NEWSPEAK in the 21st Century

David Edwards, David Cromwell

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2009
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783710690
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media Lens' mission is to correct the distorted vision of the liberal media. A thorn in the side of the Guardian, Independent, Channel 4 and the BBC, among many others, it is constantly under counterfire by those it attacks. These responses are collected in Newspeak. They expose the arrogance and servility to power of our leading journalists and editors, starring Andrew Marr, Alan Rusbridger, Roger Alton, Jon Snow, Jeremy Bowen and even George Monbiot. Packed with forensic media analysis, revealing the lethal bias in 'balanced' reporting. Even the 'best' UK media turn out to be cheerleaders for government, business and war. Alongside an A-Z of BBC propaganda and chapters on Iraq and climate change, Newspeak focuses on the demonisation of Iran and Venezuela, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the myth of impartial reporting and the dark art of smearing dissidents.

1

No Conspiracy:
Solving the Propaganda Puzzle

David Edwards: ‘Have you heard of the British historian Mark Curtis?’
Jon Snow: ‘I don’t know.’

DE: ‘He argues that there’s a pattern to post-1945 British and US interventions,

basically defending profits and installing people like the Shah in Iran...’

JS: ‘Oh this is bollocks! Total bollocks!’

DE: ‘Do you think so?’

JS: ‘Utter bollocks!’¹

THE NEED TO BELIEVE

Understanding the media is not like understanding maths or physics. We have no great urge to believe that 2 + 2 = 5. We are happy to believe that 2 + 2 = 4, if the evidence adds up. But we do like to believe that the newspaper we read is basically honest. Buying the Independent or the Guardian may give us a sense that we are involved and informed; that we care. This single act may be the only gesture we make towards democratic responsibility – we can even view it as a kind of vestigial activism. On a more mundane level, we may be proud that we are brainy enough to take the ‘high-brow’ Times (and do the crossword), and sneer at lesser minds that wallow in the Mail or ogle at the Sun. We want to believe these media when they tell us that Britain and America are attacking other countries out of humanitarian concern. We want to believe that the people in control are decent and rational. The alternative is disturbing, frightening; it can give rise to painful feelings of powerlessness. Above all, it can lead us to question whether we should assume moral responsibility for the state of our country and world – a burden many of us would rather avoid.

In December 2008, the Times leader writer, Oliver Kamm, described Media Lens as ‘a sinister and ridiculous organisation’.² On the face of it, the claim that we are ‘ridiculous’ would certainly appear to have merit. Since sending our first media alert on July 9, 2001, we have published more than 2,500 pages of material – just under 1 million words. If the media were as honest as we are led to believe, this level of criticism could only be the result of some exotic, shared neurosis. But if we have learned one lesson in the last eight years, it is that there is very much more to the corporate media than meets the eye. The ‘free press’, truly, is not what it seems.

To understand why the appearance is so different from the reality, we need to understand how the public is deceived. Specifically, we need to understand how our hopes and fears are manipulated in the cause of our own deception. Consider, for example, our vulnerability to small gestures in the direction of truth. The journalist Jonathan Cook addressed the point in a fascinating reply to one of our media alerts in October 2008. Cook, who previously worked for the Guardian and the Observer, agreed with us that honest voices are systematically filtered out of the mainstream. But he posed a crucial challenge: ‘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?’³ In answering his own question, Cook noted the remarkable fact that this small group pretty much exhausts the list of writers who can be said to seriously confront the mainstream consensus: ‘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’; and in truth, even Pilger is heavily constrained in what he can write about the mainstream in the mainstream (as are we). It is also crucial, 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.

Cook examined the case of Fisk in more detail:

All the evidence is that the Independent might have folded were it not for his inclusion in the news and comment pages. Fisk appears to be one of the main reasons people buy the Independent. When, for example, the editors realised that most of the hits on the paper’s website were for Fisk’s articles, they made his pieces accessible only by paying a subscription fee. In response people simply stopped visiting the site, forcing the Independent to restore free access to his stories.

It is also probable that the other writers cited above are among the chief reasons readers choose the publications that host them. It is at least possible that, were more such writers allowed on their pages, these papers would grow in popularity. We are never likely to see the hypothesis tested because the so-called leftwing media appear to be in no hurry to take on more dissenting voices.

There is a deep irony here: the public is eager to read the honest and courageous work of writers like Fisk, Monbiot and Pilger. But it is precisely because their work is so valued that we perceive the media as more open, free and inclusive than it really is. Focused on this tiny dissident group, we fail to notice the ocean of distortion and distraction that surrounds them and by which they, and we, are overwhelmed. Fisk and Pilger are tiny specks of light, all but invisible to the public in the intellectual murk that is 24/7 media output.

So this is one of the big lessons we have learned about the media: first impressions cannot be trusted.

FACTS ARE NOT SACRED

We have also learned that the media’s famed obsession with ‘balance’ is in fact a powerful support for biased reporting. Guardian journalist Nick Davies offered a rare honest analysis in his book Flat Earth News:

The great blockbuster myth of modern journalism is objectivity, the idea that a good newspaper or broadcaster simply collects and reproduces the objective truth. It is a classic Flat Earth tale, widely believed and devoid of reality. It has never happened and never will happen because it cannot happen. Reality exists objectively, but any attempt to record the truth about it always and everywhere necessarily involves selection.⁴

Thus, former Guardian editor C.P. Scott’s famous dictum, ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’,⁵ is as naïve as it is misleading. Facts are not sacred, pristine, untouchable – they are gathered by human beings guided by mundane, earthy, often compromised beliefs and motives. To choose ‘this’ fact over ‘that’ fact is already to express an opinion. To highlight ‘this’ fact over ‘that’ fact is to comment.

The great claim of professional journalistic impartiality – the idea that ‘When I joined the BBC, my Organs of Opinion were formally removed’,⁶ as the BBC’s then political editor, Andrew Marr, put it – is a lie. It serves to camouflage a deep bias that consistently mistakes ‘impartial’ for ‘officially approved’. If the Iranian president makes a claim, media ‘impartiality’ demands that his claim be balanced by an opposing view. But if the American president makes a claim, no such balance is deemed necessary. Time and again, we are given just the Bush, Blair, Brown, Obama view. The unwritten understanding is that news reporters should not express bias by passing judgement on our democratically elected leaders. Doing so is deemed almost a subversion of democracy – news reporting should offer the public a neutral service. And yet, when the same reporters praise our leaders to the skies, it is considered entirely unproblematic. In practice, ‘balance’ tends to involve presenting a ‘spectrum’ of views ranging from those heavily supportive of state policy to those mildly critical. Strongly critical views are dismissed as too ‘extreme’ to be included.

The myth of balance is used to justify the imposition of an ‘editorial line’ requiring journalists to conform to this structural bias favouring power. After all, as an alternative to editors imposing their version of ‘balance’, journalists might simply be allowed to present the version of events that strikes them as most rational and honest. And this is exactly what the best journalists do – it is why people love the journalism of Pilger and Fisk. Readers and viewers could then be invited to vote with their feet.

For example, the media present domestic elections as serious exercises in democracy offering a meaningful range of political choices. But there is nothing intrinsically ‘professional’ or ‘balanced’ about presenting such a view as being obviously true. It is not ‘impartial’ to present opinions offered by the leading two or three political parties as the only views that matter. If a journalist’s intelligence tells him or her that extremely important opinions are not being represented by the big parties, he or she should be allowed to say so. Rational thought should not be subordinated to the idea that we have a properly functioning democracy when that is clearly not the case. The three-time US presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, describes the American political system as ‘a two-party dictatorship in thraldom to giant corporations’.⁷ An alternative at election time would be for journalists to present evidence indicating that ‘democracy’ is a charade serving privilege and power. This would be not a subversion but a defence of democracy.

If we accept that it is ‘balanced’ and ‘professional’ for a journalist to fail to respond as a thinking, rational human being, we are deferring to a mindless and very dangerous conformity.

LORDLUVADUCK! VULLIAMY GRASSES UP ALTON

If consistent distortions are found right across the supposed ‘media spectrum’, how can they appear with such consistency? Could it all be, in fact, the result of some kind of conspiracy? Consider, after all, the events that took place in the Observer newsroom in 2002. In the autumn of that year, Ed Vulliamy, one of the newspaper’s leading reporters, was talking with Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA analyst. Although Goodman had left the agency, he retained his high security clearance and remained in communication with senior former colleagues. He told Vulliamy that, in contradiction to everything the British and American governments had claimed, the CIA were reporting that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. And Goodman was willing to go on the record as a named source.

This was an incredibly important scoop at a time when the British and US governments were doing everything they could to persuade the public of the need for war. And yet the Observer refused to publish the story. Over the next four months, Vulliamy submitted seven versions of his article for publication – his editors rejected every one of them.

Other people paid the price. In March 2003, eleven days after Vulliamy’s story was rejected for the seventh time, the first bombs fell on Baghdad. In January 2003, the Observer’s then editor, Roger Alton, had told his staff: ‘We’ve got to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans.’⁸ Three years later, the Evening Standard reported that Alton had been on ‘something of a lads’ holiday’ in the Alps. His companions included Jonathan Powell, ‘Tony Blair’s most trusted aide’, as well as staunch Blairite MP and propagandist Denis MacShane.⁹

In February 2008 we wrote to Vulliamy, and asked him: ‘Did you try to publish the pieces elsewhere? Why did you not resign in protest at these obvious acts of censorship on such a crucial matter?’¹⁰ We received a series of anguished replies to the effect that Vulliamy had not tried to publish the article elsewhere; that he had been naïve, complacent, fearful of harming his career (he asked us not to publish these emails). But we received nothing that explained why he had failed to get such an important story out somewhere, somehow. We also repeatedly asked him to describe the reasons the Observer had given for rejecting his story so many times, but he failed to answer and then stopped replying altogether.

We also wrote to Roger Alton, on April 21, 2008. We asked why seven versions of Ed Vulliamy’s story were rejected over a period of four months. Alton replied on April 25:

... so it was my old pal Ed who grassed me up eh?? Lordluvaduck, what a surprise ... like Falstaff and Prince Hal eh??

Now, I don’t know anything about this tale...while I think an editor should read, or try to read, all the 250,000-odd words that go into an edition of the Observer, I would not expect them to read all the several million words that are submitted eaxh [si c] week ... as I understand it, this story was not used by the desk, on journalistic grounds, and indeed this was a decision taken by a very anti-war executive...

There was an article setting all this out in a recent edition of Press Gazette, which I am sure you can easily find...

How remarkable that Alton could be so unaware of the Mel Goodman ‘tale’. When we checked, we found nothing in Press Gazette, a t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 No Conspiracy: Solving the Propaganda Puzzle
• 2 BBC Balance: The Magnificent Fiction
• 3 Back-to-Back Bias: An A–Z of BBC Propaganda
• 4 Climate Chaos: Keeping Madness Mainstream
• 5 Plan A/Plan B: The Downing Street Memo
• 6 Mind Your Methodology: Killing the 2004 Lancet Report
• 7 One Million Dead and Counting: The 2006 Lancet Report and Beyond
• 8 Bitter Harvest: Bombings in Britain, Spain and Iraq
• 9 Israel and Palestine: An Eye for an Eyelash
• 10 Real Men Go To Tehran: Targeting Iran
• 11 Iran in Iraq
• 12 Venezuela: Dousing the ‘Firebrand’
• 13 Liberal Press Gang: Behind the Scenes at the Independent and the Guardian
• 14 Brilliant Fools: Snarls, Smears and the Dark Art of Willy-Waving
• 15 Compassion, Awareness and Honest Journalism
• Notes
• Index