of their original, rejected responses on ZNet.

Guardian readers posted comments below the truncated response from Herman and Peterson, with the majority in support and several providing links to the fuller rebuttals posted at ZNet. The CiF moderators swiftly got to work playing ‘whack-a-mole’ to remove these comments whenever they popped up. Even a comment by Peterson himself, linking to these longer pieces, was removed. Unusually, this was later restored, most likely in response to public complaints.

Less than a week after Herman and Peterson’s condensed response had appeared in the Guardian, a speedy rejoinder was published by James Wizeye of the Rwanda high commission in London. Apparently no extensive Guardian investigation was required for the Rwandan official’s claims.

By this point, the Guardian had grudgingly allowed Herman and Peterson 500 words to defend themselves against the ugly and false charges of ‘genocide denial’ in several thousand words printed by the Observer/Guardian.

Jonathan Cook summarised the debacle:

This whole episode really has been a fabulous case study of how our most liberal media ensure that certain reasonable views are beyond the pale of respectable discourse. The Guardian has allowed Monbiot to misrepresent the positions of the people he defamed as genocide deniers; then, despite prolonged lobbying, the Guardian has denied DP and EH a proper platform on which to defend themselves; then it has censored those on the talkbacks who tried to inform the wider readership of the pair’s much fuller defence, published elsewhere, and the Guardian’s role in trying to stop the two from responding; and now it has allowed the pair to be misrepresented again.

This isn’t an isolated stitch-up; this is a strategy. this is how the media – from Murdoch to the Guardian – operate when they want to severely limit the framework of a debate. The Guardian is doing everything possible to ensure its wider readership is not exposed to DP and EH’s ideas, and is doing it by labelling and dismissing them as genocide deniers. No one is winning this argument because no argument is taking place. The Guardian is not presenting reasoned criticisms or allowing DP and EH to present their arguments properly. Instead the Guardian is winning the non-debate because it is the one able to dictate the terms of the non-debate. This is trickery, dressed up as a free media.

That Monbiot is at the heart of this deception reflects very poorly on him. (Email, July 26, 2011)

Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and TV channels have supported all the US-UK wars over the past 30 years, from Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands war in 1982, through George Bush Senior and the first Gulf War in 1990-91, Bill Clinton’s war in Yugoslavia in 1999 and his undeclared war on Iraq in 1998, George W Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Tony Blair on his coat tails, and up to the present, with Barack Obama continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now adding Libya to his tally of seven wars.

The consequences in Iraq include a million dead people, four million refugees, a devastated country and the West’s corporate capture of huge oil resources.

David Swanson observes correctly that ‘Murdoch has blood on his hands’ and reminds readers of Article 20 of the UN International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights: ‘Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.’

Murdoch admitted his complicity during a televised debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he said that his media empire had tried to shape public opinion in support of the Iraq war. That he largely failed in his aim, thanks to the scepticism of the public towards the incessant war-mongering, does not detract from the scale of his wrongdoing.

The Hall Of Shame: Samples From The Archives

Consider some of the evidence of the Murdoch empire’s attempts to manipulate the public. The Sun screamed ‘BRITS 45 MINUTES FROM DOOM’ on its front page following Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’ of September 2002. When UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix found no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Sun’s hysterical headline was ‘HE’S GOT ‘EM. LET’S GET HIM’. Once the war was underway, the Sun and News of the World were full of propaganda about the need to get behind ‘our boys’ (and girls). In the United States, Fox News was perhaps even worse: a primitive mix of ‘patriotism’ and vitriol directed against even mild dissenters.

The Times could be relied upon to put a more genteel sheen on the propaganda. Michael Gove, then a Times journalist, now Secretary of State for Education, wrote:

We have no alternative but to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq to prevent Saddam completing his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Massive military force must be deployed to remove Saddam’s regime. (Gove, ‘We need Bush and not Saddam calling the shots,’ The Times, August 28, 2002)

Gove remains in close contact with his former colleagues. George Eaton reports in the New Statesman this week:

The Education Secretary listed 11 meetings at which executives from the company [News Corp] were present, including seven with Rupert Murdoch. Gove met the News Corp head more times than any other minister and had dinner with him twice last month.

Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, works for News International.

In 2004, after Fallujah had been subjected to a brutal US onslaught leaving at least 800 civilians dead, a Times editorial declared: ‘the US military had to act decisively or fail those entitled to its protection.’ (Leading article, ‘Taking Fallujah,’ The Times, November 10, 2004)

In 2006, the prestigious Lancet journal published a paper estimating the Iraq war death toll at around 650,000. The study was led by researchers from the world-renowned Johns Hopkins University and followed standard epidemiological practice for estimating mortality in war. John Tirman, who commissioned the Lancet study, notes in a recent article that ‘the Murdoch media machine did its part in attempting to discredit the household surveys’ which formed the basis of the paper:

The reaction to the Johns Hopkins estimate of 650,000 “excess deaths” came in for savage treatment, trashed as a “political hit” in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. This campaign against the scientists had a chilling effect.

The ‘chilling effect’ meant the corporate media failed to give the study the prominence it deserved. But awkward silences and embarrassed shoe-gazing is standard behaviour when we, the good guys, are doing the killing.

Like most newspapers, The Times and Sunday Times have published good journalism: Michael Smith’s excellent investigative reporting on the Downing Street Memos springs to mind. So too does Jerome Starkey’s work to expose the horrific killing of Afghan schoolchildren in night-time raids led by US forces. The Times editors were, however, on hand to portray the atrocity in the required context of a ‘just war’: ‘The legitimacy of the cause in Afghanistan is called into question by civilian deaths. The conflict needs to be conducted with regard for the native population.’

Not content to justify war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Murdoch press has lined up Iran in its crosshairs. In 2006, Times columnist Gerard Baker donned his fatigues and boots to declare: ‘The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran.’

In 2008, The Times once again came under the Media Lens spotlight for its unbalanced coverage on Iran. Our analysis of the output of the paper’s then chief foreign commentator, Bronwen Maddox, did not go down well. In fact, we received threats of legal and police action from Alastair Brett, then legal director of Times Newspapers Limited. This was the first time we had been subjected to such outrageous threats. Peter Wilby, former News Statesman editor, suggested it was ‘an extraordinary reaction’ from the giant newspaper group, while Noam Chomsky said pithily that the Times reaction was ‘pretty sick’.

In 2010, Times propaganda over the Iranian nuclear ‘threat’ was ramped up yet again when the paper published documents which, it confidently asserted, showed Iran’s intention to develop a trigger for a nuclear weapon. In fact, the authenticity of the documents was highly questionable, with some intelligence experts claiming they were forgeries most likely created as part of an attempt to further boost war fervour against Iran.

Meanwhile, The Times continued to shore up Western foreign policy in its attack on WikiLeaks in an editorial last October:

Nowhere in WikiLeaks’s self-serving self publicity is there a judgment of what the organisation is achieving for the Iraqi nation, and what it hopes to achieve… Its personnel are partisans intervening in the security affairs of Western democracies and their allies, with a culpable heedlessness of human life. (Leader, ‘Exercise in Sanctimony; The release of military files by WikiLeaks is partisan and irresponsible,’ The Times, October 25, 2010)

The Times managed to miss the target by a full 360 degrees. It is the corporate media, not WikiLeaks, which demonstrates a ‘culpable heedlessness of human life’ in its endorsement of the West’s fixed foreign policy: to attack, bomb, invade, torture and steal based on any pretext that can be fed to the public.

The above is but a tiny sample of the abysmal historical record of News International. Journalist Neil Clark correctly noted of Murdoch’s papers that ‘no other newspaper group has as much blood on its hands when it comes to propagandising for illegal and fraudulent military conflicts.’

His Master’s Voice: Cues From The Boss

In 2001, reporter Sam Kiley left The Times following ‘pro-Israeli censorship’ of his reporting. Why the censorship? Kiley believed the explanation lay in Murdoch’s heavy investment in Israel and close friendship with the then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. Indeed, Murdoch has travelled to Israel numerous times and met many of its leaders. Kiley said:

In the war of words, no newspaper has been so happy to hand the keys of the armoury over to one side than the Times.

The Times foreign editor and other middle managers flew into hysterical terror every time a pro-Israel lobbying group wrote in with a quibble or complaint and then usually took their side against their own correspondent.

He added: ‘No pro-Israel lobbyist ever dreamed of having such power over a great national newspaper.’

Robert Fisk, now at the Independent, explained that he too left The Times after interference with his reporting on the Middle East:

The end came for me when I flew to Dubai in 1988 after the USS Vincennes [a US Navy guided missile cruiser] had shot down an Iranian passenger airliner over the Gulf. Within 24 hours, I had spoken to the British air traffic controllers at Dubai, discovered that US ships had routinely been threatening British Airways airliners, and that the crew of the Vincennes appeared to have panicked. The foreign desk told me the report was up for the page-one splash. I warned them that American ‘leaks’ that the IranAir pilot was trying to suicide-crash his aircraft on to the Vincennes were rubbish. They agreed.

Next day, my report appeared with all criticism of the Americans deleted, with all my sources ignored. The Times even carried an editorial suggesting the pilot was indeed a suicider. A subsequent US official report and accounts by US naval officers subsequently proved my dispatch correct. Except that Times readers were not allowed to see it.

Fisk said that he believed Murdoch did not personally intervene. However: ‘He didn’t need to. He had turned The Times into a tame, pro-Tory, pro-Israeli paper shorn of all editorial independence.’

In March 2009, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) honoured Murdoch with their ‘National Human Relations Award’. In his speech, Murdoch declared his own version of Middle East reality, including this gem: ‘In Iran, we see a regime that backs Hezbollah and Hamas now on course to acquire a nuclear weapon.’

So Murdoch’s editors and columnists can be in no doubt of where the boss stands on the ‘threat’ of Iran. News Corp employees would also do well to heed the master’s views on Israel, made clear in the same speech: namely, that the state is an integral part of the West as ‘defined by societies committed to freedom and democracy’. Only weeks after the brutal onslaught by Israeli forces in Gaza, with around 1400 Palestinians killed including over 400 women and children, Murdoch had this to say to his audience:

My friends, I do not pretend to have all the answers to Gaza this evening. But I do know this: The free world makes a terrible mistake if we deceive ourselves into thinking this is not our fight.

In the end, the Israeli people are fighting the same enemy we are: cold-blooded killers who reject peace … who reject freedom … and who rule by the suicide vest, the car bomb, and the human shield.

Against such an enemy, I will not second-guess the decisions of a free Israel defending her citizens. And I would ask all those who support peace and freedom to do the same.

Murdoch’s pro-Israeli position is reflected in his newspapers. According to Isi Liebler, an Australian Jewish community leader who now lives in Israel, Murdoch’s ‘affection’ for the state ‘arose less out of his conservative sensibility than from his native Australian sympathy for the underdog fending off elites seized by conventional wisdoms’. Liebler added: ‘He’s met Israelis, he’s been to Israel, he’s seen Israel as the plucky underdog when the rest of the world saw Israel as an occupier.’

But the pro-Israel lobby is now ‘warily watching the unfolding of the phone-hacking scandal that is threatening to engulf’ his media empire. ‘Murdoch’s sudden massive reversal of fortune’ has ‘supporters of Israel worried that a diminished Murdoch presence may mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.’

One recent article in the Jewish Chronicle was even headed, ‘Is this curtains for pro-Israel Murdoch?’

The Farcical Faustian Pact

Andrew Neil, a former Murdoch editor, once said that although the media mogul would not intervene directly at The Times or the Sunday Times, ‘he does regard himself as someone who should have more influence on these papers than anyone else.’

During his time as Sunday Times editor, Neil ‘was never in any doubt what the News Corp boss thought about issues.’ It obviously helped that Neil and Murdoch ‘share[d] a common worldview’; indeed this is a requirement for all editors and proprietors: ‘An editor has to be on the same planet [as the paper’s owner]. You don’t have to be on the same continent or the same country for all of the time but you need to be on the same planet.’

When it came to Murdoch’s tabloid press, direct intervention by the owner did take place: ‘If you want to know what Rupert Murdoch really thinks read the editorials in the Sun and the New York Post because he is editor-in-chief of these papers.’

Neil continued: ‘There is no major geopolitical position that the Sun will take whether its attitude to the euro or to the current European treaty or to whom the paper will support in the upcoming general election. None of that can be decided without Rupert Murdoch’s major input.’

In 1999, News of the World exposed the former Tory MP Jeffrey Archer as a liar and perjurer, which led to him being imprisoned. But Murdoch had not wanted the Archer scoop to be published and sacked the editor Phil Hall for defying him. It was a clear example of what happens to editors who step out of line.

The threat of proprietorial interference, then, is always present; whether directly (Murdoch’s tabloid press) or by knowing exactly what the owner’s views are and conforming to them (Murdoch’s ‘quality’ press). Denying or downplaying all of this, even in defiance of the clear ‘evidence’, is ‘in everyone’s interests’, said Neil, adding: ‘It suits the editors and proprietors to continue this farce.’

This is not limited to the Murdoch press. Throughout the corporate media, editors and proprietors enter a ‘Faustian pact’ to pretend that interference does not happen; editors do not want to be seen ‘as puppets of proprietors.’ But, in effect, that is what they are.

Thus, it is important to look beyond the Murdoch media empire at the wider context of the scandal engulfing News International, a corrupt police force and a supine political establishment. Seumas Milne made some good observations along these lines in the Guardian recently:

These revelations [of phone hacking] should ram home the reality that Britain has become a far more corrupt country than many realise. Much of that has been driven by the privatisation-fuelled revolving door culture that gives former ministers and civil servants plum jobs in the companies they were previously regulating.

Milne notes that several ‘opportunities’ to clean up this corruption ‘have come and gone’:

First the official deception of the Iraq war, then the collapse of a deregulated banking system, then the exposure of systematic sleaze in parliament revealed a growing crisis in the way the country is run. Now that crisis has been shown to have spread to the media and police. Official Britain isn’t working. Sooner or later, pressure for change will become unstoppable.

It is hard to argue with Milne’s article. But he is silent, for obvious reasons, about the Guardian’s important role as a liberal gatekeeper that helps preserve the established order. As we have repeatedly pointed out in our media alerts and books, this role is a crucial missing ingredient in any serious discussion of the nexus of power, politics and the media. As ever, we have to look to someone commenting from beyond the confines of the self-regarding Guardian for the unvarnished truth. John Pilger is one such voice:

the truth is, Britain’s system of elite monopoly control of the media rests not on News International alone, but on the Mail and the Guardian and the BBC, perhaps the most influential of all. All share a corporate monoculture that sets the agenda of the “news”, defines acceptable politics by maintaining the fiction of distinctive parties, normalises unpopular wars and guards the limits of “free speech”. This will be strengthened by the illusion that a “bad apple” has been “rooted out”

Even if Murdoch’s empire were to collapse, there would still be no free press, no responsible corporate news agenda and no brave new world of media democracy. For these to take root, the stranglehold of corporate media and corporate politics needs to be broken. That will happen only when enough people demand change.

There’s no doubt that a body blow has been delivered to Rupert Murdoch’s mighty News Corporation empire. Leading politicians, who until very recently had been both obsequious and fearful, now want to put themselves at least a bargepole’s length away from the media mogul. As Media Lens reader ‘Keith-264’ noted on our message board:‘Rupert’s down and is getting a tabloid handbagging from lots of people who hitherto hid under a stone at the mere sound of his name.’ (July 14, 2011)

The power of the public is the prime reason for the shift. There had been near-universal revulsion at the phone hacking involving murdered children, victims of the 7 July 2005 bombing in London, and the families of servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. News International payments to police officers and pay-offs to phone-hacking victims, together with feeble and curtailed police investigations, make up a toxic mix with rumours of even worse to be exposed in the near future. In this atmosphere of public disgust, the main political parties had finally shown some mettle and stood up to Murdoch’s long-time bullying.

Tory leader David Cameron desperately tried to keep his head above water, seemingly unable to comprehend the extent of a rapidly escalating anger throughout an appalled country. He was engulfed by fallout from his shoddy judgement in employing Andy Coulson, a former editor of News of the World, as his director of communications.

Spreading around the blame in an attempt to dilute his own culpability, Cameron stated: ‘The truth is, we have all been in this together—the press, politicians and leaders of all parties—and yes, that includes me.’

There was no sign that he, far less the government, would resign over the matter.

A Guardian team lead by investigative journalist Nick Davies did much to stoke up the heat on Rupert Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Brooks, as well as the Metropolitan Police in London. While recognising the good journalism undertaken here, the Guardian has not been entirely convincing about its role in ‘warning’ Cameron about Coulson’s connections to a private investigator with a criminal record. As John Hilley asks:

Is it the role of this country’s ‘leading liberal’ newspaper to act as a ‘vetting agent’ for top politicians?

We asked Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, deputy editor Ian Katz (who actually placed the phone call to the Tory inner circle) and the ‘unreconstructed idealist’ George Monbiot. Not one of them responded. It appears that Monbiot is a ‘professional troublemaker’ so long as it does not entail asking questions of his own corporate employer.

We must also bear in mind that it makes good business sense to put media competitors under the spotlight; The Times and Sunday Times are, after all, in the same ‘quality press’ market as the Guardian and the Observer. Weakening the grip of News International on the UK media would have many benefits for the other corporate media players. But the notion that a more honest media would thus emerge, one capable of systematically challenging official propaganda that facilitates military ‘interventions’ and abuses of planet and people, is highly suspect. The same structural constraints ensuring propaganda services on behalf of elite state-corporate interests remain in place.

Downplaying or overlooking these constraints, with talk of a Hippocratic Oath for journalists and a new manifesto for media ethics, is little more than a fresh lick of paint to a towering press edifice.

Freedom of information campaigner Heather Brooke says the ‘root cause’ of ‘the corrupt relationship between the power elites’ is ‘the secretive system of information patronage.’ Access to public records in the US is far better protected than here in the UK which still veers towards secrecy. One might ask then: why is it that journalism in the US is arguably even more supine to power than it is here in the UK? In fact, the barriers to genuine fourth-estate journalism are much more systemic than Brooke recognises, in common with other commentators now blathering away in the corporate media.

Equally oblivious to the structural realities that crush any real prospects of journalism holding power to account, the Independent asserted: ‘Britain still has a free, independent and ethical press, and it remains as essential to the nation’s wellbeing as ever.’

In his book, Flat Earth News, the Guardian’s Nick Davies had written:

Owners and advertisers are only part of the reason for the ideological problems in the mass media; and ideology is only part of the total problem of the retreat from truth-telling journalism. Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference. (p. 22)

The inference was that even Murdoch at most constitutes a 5 to 10% hindrance in honest journalism: a very modest ‘statistic’ – in fact, more of a thumb-sucking number – at odds with the hyperbolic wave of rhetoric and self-congratulation sweeping over the Guardian and the rest of the liberal media at the sight of Rupert Murdoch apparently stopped in his tracks. Could this really be the dawn of a new ‘changed’ world of ‘media plurality’, ‘stronger democracy’ and dismantled Berlin Walls?

The ‘Wake-up Call’ That Rang for Thirty Years and More

We are to believe that our leaders have suddenly come to their senses about the collusion between powerful media, corrupt police and the political establishment. David Cameron declared the current scandal was a ‘wake-up call’. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said:

I think what we’ve seen, what’s come to light over the last week or two is a symptom if you like of a much wider problem. And that problem is that different bits of the British system; the press, the police, the politicians just became too close to one another, became too cosy, became too tied up with each other.

Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow mewled plaintively into the Twitter sphere: ‘We knew it was happening … all of it in a sense, why didn’t we do more about it?’

Indeed, why didn’t you? You and your media colleagues had the resources to uncover it all. You just didn’t have the cojones. Instead, you shamefully let down the public that pays your salary.

Somehow this all ‘just’ happened and only hit senior politicians over the head in ‘the last week or two’. Journalists bemoan the fact they couldn’t speak out about it before. All of this is deceptive, self-serving nonsense. The public has seen the reality for years, if not decades. Why else the widespread scepticism and even deep cynicism towards politicians and the corporate media?

Many people know all too well that we are kept away from meaningful input to major government policies. Excluded from the ship’s bridge, we are largely captive passengers on a supertanker that is sailing on a destructive course set by the convergence of state and corporate power.

Julie Hyland injected some much-needed perspective:

What is being exposed is not simply the moral and political depravity of one man or one corporation, but the putrefaction of an entire social and political system. Nothing the Labourites or Tories say can conceal the fact that for more than 30 years Murdoch has been the power behind the throne of British politics—and indeed, the politics of countries all over the world. This includes the US, where Murdoch’s Fox network, New York Post and Wall Street Journal largely set the reactionary agenda for the two big business parties [i.e. both the Republicans and the Democrats].

Turning back to Britain, Hyland provided further context so glaringly absent from ‘mainstream’ media coverage:

The relationship between the two main parties and Murdoch is based on a common economic and political agenda—one forged in the early 1980s, as the ruling class set out to destroy the social rights won by working people in order to give free rein to the corporations and the City of London.

Murdoch backed Thatcher to launch the anti-working class offensive, then switched to Tony Blair and Labour to deepen it, and switched back to the Tories and Cameron to finish the job of destroying the social gains of a century of working class struggle.

Or if you prefer Clegg’s propaganda version of the truth, uncritically relayed by the Guardian:

This whole episode has cast a spotlight on that sort of murky world of the British establishment, the police, the press and politicians and we must now take this opportunity to clean things up and make sure that the public once again trust those institutions.

Just as when Tony Blair’s New Labour swept into Downing Street in 1997, and when the sainted Barack ‘Yes we can!’ Obama ascended to the US presidency in 2009, it is crucial that the slate is once again wiped clean, and public confidence in power restored, so that the establishment can get on with doing pretty much whatever it likes. Or if we decide that this is unacceptable, as we should, then we can rip up the endlessly repeating script and rewrite it in our favour.