Meeting report: MWAW in Scotland
Last weekend saw the launch in Glasgow of a Scottish branch of Media Workers Against the War, which has already been successfully campaigning in London for better media coverage of the war on terror.
We are journalists, media staff, academics and campaigners who are concerned that sections of the media seem not to have learned lessons from the Iraq conflict, and are making the same mistakes in coverage of war policy towards Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea.
We now have dozens of members in Scotland and want to continue the momentum with a series of briefings, campaigns and protests to draw attention to media bias, flawed reporting and the failure of journalists adequately to challenge and question government and military statements on the various conflicts into which we are being drawn.
At the meeting in Glasgow, Professor John Eldridge of Glasgow Media Unit talked about the modern history of media war coverage, its errors and omissions. One particularly revealing statistic he gave was that only 9 per cent of people in a recent survey were aware that the Israelis were the occupiers of the occupied territories; John called this a classic example of the “social construction of ignorance”.
Dave Crouch from MWAW in London talked about the need for political action in the media, arguing that this neither compromised journalists’ integrity nor undermined their professionalism. He reported that NUJ conference a week earlier saw 30 delegates attend a MWAW fringe meeting; there was strong support at the conference for action to call the media to account on war coverage.
After the meeting we met Craig Murray, the British former ambassador to Uzbekistan who is now rector of Dundee University. Murray was sacked for opposing extraordinary rendition, where suspects are brought to foreign countries to be tortured to extract intelligence for use in the war on terror. He agreed to address the next meeting of MWAW Scotland and to speak about his experiences with the media and the recent detention of British naval personnel by Iran.
We need your support! Any help you can give with venues, speakers, leaflets and flyers, and contacts with journalists and politicians who might support us, will be greatly appreciated. If anyone knows of MSPs (elections nothwithstanding) MEPs and MPs who are interested in media issues, please let me know. In addition, authors, writers and broadcasters who support a fairer media are essential for our campaign.
Bruce Whitehead, brucek3@aol.com
