Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media

241 Pages·2006·2.08 MB·english

by  David Edwards

Guardians of Power
The Myth of the Liberal Media
David Edwards and David Cromwell
P
Pluto Press
LONDON (cid:127) ANN ARBOR, MI
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First published 2006 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © David Edwards and David Cromwell 2006
Foreword copyright © John Pilger 2006
The right of David Edwards and David Cromwell to be identifi ed as the authors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
John Pilger hereby asserts his moral right as author of the Foreword
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 2483 5 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 2482 7 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Printed and bound in the European Union by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
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Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Foreword by John Pilger ix
1 The Mass Media – Neutral, Honest, Psychopathic 1
Pulling The Other One – The Corporate ‘Free Press’ 1
Outlawing Social Responsibility 2
Of Big Brother and ‘Auntie Beeb’ – The Propaganda
Model 4
The Convenient Rise of Professional Journalism 9
A Note About the Structure of this Book 12
2 Iraq – The Sanctions of Mass Destruction 13
Blair’s Big Bad Lie – The ‘Moral Case for War’ 13
Effectively Terminated – The US–UK Genocide in Iraq 15
Media Complicity – The ‘Pilger-Baathist Line’ 19
Burying the Effects of Sanctions 21
Observer Editor Roger Alton and the 83-year-old War
Veteran 25
Three Remarkable Emails from Nick Cohen 28
3 Iraq Disarmed – Burying the 1991–98 Weapons
Inspections 32
Find Me a Way to do This 32
‘Fundamentally Disarmed’ by 1998 33
Pushed or Pulled? The Art of Truth-Reversal 37
No Particular Answer – Media Lens and BBC Newsnight
Editor George Entwistle 41
Serious and Current Threat? – The Sludge of Mass
Destruction 44
4 Iraq – Gunning for War and Burying the Dead 47
The Message from America 47
Falling into Execute Mode 50
A Larger Man and a Stronger Prime Minister – The Fall
of Baghdad 51
Outdoing Saddam – The US–UK are ‘Absolutely
Accountable’ 53
Necessary ‘Dud’ – The Lancet Report 56
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vi Guardians of Power
Our Data Have Been Back and Forth 58
The Charnel House – A Simple Question from a Couple
of Amateurs 63
All Hail Democratic Iraq! – A Tragi-Comedy 65
Democracy Born and Still-Born – A Tale of Two Elections 68
‘He Wants Democracy’ – Media Lens and BBC Newsnight
Editor Peter Barron 73
5 Afghanistan – Let Them Eat Grass 76
Normalising the Unthinkable 76
In The Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Lion Is News 80
Killing as a First Resort 82
Bombing it Better 85
Outside Looking In – Media Lens and the BBC’s
Director of News, Richard Sambrook 90
6 Kosovo – Real Bombs, Fictional Genocide 94
Iraq And Kosovo – The Forbidden Parallels 94
Lights out in Belgrade – The Media Line Up 95
Pure Invention – The Kosovo ‘Genocide’ 96
Questioning Racak 100
Pernicious and Anti-Journalistic – Media Lens and
the BBC’s Andrew Marr 104
7 East Timor – The Practical Limits of Crusading
Humanitarianism 109
A Toothless Moral Crusade 109
No One Gave a Damn – The ‘Blessing’ of the West 111
Impoverished Territory – The Calculations of Realpolitik 114
8 Haiti – The Hidden Logic of Exploitation 117
Conquering Paradise – The Logic of Exploitation 118
Haiti’s Big Surprise – Aristide 120
Media Silence on Washington’s ‘Double Game’ 124
Aristide Toppled – The Disputed Elections 125
9 Idolatry Ink – Reagan, the ‘Cheerful Conservative’
and ‘Chubby Bubba’ Clinton 132
Will the Real Paul Wolfowitz Please Stand Up? 132
Reagan – ‘An Extraordinarily Successful Presidency’ 134
Killing is Not Enough 138
Nicaragua – The Threat of a Good Example 142
Reagan’s Legacy in Central America 145
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Contents vii
Clinton – The Bitter Ironies 148
Dimbleby Dumbs Down 152
10 Climate Change – The Ultimate Media Betrayal 154
Uninhabitable Planet? 154
The High Cost of Buying Time 155
Global Climate Catastrophe – Mustn’t Grumble! 157
Put a ‘Hog’ in it – Liberal Media Greenwash 158
Neither do I, Too! – The Fossil-Fuelled Guardian 161
Dead Planet’s Society – The Mystery of the Guardian’s
Post Box 167
The Guardian’s Readers’ Editor Serves up a Liberal
Herring 170
What is our Problem? 171
11 Disciplined Media – Professional Conformity to Power 172
How do you Shoot Babies? 172
The ‘Gushing’ Phenomenon 174
Trained for Timidity 178
Hell, the System Works Just Fine! 182
Making a Difference – Why We Can Infl uence the Media 185
12 Towards a Compassionate Media 188
West is Best – How Media Compassion Radiates
‘Outwards’ 188
So What Would you do? The Guardian Editor Bowls
a Googly 190
The Netizens are Coming! 192
Towards a Compassionate Mass Media 196
Honest, Compassionate, Non-Corporate 199
The Media is not Just Another Issue 201
13 Full Human Dissent 204
The Reality Filters 204
Life, Liberty and Happiness – The Corporate Versions 208
Enlightened Self-Interest – The Curious Qualities of
Kindness 210
Towards Full Human Dissent 215
Resources 218
About Media Lens 229
Index 231
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Acknowledgments
We would like to express our thanks to the following people for their
help with this book and with the Media Lens project: Michael Albert,
Gilbert Burnham, Gabriel Carlyle, Phil Chandler, Noam Chomsky,
Sue Cullum, Mark Curtis, Denis Halliday, Edward Herman, Richard
Keeble, Tim Llewellyn, Marianne McKiggan, Oliver Maw, Aubrey
Meyer, David Miller, Milan Rai, Les Roberts, Andy Rowell, Hans von
Sponeck, John Theobald and all at Pluto Press. We also gratefully
acknowledge the fi nancial support of the Barry Amiel and Norman
Melburn Trust, the Lipman Miliband Trust, the Foundation de Sauve,
the Marmot Trust, the Tinsley Charitable Trust and many individual
donors over the years.We would like to thank our families for their
love and support. David Cromwell would like to thank Foske, Sean
and Stuart. We would particularly like to thank John Pilger for his
encouragement and support.
viii
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Foreword
John Pilger
Two epic episodes have determined how many of us in the West see
the world beyond. They are the Second World War and the Cold
War. As this is being written, the British are being called upon, yet
again, to celebrate the ‘good war’ against Hitler: that ‘ethical bath
where the sins of centuries of conquest, slavery and exploitation were
expatiated’, to quote Richard Drayton on the latest crop of imperial
historians like Niall Fergusson. He might as well have been referring
to many ‘mainstream’ journalists.
‘The good war’, wrote Drayton, ‘has underwritten sixty years of
war-making. It has become an ethical blank cheque for British and
American power. We claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison
without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war
against fascism. When we fall out with such tyrant friends as Noriega,
Milosevic or Saddam, we re-brand them as “Hitler”. In the “good
war” against them, all bad things become forgettable’ (Drayton, ‘An
Ethical Blank Cheque’, Guardian, May 10, 2005).
During the Cold War, the ultimate ‘bad thing’ was the threatened
use of nuclear weapons. Declassifi ed offi cial fi les now reveal the
them-and-us propaganda of the Cold War as largely fi ction. British
planning documents from the 1960s actually dismiss the ‘Soviet
threat’ in Europe as exaggerated and non-existent in most of the
world, even in the Middle East. The real Cold War was fought by
‘our’ governments, not against Russians, but expendable brown and
black people, often in places of great impoverishment. This was not
so much a war between East and West as between North and South,
rich and poor, big and small. Indeed, the smaller the adversary, the
greater the threat, because triumph by the weak might be contagious.
Thus the weak, whose homelands often contained vast treasuries of
oil and gas, minerals and beckoning markets, were the true goals of
the West’s crusaders, and still are. Western state terrorism was used
from Palestine to Nicaragua, Indochina to the Congo. And when on
September 11, 2001, the weak, in effect, struck back, a new mythical
war, the ‘War on Terror’, was launched.
ix
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x Guardians of Power
The latest ‘bad things’, such as America’s and Britain’s bombing of
civilian targets with cluster bombs, and use of napalm and depleted
uranium, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not reported as acts of rapacious
conquest but as imperfect liberation, justifi ed by the myths of the
‘good war’ and the Cold War. The principal conveyer of these myths
is that amorphous extension of the established order known as ‘the
media’. While occasionally begging to differ on tactics and political
personalities, journalists know, almost instinctively or by training, or
both, the true nature of their tasks, especially when the established
order appears to be threatened or goes to war. Societies are to be
reported in terms of their threat or usefulness to ‘us’. Offi cial enemies
are to be identifi ed and pursued. Parallels are to be drawn with the
‘good war’ and the Cold War, while offi cial friends are to be treated
as one views one’s own government: benign, regardless of compelling
evidence to the contrary.
What has changed is the public’s perception and knowledge.
No longer trusting what they read and see and hear, people are
questioning as never before. A critical public intelligence is often
denied by journalists, who prefer notions of an ‘apathetic public’ that
justify their mantra of ‘giving the people what they want’. These days,
however, the public is well ahead of the media, refusing to accept the
limits of what academics called ‘the public discourse’. For example,
according to the polls, a majority of the British people regard their
prime minister as a liar: not one who has ‘misled parliament’ or ‘spun
the facts’, but a liar. That is unprecedented.
Most of this plain-speaking has been carried on the Internet, where
the media is frequently held to account for its part in the great issues
of the day, such as the scandal of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Forbidden questions are asked, such as this one: by amplifying the
lies of Blair and Bush, rather than exposing them, were journalists
complicit in the crime in Iraq? This has been raised many times on
a remarkable British website <www.medialens.org>. The creators and
editors of Media Lens, David Edwards and David Cromwell, have had
such infl uence in a short time that, by holding to account those who,
it is said, write history’s draft, they may well have changed the course
of modern historiography. They have certainly torn up the ‘ethical
blank cheque’, which Richard Drayton referred to, and have exposed
as morally corrupt ‘the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without
trial … ’. Without Media Lens during the attack on and occupation
of Iraq, the full gravity of that debacle might have been consigned
to oblivion, and to bad history.
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Foreword xi
They have not bothered with soft targets, such as Rupert Murdoch’s
Sun, but have concentrated on that sector of the media which prides
itself on its ‘objectivity’, ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’ (such as the BBC)
and its liberalism and fairness (such as the Guardian). Not since Noam
Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent have we had
such an incisive and erudite guide through the media’s thicket of
agendas and vested interests. Indeed, they have done the job of true
journalists: they have set the record straight.
For this reason, Guardians of Power ought to be required reading in
every media college. It is the most important book about journalism I
can remember. In the following pages, the best Media Lens ‘alerts’ are
drawn together and cast in an historical context. They are not a source
of brickbats. On the contrary, their language and tone are respectful of
journalists and unfailingly polite in their often devastating analysis.
They debate editors, current-affairs producers and media managers
and their arguments are backed by facts and research and a sense of
morality which, after a while, you realise is confi ned to their side.
As I write this, they are engaged with the BBC over the reporting
of the American attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Why, they
have asked, is there a silence over the vicious assault on Fallujah in
November 2004? This was a city already under siege, where only six
months earlier the Americans had not denied causing ‘at least’ 600
deaths. On the Internet, independent journalists, such as the brave
Dahr Jamail, a Lebanese–American, reported a pattern of American
atrocities, such as attacks on hospitals, the arrest and shooting of
staff and patients, the prevention of safe passage of medical supplies
and emergency blood. Doctors told harrowing stories of US marines
storming into homes and gunning down the elderly and children
and people with white fl ags. The BBC reported none of it.
Media Lens asked the BBC why; and why its correspondents
had not reported that the Americans had used napalm, which had
been confi rmed by Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air
Group 11. ‘We napalmed both those bridge approaches’, he said,
‘unfortunately, there were people there … It’s no great way to die’
(Alles, cited Buncombe, ‘US Admits it Used Napalm Bombs in Iraq’,
Independent on Sunday, 10 August, 2003). Together with reports about
cluster bombs, fi re bombs, poisonous gas and other evident atrocities,
this was picked up by BBC Worldwide Monitoring but not reported
even as claims.
Helen Boaden, director of BBC news, disclosed to Media Lens that
the corporation’s ‘embedded’ reporter in Iraq, Paul Wood, ‘did not
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