A Powerless-Power

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)