Media Workers Against the War

Speech at the conference “The First Casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today”, London School of Economics, November 17, 2007. Peter Wilby has a column in the Media Guardian and is a former editor of the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman.

I want to talk about the systemic failures of journalism that led to the problems of the coverage of the Iraq war, which in my view will lead to similar problems with the coverage of the Iran war – which I am sure is going to come sooner or later.

I wrote a leader in the New Statesman (Sep 30, 2002) in the week of Alastair Campbell’s notorious dossier. It came out on a Wednesday so I didn’t have very much time to read it and I didn’t at that stage know how it was going to relate to the press:

“Most people, if they are honest, will confess that the technicalities of the debate on Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities are beyond them. Tony Blair’s dossier provides little enlightenment and was never likely to, as most of the new assertions depend on intelligence that is necessarily vague. Ministers are no better equipped than the rest of us to judge whether a grainy photograph actually shows a missile site, much less whether it is a threatening one. Equally, the journalists now touring factories in Iraq wouldn’t know a phial of Sarin from a thimble of finest malt.

“A few things stand out. Saddam wants uranium (we knew that; that’s why we have sanctions), but, even if he got it, he would need a factory to make nuclear bombs. He would also need the means to deliver them and other weapons of mass destruction. The dossier’s claim that he can ‘deploy’ them within 45 minutes produces the dramatic headlines that Alastair Campbell no doubt demanded. But what does it mean? Deployed how, where, against whom? According to Scott Ritter, ex-head of the UN inspection team, the designs of ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ which the team saw up to 1998 would produce rockets ‘that would spin and cartwheel . . . go north instead of south . . . blow up’. Iraq would have to test missiles. The tests would be detectable and presumably the sites could be bombed. So where lies the argument for all-out war?”

I think that one thing I’d like to note about that, which I think stands the test of time pretty well, is that I quote Scott Ritter, and you can’t get much more authoritative than the former head of the UN inspection team. Yet Ritter was an example – there are other examples – of someone who was treated as a complete non-person by the media at the time. He was hardly ever interviewed on television or radio and was hardly ever quoted in the newspapers.

If you look back at the Daily Telegraph through the whole of 2002-2003 Scott Ritter was only ever quoted on 16 occasions. And there was nearly always an adjective in front of the name Scott Ritter – he was nearly always described as “controversial” or “irascible” and reports of his remarks were almost always followed by American claims that he was an apologist for Saddam Hussein. And many of the occasions when he was mentioned in the Daily or Sunday Telegraph it was when there were attempts to smear him as a corrupt sex maniac.

I could give a lot of examples from our own trade of journalism. John Pilger, in my view one of the most able and objective critics of the war and the media. He appears fortnightly in the New Statesman. But again he is somebody who as far as the mainstream newspapers are concerned is very much marginalised. I noticed recently that the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs gave details of the 100 most influential people on the left, including all sorts of people I’d never heard of, but at number 100 there was John Pilger, with the comment that he was still somebody who appealed to gullible young people, he had a small but visible following. This is only a man who gets hour-long documentaries on ITV that attract audiences into the millions.

As to the core of the systemic failure, the way in which what has been called the “public relations state” operates, the way in which the government tries to establish a narrative and thus control the news agenda. Of course the opposition tries to do the same. And essentially politics in this country is a competition between the government and the opposition to establish a narrative of events. Sometimes the government has the upper hand, sometimes the opposition. What is very difficult, even for a backbench MP, is for anybody outside that system to establish an alternative narrative. That’s what we saw in the case of the Iraq war. There was no serious division between government and opposition on policy.

The second problem was that there was a shortage of credible alternative sources on the facts. Intelligence is necessarily a shadowy area of nudges, winks and disinformation. Almost nothing from intelligence sources is ever said on the record, so readers can’t judge the reliability of the source. Journalists are grateful for what can be presented as secret information so they are rarely willing to treat it sceptically. Suppose you are a journalist and you are told that 1,000 terrorists are plotting to blow up railway stations. Well that’s probably going to make a splash, so the journalist isn’t going to write a second paragraph saying this is a load of hyped-up rubbish. That I think is one of the problems.

The war on terror is a perfect example of a narrative that is controlled entirely by official sources. Nobody from outside can say how it is going. Nobody can say how big the threat is or where the enemy is or anything. When Singapore fell during the Second World War, nobody could very easily deny that it had fallen. During the Cold War nobody could say that the Soviets had marched into West Germany when nobody had actually seen them do so. But when you hear of victories, defeats and threats in the war on terror they are by their nature uncheckable – except I suppose when bombs go off, but perhaps not even then. When lots of bombs were going off in Iraq we were told we were winning, because the terrorists were obviously getting very desperate!

What always gives official sources the upper hand in this war on terror is that they can tell a simple dramatic narrative: good against evil, us against them. Introducing complications into that narrative, introducing doubts, is very difficult. Maybe Saddam doesn’t have WMDs, maybe Iran just wants civil nuclear power. Maybe there are only 20 or so really serious terrorists, or maybe a thousand, and maybe they aren’t very good at what they do. But that doesn’t make good stories. “Saddam/Iran/al-Qaeda not much of a threat” – that’s not a good headline. “They might be but we’re not sure” – that’s an even worse headline.

So what can journalists do? I think there are three things.

First, instead of dismissing non-government, non-official or Iranian sources as marginal, we should be cultivating, trying to build up alternative sources of authority. Right now we should be seeking out sources who know something about how the Iranian government operates and about the relevance of nuclear technology. Almost the only detailed discussion I have read in the newspapers about how countries might go about making an operational nuclear bomb has been in the London Review of Books.

I am not appealing at all for one narrative to take priority over another. It may be true that Iran can and will become a nuclear armed power within a very short space of time and that it can credibly threaten Israel and other countries with annihilation. But I would like the alternative narrative, which does exist, to be presented and given the same airing as the official one.

Second, I would like every American or British government statement on Iraq, including the alleged Iranian arming of militias in Iraq, to be scrutinised rigorously. Where does the evidence for it come from? What is the evidence? Is it disputed and if so by whom? If somebody said that the British government was full of warmongering lunatics nobody would just accept it, people would scrutinise this statement and ask if it’s true. So why are we so willing to accept it when it’s said about another country’s government?

We’re always being told, for example, that we should read what Osama Bin Laden has written, the Iranian president’s speeches, so see what they say about destroying Israel and destroying the west and so on. Neither are ever mentioned – the Iranian president particularly – in the press without reference to their blood-curdling views. So why are we not reminded every time there is a reporting of the US administration’s stance on Iran, the preparations it is making to confront Iran, why are we not reminded of the Project for the New American Century? It sets out in black and white, in very great detail, the Neo-Cons view of their aims and how America should proceed in the future. Why are we not reminded of that every time we read about the US administration?

[Third, there is the language we use.] What does “extraordinary rendition” mean? Is it by any chance kidnapping? What are “abuses” in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo? Are they by any chance torture? Torture is nearly always used in continental newspapers, but hardly ever in British or American newspapers.

Have the British media learned anything from Iraq? I don’t think so. I’m afraid even the Guardian recently led on a story that came from unnamed US sources on the wicked things Iran was up to in Iraq. It may be true, I don’t know. But it was without a word from other sources.

If they are going to do a better job, media outlets are going to have to change the way they operate and the way they deal with sources of information.

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