State-private power keeps the media in line with a constant stream of flak. This is used to intimidate 'rogue' journalists and editors, and to keep everyone else's heads down. The most notorious example of recent times was, of course, the government campaign against the BBC over the Iraq war. The power to intimidate is naturally intense when the government appoints the BBC's senior managers and governors.
Yesterday's Guardian online reported:
"Mark Byford, the BBC's deputy director general, angrily rejected a claim by John Prescott that the BBC was 'only telling one side of the story' about Iraq."
The remarks were in a letter of response to a complaint by deputy prime minister John Prescott claiming that "five BBC news programmes or channels had this week refused to interview the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which backed the government's decision to go to war in Iraq".
Also yesterday, the Guardian's Matthew Tempest published an online article describing how Iraqi deputy prime minister Barham Salih, previously PUK leader, had "rallied to the defence of Tony Blair today and hailed his courage in liberating the country from Saddam Hussein's 'evil tyranny'".
I wrote to Tempest:
Dear Matthew
Hope you're well. Barham Salih said of the oil-for-food programme:
"The oil-for-food programme is a good programme; it must continue. It is the
best thing that has happened to Iraq since the foundation of the Iraqi
state. By the way, not only for the Kurdish areas but also for the rest of
Iraq, because we never had it so good - all Iraqis not just Kurds."
(Interviewed in The Mother of all Ironies, by John Sweeney, Correspondent,
BBC2, June 23, 2002)
You will recall that the UN diplomat who set up oil-for-food, Denis
Halliday, described the consequences of the programme as "genocidal" for the people of Iraq.
A British-trained civil engineer, Salih was previously Kurdistan's regional
representative to Washington, and is said to be "close" to both the State
Department and the Pentagon.
You mention Salih as an example, merely, of how Labour has "countered
opposition to the war with the views of native Iraqis". Why did you not
discuss his links with US-UK interests and his history as a propagandist for
US-UK crimes?
Best wishes
David Edwards
This little episode gives an insight into how the world works. Our government selects and promotes propagandists for their point of view. The attempt to deceive the public is able to succeed only because the media fail to tell us about the grubby realpolitik going on behind the scenes. A major cause of the failure is that state-dependent and/or corporate media are powerful businesses that are supremely vulnerable to backlashes from other powerful groups.
The bottom line: if you're part of an organisation whose raison d'etre is to maximise profits that depend on the support of other powerful businesses and governments, then you are going to find it very hard to tell the truth. The media appear to have great power, but in fact they have a powerless-power. Come again?! Norman Mailer explains:
“The reporter hangs in a powerless-power... the more readers he owns, the less he can say. He is forbdden by a hundred censors, most of them inside himself, to communicate notions that are not conformistically simple, simple like plastic is simple, that is to say, monotonous. Therefore a reporter forms a habit equivalent to lacerating the flesh: He learns to write what he does not naturally believe. Since he did not start, presumably, with the desire to be a bad writer or a dishonest writer, he ends by bludgeoning his brain into believing that something which is half true is in fact nine-tenths true. A psyche is debauched - his own; a false fact is created. For which fact, sooner or later, inevitably, inexorably, the public will pay. A nation that forms detailed opinions on the basis of detailed fact which is askew from the subtle reality becomes a nation of citizens whose psyches are skewed, item by detailed item, away from any reality.
So great guilt clings to reporters. They know they help to keep America slightly insane." (Mailer, 10,000 Words A Minute, The Time of Our Time, Little Brown, 1998, p.459)
Friday, 29 April 2005
Thursday, 21 April 2005
Peace and democracy - Bush-Blair-style
In today's NYT (March 21), Larry Pressler writes:
"ONE big story from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's trip to South Asia was that once again Washington's policymakers are trying to send F-16 jet fighters to Pakistan. This is like a broken record - the argument has come up repeatedly since 1990, when an amendment I wrote quashed a deal involving 28 of the planes - but unfortunately this time the sale may well happen.
"Pakistan is a declared ally in the fight against terrorism, and thus we give it huge amounts of military aid. But F-16's have nothing to do with fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban. So what is really going on here?" (Pressler, 'Dissing democracy in Asia,' The New York Times, March 21, 2005)
Pressler continues:
"Pakistan... is a corrupt, absolute dictatorship. It has a horrendous record on human rights and religious tolerance, and it has been found again and again to be selling nuclear materials to our worst enemies. It claims to be helping us to fight terrorism, although many intelligence experts have suggested that most of our money actually goes to strengthening the rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf."
According to Pressler, the US should be supporting India instead. No need! In September 2003, it was reported that 66 BAE Systems Hawk jets were being sold to India in a £1 billion package. The Hawks were to be used to train Indian pilots to fly more powerful jets, including Jaguar bombers, also made by BAE Systems, which the Ministry of Defence has accepted can be adapted to deliver nuclear weapons. Some 126 of these nuclear-capable bombers were reported as being built under licence.
Any other ethical problems here?
Over the past 17 years, India and Pakistan have fought a simmering low-intensity war at a cost of some 60,000 lives. In December 2001, terrorists stormed India's parliament building in New Delhi, killing several people. India held Pakistan responsible, mobilised thousands of troops and came close to declaring war in June 2002. Sources in the Foreign Office have declared Kashmir their "number one concern" due to fears that the two countries could slip into uncontrolled conflict and nuclear war.
"ONE big story from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's trip to South Asia was that once again Washington's policymakers are trying to send F-16 jet fighters to Pakistan. This is like a broken record - the argument has come up repeatedly since 1990, when an amendment I wrote quashed a deal involving 28 of the planes - but unfortunately this time the sale may well happen.
"Pakistan is a declared ally in the fight against terrorism, and thus we give it huge amounts of military aid. But F-16's have nothing to do with fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban. So what is really going on here?" (Pressler, 'Dissing democracy in Asia,' The New York Times, March 21, 2005)
Pressler continues:
"Pakistan... is a corrupt, absolute dictatorship. It has a horrendous record on human rights and religious tolerance, and it has been found again and again to be selling nuclear materials to our worst enemies. It claims to be helping us to fight terrorism, although many intelligence experts have suggested that most of our money actually goes to strengthening the rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf."
According to Pressler, the US should be supporting India instead. No need! In September 2003, it was reported that 66 BAE Systems Hawk jets were being sold to India in a £1 billion package. The Hawks were to be used to train Indian pilots to fly more powerful jets, including Jaguar bombers, also made by BAE Systems, which the Ministry of Defence has accepted can be adapted to deliver nuclear weapons. Some 126 of these nuclear-capable bombers were reported as being built under licence.
Any other ethical problems here?
Over the past 17 years, India and Pakistan have fought a simmering low-intensity war at a cost of some 60,000 lives. In December 2001, terrorists stormed India's parliament building in New Delhi, killing several people. India held Pakistan responsible, mobilised thousands of troops and came close to declaring war in June 2002. Sources in the Foreign Office have declared Kashmir their "number one concern" due to fears that the two countries could slip into uncontrolled conflict and nuclear war.
Monday, 11 April 2005
Using and abusing evidence
Dear Davids,
The Lancet report which claimed that 100,000+ people have been killed in Iraq since the US/UK invasion should have been discussed at length in the mainstream press, and it's a scandal that it was so quickly shot down by the flak machine. Having said which, it may be wrong. It may have underestimated the true figure, or it may have overestimated it. Of late Medialens seems to have enshrined a complex statistical argument with a set of possibly incorrect assumptions and a fair margin of error as if it were the simple truth of the matter. I can't help suspecting that if the Lancet had published an article claiming that only 2,000 people had died as a result of Western aggression, then you would have gone looking for another article with a higher mortality figure. And if some other respectable journal publishes an article which claims that 200,000 people have died, then I imagine you will quietly forget the Lancet figure, despite your published admiration for the rigorous methodology of the Lancet authors.
Of course it's important that people be made aware that the level of carnage in Iraq may be far higher than the goverment is claiming, and of course it's important that the government be held to account for its crimes. But it's also important that Medialens doesn't get a reputation for following statistics just because they happen to suit its arguments; that way your authority will be weakened and your political stance damaged. So next time you talk about the 100,000+ dead, could you remember to refer to the Lancet and make it clear that you know that even top academic journals sometimes get it wrong?
Best,
Name Withheld
Thanks. If you check through the 1,200 pages of Media Alerts we've
published so far, I think you'll find that we are careful to use only
credible sources and facts - we do not make claims that cannot be
substantiated by serious evidence. That is not to say that everything we
write is incontrovertible Truth, either, obviously.
The Lancet report is not just another report among many. It is the +only+
credible scientific study of post-war mortality in Iraq. Moreover, it is a
meticulously researched report by one of the top organisations in the field
published in one of the world's most prestigious science journals. The
Lancet editor's claim was highly reasonable when he argued on Newsnight:
"The most likely estimate of excess deaths is 98,000. It's +not+ right to
say that it's equally likely it could be between 8,000 and 194,000. The most
likely figure is 98,000, and as soon as you go away from that figure, either
lower or higher, it's much less likely it will be much lower or higher."
(Richard Horton, BBC2, Newsnight, November 2, 2004)
Professor Richard Garfield, the lead author of the report, told us:
"The true death toll is far more likely to be on the high-side of our point
estimate [98,000] than on the low side." (Email sent to Media Lens reader,
October 31, 2004)
These are very credible people making very credible claims. No one can be
certain of the exact figure - science is not about certainty - but we feel
it is quite reasonable for us to assert, as the authors do, that 100,000
Iraqis have died, most of them civilians. If these authors, or some equally
credible researchers, were to conduct further research and give different
figures, we would certainly reflect these new facts in what we wrote.
It's worth bearing in mind that dissidents challenging the status quo are
expected to meet +far+ more exacting standards of evidence, accuracy and
rationality than mainstream writers. We would be torn to shreds if we tried
to play fast and loose with the facts in the way you are suggesting. The
best defence for people serious about challanging mainstream killing and
exploitation is to be as honest as possible and as rational as possible.
We've always understood that. We are only human, to be sure, but we try to
keep that constantly in mind.
Best wishes
David Edwards
The Lancet report which claimed that 100,000+ people have been killed in Iraq since the US/UK invasion should have been discussed at length in the mainstream press, and it's a scandal that it was so quickly shot down by the flak machine. Having said which, it may be wrong. It may have underestimated the true figure, or it may have overestimated it. Of late Medialens seems to have enshrined a complex statistical argument with a set of possibly incorrect assumptions and a fair margin of error as if it were the simple truth of the matter. I can't help suspecting that if the Lancet had published an article claiming that only 2,000 people had died as a result of Western aggression, then you would have gone looking for another article with a higher mortality figure. And if some other respectable journal publishes an article which claims that 200,000 people have died, then I imagine you will quietly forget the Lancet figure, despite your published admiration for the rigorous methodology of the Lancet authors.
Of course it's important that people be made aware that the level of carnage in Iraq may be far higher than the goverment is claiming, and of course it's important that the government be held to account for its crimes. But it's also important that Medialens doesn't get a reputation for following statistics just because they happen to suit its arguments; that way your authority will be weakened and your political stance damaged. So next time you talk about the 100,000+ dead, could you remember to refer to the Lancet and make it clear that you know that even top academic journals sometimes get it wrong?
Best,
Name Withheld
Thanks. If you check through the 1,200 pages of Media Alerts we've
published so far, I think you'll find that we are careful to use only
credible sources and facts - we do not make claims that cannot be
substantiated by serious evidence. That is not to say that everything we
write is incontrovertible Truth, either, obviously.
The Lancet report is not just another report among many. It is the +only+
credible scientific study of post-war mortality in Iraq. Moreover, it is a
meticulously researched report by one of the top organisations in the field
published in one of the world's most prestigious science journals. The
Lancet editor's claim was highly reasonable when he argued on Newsnight:
"The most likely estimate of excess deaths is 98,000. It's +not+ right to
say that it's equally likely it could be between 8,000 and 194,000. The most
likely figure is 98,000, and as soon as you go away from that figure, either
lower or higher, it's much less likely it will be much lower or higher."
(Richard Horton, BBC2, Newsnight, November 2, 2004)
Professor Richard Garfield, the lead author of the report, told us:
"The true death toll is far more likely to be on the high-side of our point
estimate [98,000] than on the low side." (Email sent to Media Lens reader,
October 31, 2004)
These are very credible people making very credible claims. No one can be
certain of the exact figure - science is not about certainty - but we feel
it is quite reasonable for us to assert, as the authors do, that 100,000
Iraqis have died, most of them civilians. If these authors, or some equally
credible researchers, were to conduct further research and give different
figures, we would certainly reflect these new facts in what we wrote.
It's worth bearing in mind that dissidents challenging the status quo are
expected to meet +far+ more exacting standards of evidence, accuracy and
rationality than mainstream writers. We would be torn to shreds if we tried
to play fast and loose with the facts in the way you are suggesting. The
best defence for people serious about challanging mainstream killing and
exploitation is to be as honest as possible and as rational as possible.
We've always understood that. We are only human, to be sure, but we try to
keep that constantly in mind.
Best wishes
David Edwards
Sunday, 3 April 2005
Semi-human dissent
Dissident politics is quite often the preoccupation of people – often young and raging – caught up in the illusion of the permanence and certainty of their lives. They see everything that’s happening, every argument, as of supreme importance: Bush and co are absolutely the worst bad guys ever, the cause of all problems. Other people are the absolute victims, absolute heroes. If only the bad guys could be stopped everything would be okay. But it wouldn't. W.B. Yeats explained:
"Man is in love and loves what vanishes."
It’s a kind of religious fervour (a march towards the promised land) rooted in an ignorance about the extent to which their own lives are, or shortly will be immersed in loss, transience, impermanence and grief. ‘The government said this and that’, and then they’ve lost their loved ones, are all alone, are immersed in the reality of their own personal suffering.
Dissent has nothing to say about this reality – it’s all ‘out there, out there’. To think about ‘in here’ is bourgeois, self-indulgent... I don’t know what.
This is a kind of semi-human dissent – fiercely energetic, angry, intelligent, but shorn of so many concerns and emotions that are key to human life. Actually, it’s deeply immature and naïve – it’s the naivety of unconquerable youth.
"Man is in love and loves what vanishes."
It’s a kind of religious fervour (a march towards the promised land) rooted in an ignorance about the extent to which their own lives are, or shortly will be immersed in loss, transience, impermanence and grief. ‘The government said this and that’, and then they’ve lost their loved ones, are all alone, are immersed in the reality of their own personal suffering.
Dissent has nothing to say about this reality – it’s all ‘out there, out there’. To think about ‘in here’ is bourgeois, self-indulgent... I don’t know what.
This is a kind of semi-human dissent – fiercely energetic, angry, intelligent, but shorn of so many concerns and emotions that are key to human life. Actually, it’s deeply immature and naïve – it’s the naivety of unconquerable youth.
Channel 4 Self-Kidology
Alex Thomson of Channel 4 writes to a reader: "your definition of a terrorist as one bringing terror is nonsensical as it would encompass all military outfits from al Qaeda to the Royal Fusilliers" (Feb 25, 2005). So an argument is nonsensical if it means suggesting the Royal Fusilliers are guilty of terrorism - interesting logic. In a letter to Arthur 'Bomber' Harris in 1945, Churchill wrote:
"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." (Blitz, Bombing and Total War, Channel 4, January 15, 2005)
Clearly the RAF was involved in terrorism, according to Churchill - although his argument is nonsensical, according to Thomson, because it means lumping the RAF in with al Qaeda.
Thomson also writes:
"not everybody agrees that the Spetember 11th attack was a heinous crime, or indeed a crime at all. I should have thought recognising that fact - however distasteful it might seem - is central to this deabte".
Quite right. Equally, the related idea that the US state is currently by far the greatest source of global terrorism should also be central to the debate on Channel 4. Well is it? Thomson insists "of course [he's] suggesting that" Channel 4 would pass an impartiality test. So by his own standards, Channel 4 has to pass the test of including this argument as central to the debate. Clearly it isn't - I've never heard it so much as mentioned - so clearly he's deceiving himself.
It's quite clear that Channel 4 treats US and UK politicians as fundamentally respectable, credible, law abiding and reasonable. It treats Blair as the prime minister rather than the prime suspect in major war crimes, for example. There's been minimal emphasis on the obviously illlegal nature of the war, on the cynical motives, on the US-UK history of pursuing the same motives with similar results around the world, on the need to impeach Blair, and virtually zero input from the genuine dissident opposition to mainstream deception - Chomsky, Pilger, Herman, Curtis, Fisk, Klein et al. There hasn't even been an analysis of the catastrophic level of pre-war media deceptiveness. It couldn't be more obvious, but I wouldn't for one moment expect Thomson to be able to see it. Upton Sinclair explained:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
"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." (Blitz, Bombing and Total War, Channel 4, January 15, 2005)
Clearly the RAF was involved in terrorism, according to Churchill - although his argument is nonsensical, according to Thomson, because it means lumping the RAF in with al Qaeda.
Thomson also writes:
"not everybody agrees that the Spetember 11th attack was a heinous crime, or indeed a crime at all. I should have thought recognising that fact - however distasteful it might seem - is central to this deabte".
Quite right. Equally, the related idea that the US state is currently by far the greatest source of global terrorism should also be central to the debate on Channel 4. Well is it? Thomson insists "of course [he's] suggesting that" Channel 4 would pass an impartiality test. So by his own standards, Channel 4 has to pass the test of including this argument as central to the debate. Clearly it isn't - I've never heard it so much as mentioned - so clearly he's deceiving himself.
It's quite clear that Channel 4 treats US and UK politicians as fundamentally respectable, credible, law abiding and reasonable. It treats Blair as the prime minister rather than the prime suspect in major war crimes, for example. There's been minimal emphasis on the obviously illlegal nature of the war, on the cynical motives, on the US-UK history of pursuing the same motives with similar results around the world, on the need to impeach Blair, and virtually zero input from the genuine dissident opposition to mainstream deception - Chomsky, Pilger, Herman, Curtis, Fisk, Klein et al. There hasn't even been an analysis of the catastrophic level of pre-war media deceptiveness. It couldn't be more obvious, but I wouldn't for one moment expect Thomson to be able to see it. Upton Sinclair explained:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Friday, 1 April 2005
Puppet Government - Puppet Press
In today's Guardian:
“Both the Syrian regime and its puppet government in Beirut have been under pressure since the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri a fortnight ago.” (Protests force out Lebanese government,' Ewen MacAskill, Carolynne Wheeler in Beirut and Conal Urquhart,' The Guardian, March 1, 2005)
Puppet government! Don't recall reading that term much in relation to Iraq. And yet Ed Pilkington, foreign editor of the Guardian, told Media Lens, “We are not in the business of editorialising our news reports." (Email to Media Lens, November 15, 2002)
A quick check of the Guardian website shows that no Guardian/Observer news report has described the Iraqi interim government as a "puppet government" in 2003 or 2004. Why? Well obviously because they don't editorialise their news reports. :o)
“Both the Syrian regime and its puppet government in Beirut have been under pressure since the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri a fortnight ago.” (Protests force out Lebanese government,' Ewen MacAskill, Carolynne Wheeler in Beirut and Conal Urquhart,' The Guardian, March 1, 2005)
Puppet government! Don't recall reading that term much in relation to Iraq. And yet Ed Pilkington, foreign editor of the Guardian, told Media Lens, “We are not in the business of editorialising our news reports." (Email to Media Lens, November 15, 2002)
A quick check of the Guardian website shows that no Guardian/Observer news report has described the Iraqi interim government as a "puppet government" in 2003 or 2004. Why? Well obviously because they don't editorialise their news reports. :o)
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