We extend our deepest sympathies to Rupert’s wife and children, to his colleagues at the Sunday Mirror, and we wish Phil a speedy and full recovery.

Rupert’s death reveals the risks faced by journalists trying to cover this war. Eight years into the US/UK-led occupation of Afghanistan, the country is becoming ever more dangerous for the media. It is thanks to journalists like Rupert that the British public has a picture of the disaster unfolding in that country.

We are sad, but we are also angry.

The Nato occupation of Afghanistan is propping up a deeply corrupt, bloody and unpopular regime in Kabul. British support for US imperial ambitions in Asia requires that a price be paid by soldiers, by journalists and by the civilian
populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

That price is too high.

We will continue to do everything possible to campaign to bring the troops home.

Media Workers Against the War
info@mwaw.net
tel 07801 789 297 ]]> http://mwaw.net/blog/2010/01/11/death-of-rupert-hamer-in-afghanistan/feed/ 0 http://mwaw.net/blog/2009/07/06/goodwar/ http://mwaw.net/blog/2009/07/06/goodwar/#comments Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:37:34 +0000 MWAW http://www.mwaw.net/2009/07/06/goodwar/ Public meeting

With speakers:

Stephen Grey, investigative journalist embedded with British troops in Helmand and author: “Operation Snakebite: The Explosive True Story of an Afghan Desert Siege“, and “Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program”

Guy Smallman, photojournalist, recently returned from Afghanistan

Seumas Milne, columnist, the Guardian

And others

Monday July 13, 7pm

Friends Meeting House (small hall)

173 Euston Road, NW1 2BJ, opposite Euston station

Map: http://tinyurl.com/p33vhf

All welcome!

Hosted by Media Workers Against the War / Stop the War Coalition

www.mwaw.net / www.stopwar.org.uk

Speakers appear in a personal capacity

For more information and flyers: tel 0207 801 2768

The BBC Trust’s preposterous attack on Jeremy Bowen last week is a crude attempt to push back the wave of protest inside the BBC over the DEC appeal decision. If Bowen is slapped down, they calculate that no other BBC journalist will dare to speak out.

The Trust’s report itself has been massively spun by the right-wing press – in no way is it a demolition of Bowen’s journalism, let alone proof that he is in any way biased against Israel.

We call on all our supporters to urgently:

• Scan the report summary (pages 4-15)
• Read Robert Fisk’s superb comment on the report
• Note the research showing BBC bias IN FAVOUR of Israel

• Email Jeremy Bowen with your support: jeremy.bowen@bbc.co.uk

• Copy your emails to the BBC Trust: trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk

Led by a panel of establishment figures chaired by Sir Quentin Thomas, it took evidence from all sides, including Greg Philo’s detailed research “Bad News from Israel” and a quantitative study by the Communications Research Centre at Loughborough University.

It also saw the top secret Balen Report – an unpublished internal report prepared for BBC management by its senior editorial adviser on the Middle East, Malcolm Balen, in 2003 – about which there has recently been speculation that it showed anti-Israel bias at the BBC.

Entitled “Report of the independent panel for the BBC governors on impartiality of BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict“, the review was widely seen as confirmation that the BBC is biased towards Israel. The headline in the Times, for example, on the day after the report was published, read: “BBC news ‘favours Israel’ at expense of Palestinian view“.

The report itself concluded: “One important feature of [the BBC's problems telling a complicated story] is the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation. Although this asymmetry does not necessarily bear on the relative merits of the two sides, it is so marked and important that coverage should succeed in this if in nothing else.”

It continued: “We recommend the BBC should make purposive, and not merely reactive, efforts to explain the complexities of the conflict in the round, including the marked disparity between the positions of the two sides, and to overcome the high level of incomprehension among the audience.”

Page 22 of the report states:

“Among the findings from the quantitative content analysis which the researchers judge to be most important for the Panel are these: …

that a disparity (in favour of Israelis) [brackets in original, ed.] existed in BBC coverage taken as a whole in the amount of talk time given to non-party political Israelis and Palestinians;

that a disparity (in favour of Israelis) existed in BBC coverage taken as a whole in the amount of talk time given to Israelis and Palestinians;

that there was a broad parity in BBC coverage taken as a whole in terms of the appearance of Israeli and Palestinian party political actors;

that a disparity (in favour of Israelis) existed in BBC coverage taken as a whole in terms of the appearance of non-party political Israeli and Palestinian actors;

that a disparity (in favour of Israelis) existed in BBC coverage taken as a whole in terms of the appearance of Israeli and Palestinian actors”.

At least three BBC NUJ workplace branches have passed motions calling on the BBC to transmit the Gaza aid appeal. A petition is circulating within the corporation which concludes: “The victims of Gaza deserve the aid appeal like any other victims of humanitarian crises. The conflict they are caught in is as controversial as any other armed conflict in the world and singling them out is what harms the BBC’s reputation of impartiality.”

The latest issue of Ariel, the BBC’s internal staff magazine, carries 10 letters on the BBC’s refusal to air the Gaza appeal – all are critical of the decision.

Here is a selection posted on the Media Lens message board:

1. The director general’s comments defending the BBC’s decision not to broadcast the DEC appeal appeared timid and unconvincing.

The main reason given is that he doesn’t want to compromise our reporting impartiality, because the issue of aid to Gaza is controversial. The flaw in this argument is that we are allowing the combatants (or their allies) – in this case Israel – to define whether or not an appeal for aid is legitimate. It is a curious logic to argue that we are defending the principle of impartiality by caving in to Israeli pressure.

There is a smell of fear about this decision – fear of controversy, fear of criticism, fear of repercussions. Perhaps this is the true fallout from the Hutton report, Queengate and Jonathan Ross; an organisation so mired in fear that it finds itself able to sacrifice aid to the victims of war for a principle that nobody (outside the BBC higher echelons) seems to believe was at stake.

Staff member, London factual

2. For the first time in my career I am ashamed to work for the BBC. The Disasters Emergency Committee – made up of the 12 biggest aid charities including the British Red Cross and Save the Children – has asked for help in raising money for the people in Gaza. Even the government has pledged money. The head of the UN says the situation in Gaza is ‘outrageous’. People are dying because of a lack of food, medicine and basic sanitation. The BBC has decided not to broadcast the appeal because it believes impartiality would be at risk. I believe the message the BBC is sending out is clear. And it is not impartial.

Staff member, BBC London

3. Whatever the politics of the situation it is obvious that Gaza is in the middle of a massive humanitarian crisis, people are suffering and need help. The BBC’s own coverage of flattened homes and parents mourning lost children amid the rubble clearly demonstrates that. The decision not to broadcast the appeal opens the BBC up to justified accusations of bias towards Israel and implies that the people of Gaza only have themselves to blame for what happened.

Staff member, News interactive, Plymouth

4. The BBC points to question marks over how the funding would be delivered, but that hasn’t stopped us running other DEC appeals where the distribution of funds is far from straightforward – Goma for example. And anyway, surely the mechanics of the appeal aren’t our problem. We’ve run appeals for victims of conflict before, so why not these people? We don’t need to mention the cause of the conflict or assign blame when we run the appeal, or schedule it near a news or current affairs programme. We just need to get vital funds for people who have no food, water, shelter or medical supplies.

Staff member, TV news

5. The refusal to carry the Gaza appeal insults the intelligence of licence fee payers, implying that they are unable to tell the difference between a charity appeal and a political broadcast. It also undermines the BBC’s claims to impartiality. In almost every war there is contentious debate about who is responsible for the consequent humanitarian crisis. Why is it only in the case of Gaza and, previously, Lebanon that this debate has been used to justify refusing to broadcast an appeal?

Staff member, multiplatform productions

The story is so pathetic that it barely warrants serious discussion. But it’s there in the Times. On page 4. And the article is typical of so much media reporting of Islam.

The paper published this “news” item on October 27 under the headline “Police warned of Ramadan tension during 2012 Games”.

The story claimed that Scotland Yard was concerned that the 2012 Olympics in London would “clash” with Ramadan, making it harder to “reduce tensions between Muslims and police” during the Games.

Instead of offering any proof, however, that a religious festival could present a problem for police, the Times article switched in its second paragraph to speculation about terrorism. The 40th anniversary of the shoot-out at the Munich Olympics – in which 9 Israeli hostages died after they were taken hostage by Palestinians – meant there was an “Islamic terrorist threat” to the 2012 Games, the paper said.

Only then did the story returned to Ramadan and the London Olympics. It quoted the head of the highly respected Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths that the police would need some basic training to deal with religious issues that might arise during the Games: “During Ramadan you’re going to have a lot of tired, hungry, less evenly tempered people because they haven’t eaten for 18 hours.”

The implication is clear: tired, hungry Muslims are more likely to lose their temper and… commit a terrorist attack on the Games.

MWAW contacted Dr Ed Kessler, head of the Woolf Institute.  He wrote back that he was “very unhappy” with the Times article, which “failed to depict the conversation” that he had had with the paper’s reporter. He said it was “sensationalism of the worst kind” and was “inaccurate in its reporting about the Olympics, Ramadan and the proposed Munich commemoration”.

Dr Kessler has written to the Times to complain, but the paper has yet to publish his letter.

The Times’ method is clear: take a bit of flimsy information from the police, slap on some unrelated speculation about terrorism, throw in a quote – torn out of context – from a respected source to make the piece appear reasonable, and let the reader draw their own racist conclusions. The article is constructed to make it appear that fasting during Ramadan makes Muslims more likely to commit a terrorist atrocity.

This is dog-whistle reporting: the article is couched in reasonable language but sends out a clear message that Islam is dangerous.

It is because of reporting of this kind that MWAW is holding its conference this year on Islamophobia.

Dave Crouch

One of our supporters wrote to the reporter whose byline accompanied the piece. He replied:

“We publicised a police appeal in exactly the same way we would publish a police appeal for a missing person, a rape suspect or a murder suspect.”

Our supporter wrote back to him:

“Your comparison of anti-war protesters with rape and murder suspects pretty much sums up why the mainstream media has so little credibility these days. You blindly parrot the police’s line without question and do not even ask any of the thousands of protesters in attendance what actually happened that day. What inspiring journalism on your part.”

Often reporters’ bylines appear on stories that they are unhappy about – senior editors present their material in ways that suit the newspaper’s editorial line, rather than the reporter’s understanding of the truth.

But in this instance it is clear that the reporter in question agreed wholeheartedly with the police. As the Stop the War Coalition noted, the reporter made “no attempt … to speak to the organisers of the demonstration, or indeed anyone who actually attended the protest without a police uniform”.

This was just plain bad journalism, and as such is indefensible. The reporter allowed himself to be an uncritical mouthpiece for views with which he agreed, rather than attempting to dig beneath the police press release and establish the facts.

Here is the full text of the article in The London Paper, which can  be found at: http://tinyurl.com/4jz33q

SUSPECTS SOUGHT OVER STOP THE WAR VIOLENCE

By Richard Moriarty

25/09/08

photos of four young men at top with byline

Picture caption: “Police are seeking these four men in connection with June’s Stop the War protest, which was marred by widespread disorder.”

THESE four men are wanted for questioning by police investigating a violent demonstration against George Bush, during which officers were pelted with metal bars, sharpened sticks and bottles.

At least 10 officers were hurt after protestors breached barriers during a Stop The War protest in Parliament Square as the US President visited George Brown.

Up to 2,500 people gathered at the height of the demo on 15 June and some, thought to be anarchists, tried to get through police lines to Downing Street. Police used batons to fight back, resulting in 25 arrests. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison said: “The Met will always facilitate lawful protest but what we will not tolerate is attacks on our officers under the guise of demonstration.

“We maintained a barrier line as part of security for the visit of President Bush. In a climate where London is at a severe level of threat from global terrorism, any attempt to breach security to protect the President had to be defended.

“What our officers did not deserve was to be the subject of such violence. A number of officers had sharpened sticks poked into their eyes.”

Anyone with information should call the investigation team on 07500 768 607, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111

(article ends)

Stop the War wrote to The London Paper, which refused to publish this letter:

“Your story about the demonstration in London on 15 June to protest against the visit of President Bush is one sided and full of unsubstantiated claims. Of the article’s two paragraphs one is almost wholly given over to quotes from Police Commisioner Chris Allison. The rest of the copy paraphrases a Metropolitan Police press release.

“Despite very serious allegations made against anti-war protestors,including the publication of 4 pictures of people apparently ‘wanted’ by the police, no attempt seems to have been made to speak to the organisers of the demonstration, or indeed anyone who actually attended the protest without a police uniform.

“The claim that Police officers ‘were pelted with metal bars’ for example is a complete fabrication. Given the accounts of the demonstration carried at the time in the press which described and pictured police baton attacks on peaceful protestors this article badly let down your readers, most of whom no doubt oppose Bush’s wars.”

On the day that the British government revealed details of its plan to throw £400bn at the banks, the Sun splashed on “£170,000 benefits so mum of 7 can live in £1.2m mansion”.

The Sun made its argument clear: “Taxpayers hit by the credit crunch fund the swish seven-bedroom home enjoyed free by Afghan migrant…” The tone of the paper’s coverage was summed up by one of its readers: “I’m disgusted by what’s going on. Surely we should be taking care of our own people first.”

Instead of the multimillionaire bankers ripping off the country and ravaging the economy, the papers now turned to an easier target: 35 year old Toorpakai Saiedi and her 7 children.

The Evening Standard took up the story and ran with it three days in a row. Of course the Express and Mail got stuck in. Ealing Council’s reaction? It sacked three temporary workers whom it blamed for the situation.

And this was even before the columnists got started. Carol Malone in the News of the World described she wanted to “smack” the “workshy” Afghan woman. “It’s a given with refugees these days that the minute you hit British soil and step aboard the benefits gravy train, you need never do anything for yourself ever again.”

Rod Liddle in the Times suggested that the Taliban had the right idea in driving Ms Saiedi out of Afghanistan. Tony Parsons in the Mirror spelled it out:

“Personally, I can’t tell the difference between the unemployed investment banker and that Afghan woman who is in the news because she receives £170,000 a year in benefits. … To me this mother-of-seven looks exactly like the scalded fat cats who are being bailed out from Canary Wharf to Wall Street.”

These ravings made Richard Littlejohn sound mild in comparison.

The facts: Ms Saedi receives £1,600 a month – under £20K p.a. – to feed a family of eight. The private LANDLORD gets £12,000 a month from the state to house the family because there is no council housing.

Susie Rushton in the Independent is the lone sane voice among the press jackals. She writes that she is “ashamed by our sneaky, racist press”:

“Never mind that Mrs Saiedi appears to be highly deserving of asylum, and needs a seven-bedroom house because her kids are too old to share rooms; that she is diligently learning English; that she struggles to pay bills; nor that, thanks to the ludicrous property boom in the capital, £1.2m pounds doesn’t actually buy “a mansion” – even as prices fall, that’d hardly get you a two-bedroom flat in Notting Hill. It does however buy a pleasant enough family-sized house in a cheap part of west London.”

As the economic crisis bites, the media will lash out at the weakest and most defenceless people in society. If they are Muslim, they make an even easier target.

This is why the Media Workers Against the War conference “Under siege: Islam, war and the media” is potentially such an important event. For us, slump + war = resistance.

Dave Crouch

I was absolutely enraged. I couldn’t believe that 400 editors could have signed up to this.

Why?

Because we have a protocol which we live by on every working day of the week which is that if someone vulnerable in terms of national security is making a movement or whatever we may well know about it but we won’t in fact tell the listener

If Brown is going off to Iraq you know perfectly well because you have to make your own arrangements but you don’t talk about it

It seems to me that there was nothing so very different about a movement of Prince Harry to Afghanistan and if they wanted complete secrecy it could fit with that protocol

The argument from the media organisations that went along with it was that this was in essence what they had sort of done.

No, and it’s not true. I am certainly aware that the basis of the discussion was: if you do not sign up to this he will not go, we will not deploy. Therefore the media suddenly became charged with a role in the deployment of a soldier to Afghanistan, which seemed a most bizarre position to be in.

This was propaganda, this was not journalism, this was not ferreting about to get at the truth, this was doing somebody else’s bidding, this was the picture that the Ministry of Defence and others wanted put across the front pages of the newspapers, this was a hole in one for the Palace, the military authorities and Prince Harry, there was no journalism involved at all, not one element of it.

The media, certainly the BBC, who were in this like everyone else, would dispute that, they would say that the quality of access, that one of the reasons that the deal took some time to stitch together was that arguments over – it appears to me anyway, they appear to be saying – the quality and amount and depth of access, so they are saying that the access enabled them to tell more of the story, to let listeners and viewers see more of what is really going on in Afghanistan because of the access they got because of the deal they had done.

That’s complete garbage, isn’t it.

Do you think…?

Absolute garbage. What was going on? What was going on was a number of posed photographs. Did they say: “We moved around the village and Harry posed on a motorbike. Whose it was we don’t know, it was red, it was probably nicked from some Afghan.”

What was the truth? Does an air traffic controller actually shoot from a machine gun nest? The BBC didn’t reveal this to us.

No, this was a series of manipulated photo-opportunities, it was not journalism and did not in any sense describe what was going on in Afghanistan.

Were you surprised at the reaction to your comments?

Not remotely. Not remotely. Do you think 400 editors who have sold their souls for a mess of pottage are in some way going to start being nice to me about my one lone voice of rebellion? No, absolutely not.

But I know I was right. And I have to tell you, I have had a vast mailbag from editors, friends, journalists, other people saying: “Spot on mate” – and viewers too.

Has it done the prince any good?

I think it’s done the press a lot of harm. Has it done the prince any good? Of course. Of course it’s a much better image than someone rolling around in the street half drunk.

With Peter Wilby, columnist for the Media Guardian, formely editor of the New Statesman and the Independent on Sunday

Tom de Waal, Caucasus editor at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting

Stop the War Coalition speaker (tbc)

Tuesday September 9

7pm

Pearson Lecture Theatre
University College London, Gower Street WC1
Nearest tube: Warren Street or Euston

Map: click here

All welcome!

Download a leaflet for the meeting as a PDF file

More details: mediawar@riseup.net, or tel 07801 789 297

Called by Media Workers Against the War

Pete Wilby on the media coverage of war in the Caucasus:
In the Media Guardian

Tom de Waal on the war:
In the Financial Times
In the Guardian

N.B. our original meeting on Somalia on Sept 10 has been postponed because of the Caucasus crisis

The Guardian correctly notes: “The disclosure that a Whitehall counter-terrorism propaganda operation is promoting material to the BBC and other media will raise fresh concerns about official news management in a highly sensitive area.”

According to the paper, the secret services’ report says: “We are pushing this material to UK media channels, eg, a BBC radio programme exposing tensions between AQ leadership and supporters. And a restricted working group will communicate niche messages through media and non-media.”

These revelations raise very serious questions about recent corporate media coverage of the “war on terror”.

In June there was a string of stories in the British press stressing that al-Qaeda was “down but not out”, suffering set-backs in Iraq and Afghanistan – precisely the message being pushed by Whitehall counter-intelligence, according to the Guardian story. For example, Times columnist Gerard Baker wrote: “We are winning this war on terror“.

Yet the crisis in Pakistan and the killing of 10 French and 9 Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan in successive weeks shows what rubbish this is.

The secret services in the UK and US have a disgraceful record of planting mis-information and propaganda in the media.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the Observer’s reporter David Rose became a mouthpiece for MI5 and MI6 propaganda – by his own admission. Rose now deeply regrets this.

In April the New York Times exposed that the Pentagon conducted a major campaign of placing retired generals on US TV news to put the case for war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. In 2002 Rumsfeld’s “Office of Strategic Influence” inside the Pentagon had to be scrapped after it emerged that the OSI planned to plant “black propaganda” in foreign media.

The news that counter-intelligence is targetting the BBC should be a wake-up call to all journalists.

There were serious doubts about the story’s authenticity, however. For example, the Metro and the Telegraph reported that the circumstances of her arrest remain unclear, with US officials saying she turned herself in but Iraqi police claiming she was caught after behaving suspiciously.

The Guardian, however, published the claims of the Iraqi police without a shred of probing or scepticism. For example, the paper said that the girl’s father “had carried out a suicide bombing”, while Arabic TV stations showed both the girls’ parents sitting indoors.

Moreover, publishing Abu Ghraib-like photos and video of the young woman in such a humiliating situation verged on the pornographic. The Iraqi police certainly appeared to be enjoying the interrogation.

The Iraqi police have been shown on many occasions in the past to have made up stories. The widely-reported claim that women with Down’s syndrome blew themselves up in a market in Baghdad in February was full of holes.

Everyone in Iraq knows that all the police do after the bombing is washout the evidence. On numerous occasions eyewitnesses have said an explosion was a car bomb – with government number plates – while the police and the puppet government claim it was a suicide bomber. The truth is always the first casualty in these incidents.

All these recent claims about Iraqi women suicide bombers are either made by the US or by the Iraqi puppet government of the Green Zone in an attempt to show that the resistance in Iraq is defeated and therefore resorting to desperate measures. But very few people in Iraq believe that these security forces are there to protect them. According to Mohamed Al Dayni, member of the Iraqi parliament, there are at many documented cases of rape committed by members of the Iraqi security forces, yet to be properly investigated or prosecuted.

I telephoned the reader’s editor of the Guardian to lodge a complaint, in a polite but upset voice. The woman who answered the phone breathed a sigh down the phone as I was explaining to her my complaint as if she was bored.

Can I suggest that people write a short email or make a telephone call to the reader’s editor to complain about the Guardian’s article: reader@guardian.co.uk,
0207 7134736

Tahrir Swift

Whenever, to coin a phrase, a war breaks out in a faraway country of which we know little, I am reminded of a news editor I once worked for. He would go to a wall map showing the location of the paper’s correspondents, produce a ruler, and measure the distance of each from the area in question. Regardless of travel links or national boundaries, he decreed that the nearest should go.

It was a bit like that, I imagine, in many media offices when the conflict between Georgia and Russia broke out. Not only was it August, when many reporters are on holiday, it was also the Olympics, and the few still on duty were mostly in Beijing. The Financial Times headline, “Georgia says Russia at war“, may have seemed strange, but it summed up the state of Fleet Street’s verifiable knowledge as the armies moved into action. In the age of 24-hour news, however, the press cannot hang about waiting for reporters to arrive. Readers want bombs, tanks and death tolls. They need to be told who are the goodies and baddies. News, remember, is part of the entertainment industry.

Into the vacuum stepped the Georgian government. Its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, speaks English, wants to join Nato, sent troops to Iraq, got himself educated at Harvard, cultivates a media-friendly style, and sends Georgian university exam papers to be marked in Britain, though whether he expects to get them back is another matter. He took power in the Rose revolution of 2003-04 and professes to be a democrat. He’s clearly an all-round good egg. And he has a PR firm, Aspect Consulting, based in Brussels, London and Paris, which also acts for Exxon Mobil, Kellogg’s and Procter and Gamble.

Almost hourly over the five-day war, press releases landed on foreign news desks. “Russia continues to attack civilian population.” The capital Tblisi was “intensively” bombed. A downed Russian plane turned out to be “nuclear”. European “energy supplies” were threatened as Russia dropped bombs near oil pipelines. A “humanitarian wheat shipment” was blocked. Later, “invading Russian forces” began “the occupation of Georgia”. Saakashvili’s government filed allegations of ethnic cleansing to The Hague. Note the use of terms that trigger western media interest: civilian victims, nuclear, humanitarian, occupation, ethnic cleansing.

It would be unfair to accuse the British press of accepting the Georgian PR uncritically. Most papers dutifully reported that a Georgian attack in the breakaway province of South Ossetia, where most people want to join Russia, started the conflict. But casual readers might have struggled to understand that. The Mail’s headline announced: “‘1,500 die’ as the Russian tanks roll in” [August 9]. Only in the last paragraph of the story did it become clear that the Georgians, not the Russians, were alleged to have killed 1,500.

Russia’s behaviour, newspapers implied, was in a quite different category from Georgia’s. In the Sunday Times, Russian tanks went “rampaging” in South Ossetia, while Georgian tanks merely “moved”. If Georgian forces had bombarded civilians, it was “reprehensible”, the Telegraph allowed. Russia, however, was “offending every canon of international behaviour“. An analysis in the same paper avoided any mention of how Georgia provoked the crisis. Saakashvili was “paying the price” for his pro-western foreign policy. A “resurgent Russia” was “itching to flex its muscles and burning with post-imperial hubris”.

Such comments are illuminated by substituting Britain or America for Russia, and Iraq for Georgia. Try “resurgent Britain … itching to flex its muscles”, etc.

As the conflict went on, press coverage became more balanced, with several commentators noting, to quote the Independent’s Mary Dejevsky, that “it is quite hard to argue that there is one law for assisting Albanians in Kosovo and quite another for Russians and Ossetians in Georgia”. Increasingly, the press portrayed Saakashvili as a self-regarding fool who blundered into a war he was bound to lose.

But Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia went largely unexamined, and it was hard to find, from press accounts, what refugees from the province were fleeing from. Again, the Georgians played the PR game more skilfully. Western correspondents were welcomed into Gori and shown areas apparently bombed by the Russians. Saakashvili held international media phone conferences, got himself on TV news channels and even found time, within hours of war breaking out, to write for the Wall Street Journal. Russia, by contrast, allowed little access to South Ossetia. Its government attempted no comparable media offensive. Though it also has a PR agency, GPlus Europe in Brussels (and Ketchum in Washington), it was not asked to issue press releases. As a source wryly put it, “the press release is not a common tool of the Russian government”.

The brief war in the Caucasus was a classic example of the situation outlined in Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News. Most newspapers hadn’t a clue what was going on and lacked sufficient resources to find out. So skilfully presented PR was at a premium. Most journalists treated it with at least some scepticism, but it inevitably had an effect. If there was a military war, there was also an information one, and Georgia got the better of it.

This was a very serious piece of journalism, broadcast at an extremely sensitive time – on the anniversary of the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London. Channel 4 made sure the documentary was copper-bottomed by commissioning accompanying research by the excellent Cardiff School of Journalism team under Prof Justin Lewis. Moreover, Oborne produced his own pamphlet to go with the film, “Muslims Under Siege“. Both should be required reading for journalists.

The mainstream media’s response to Oborne’s challenge, however, has so far been disappointing, and by no means matches the seriousness of the issues he raises.

The Independent gave Oborne space for two major articles, one of which in its media section, and columnist Mark Steele last week demolished the Sun’s response to Oborne. The Mail gave him a double page spread.

But apart from a few comment pieces by Muslims praising the documentary in the Guardian, the Observer and the Times, and a splendid piece by the Guardian’s Seamus Milne, the response has been either silence or hostility.

The Observer’s Andrew Anthony slagged it off, accusing Oborne of “blasting himself in the foot“. In the Sindy, Hermione Eyre accused Oborne, of all people, of “white liberal piety“. To add insult to injury, Oborne was disgracefully thrown out of parliament for distributing his pamphlet to MPs.

Readers of this blog might wish to questions aspects of Oborne’s approach, which, for example, doesn’t make explicit the link between the rise of Islamophobia and the “war on terror”. But we share his criticisms of the war in Iraq. In his Dispatches documentary in March, “Iraq’s Lost Generation”, he said: “The British Government has misled us in the run-up to war and is in denial now about what we are leaving behind. It has failed to bring liberal democracy to Iraq, brought danger to the streets of London, damaged our international reputation, alienated millions of our fellow citizens and betrayed the values we stand for in a moral and strategic disaster.”

It is time for the dangerous Islamophobia that is rampant in the British media to be recognised and debated.

We must not let the issues that Oborne has raised be brushed under the carpet.

N.B. Last week the Independent reported record numbers of racist incidents – from verbal abuse to stabbings – are being reported to police, fuelling fears that levels of Islamophobia are rising.

Malik’s crucial test case succeeded in reining in the police, who had raided his house in March in search of his notes. The court’s main ruling two weeks ago spelt out that the police have no right to conduct speculative “fishing expeditions” to force journalists to hand over their research.

But the case has starkly revealed how the terror laws mean journalists must go to the authorities if they suspect that a source has information about “terrorism”.

Given the broad-brush definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2006 – which includes “glorifying” terror and possessing terrorist materials without the intention of committing an offence – the latest ruling means many Muslims will perceive journalists as a direct extension of the police. Anyone with genuine information about the terrorist milieu will have to weigh up the risk that talking to a reporter is like talking to the cops.

The court’s first ruling, however, was welcomed by Malik, who stressed how it circumscribed police powers. He told Free Press: “It’s a victory for common sense in that, from the wider perspective, we can protect confidential sources – that’s a big victory.

“The High Court said production orders are allowed, but in my case they really do have to be precisely drafted, the police can’t just go on fishing expeditions. Protecting journalists’ sources should be paramount, and now the High Court has said even in terrorism cases journalists are allowed to maintain confidential sources.”

The NUJ also emphasised how the initial ruling sent a clear signal to police that they can’t see journalists as “simply another tool of intelligence gathering”. Speaking outside the High Court after the ruling was announced, general secretary Jeremy Dear said that Greater Manchester Police had “failed to recognise the special nature of journalistic material. Rather than take the time to consider what information they really needed, the police went fishing, hoping a general order would dredge up something of use.”

Malik is an established freelance who has written extensively on terrorism for national newspapers and magazines. He is working on a book with the former Islamist Hassan Butt, who is linked to a forthcoming terrorism trail in Manchester in the autumn. Greater Manchester Police, who raided Malik’s home in March in pursuit of his notes, have also served draft production orders on the BBC, the Sunday Times, Prospect magazine and CBS demanding that they hand over materials they believe to be connected with the case.

Malik’s High Court appeal is the first major test of the application to journalism of the Terrorism Act 2000, sections 19 and 38B (the latter was added in 2001) of which make it a criminal offence to withhold information. Formerly police had to satisfy a judge that the information they sought from a journalist was closely related to a “serious offence” – the 2000 Act contains no such restriction.

Malik said: “This makes it almost impossible for journalists working in the field of terrorism. It’s been a scythe hanging over our necks since it was enacted in 2000. Journalists in the field have been breaking the law and hoping they won’t get prosecuted.”

He believes the issue came to a head because the police decided he would be in no position to defend himself, so they imposed a wide-ranging production order. But the NUJ and the Sunday Times agreed to pay his costs.

There is a maliciousness in the police attack on Malik. As the court ruling states, the police interest in Malik is in what he can tell them about Hassan Butt, and not in whether he has committed offences under sections 19 or 38B. However, according to the Court, on May 9 Butt was arrested and extensively interviewed by police; he told them his earlier public statements about involvement in Al-Qaeda were untrue. He has now been released without charge.

The case shows that journalists face enormous difficulties researching the roots of Islamist extremism in Britain. As a result, policies aimed at preventing terrorism will come to rely even further on the shadowy secret services and the ill-informed prejudices of the Murdoch press.

Moreover, the line between legitimate support for resistance to western intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporting “terrorism” will be further blurred, increasing the stigma attached to the Muslim community, where hostility to government foreign policy is strongest.

A range of high profile figures and organisations have supported Malik’s case. On March 19 leading figures from journalism and civil liberties organisations, including Jonathan Dimbleby and Shami Chakrabarti, signed a letter to the Times warning of its implications.

Dave Crouch
A version of this article will shortly appear in Free Press, www.cpbf.org.uk

The most influential armchair soldier in the Western world is back in his metaphorical fatigues. Yes, it’s Field Marshal David Aaronovitch, who championed the invasion of Iraq with more vigour than any fellow officer in Her Majesty’s First Light Pundits. There have been times in recent years when David seemed to be taking the weeniest backward baby-steps towards admitting that, on Iraq, he may perhaps have dropped the tiniest of bollocks. However, these faint flickerings of the reverse lights on the tank have been quickly extinguished by defiant challenges to opponents, on the exquisitely subtle lines of: “Do you want Saddam back, is that what you want?”

And now, far from succumbing to self-doubt, the Field Marshal wishes to invade Zimbabwe and oust Mugabe, which he believes would be another military piece of cake. “How many South African or British soldiers would it take to unseat the junta and disperse the Zanu-PF veterans?”

This is not a rhetorical question, of course. Having unleashed that military brain on the logistical problems, and consulted with his masters at the MoD, he well knows the precise answer, although the Official Secrets Act of course precludes him from sharing the information. Without dwelling on the ramifications of such retro-colonialism in a country that remains so sensitive on the point, lesser thinkers foresee a grave danger of hideous civil unrest. They forget that David was correct to ignore that outlandish prospect so far as Iraq. We salute the Field Marshal for the indefatigability of his faith in interventionism, and look forward to him leading his troops into battle.

And he very well might. Visitors to The Times website will relish a three-minute video of David training for a triathlon in August. Frankly, he looks in amazing shape for a chap turning 54 a week from today, especially in an aerodynamic bodysuit on Brighton beach, and it’s suspected that the Field Marshal may be training less for that triathlon than because, tiring of all the desk work his military role imposes, he intends personally to spearhead the initial raid on the presidential palace in Harare.

Would the first Times employee to find him digging a latrine in the Wapping car park please let us know?

The London demonstration on Saturday March 15 will surround Parliament to remind our political leaders that their continuing collaboration with George W. Bush and his illegal wars has not been forgotten.

There will be more than 300 demonstrations worldwide against the occupation of Iraq. These include a march in Basra. A full list can be found at www.worldagainstwar.org

David Crouch, chair of Media Workers Against the War, said:

“Every survey of public opinion has shown that the Stop the War Coalition has consistently represented majority opinion in this country on the vital issues of war and peace ever since the initial attack on Iraq.

“Despite politicians’ decision to ignore public opinion, including the extraordinary London demonstration of 1.5m people in February 2003, the Stop the War movement has continued to organise protests far bigger, more inclusive and representative than anything this country has ever seen.

“We therefore ask journalists in print, radio and TV that today’s demonstration be fully and fairly reported.

“If public opinion continues to be ignored the result will be measured in yet more death and destruction – and public cynicism about the media and politics.”

Press contact: 07801 789 297

Notes for editors:

Media Workers Against the War is a group of media professionals who campaign for fair reporting of the “war on terror”. More info: www.mwaw.net

For details of today’s (Saturday) London demonstration, go to www.stopwar.org.uk or call 07801 789 297

The collusion of senior media editors in the blackout on Prince Harry in Helmand reveals how specious this argument is. Rather than questioning the government’s war in Afghanistan, the media’s proprietors and controllers conspired to give the military a propaganda coup, boosting the notion that Britain is fighting a glamorous and just war.

As a result, more young men will join the army to fight: “They have just used Harry as propaganda to promote and glorify a war which, in the end, is going to be found to be a terrible mistake,” said Anthony Philippson, whose soldier son James died in Afghanistan.

As a result, thousands more Afghanis will die, blown to pieces by bombs from the same air strikes directed by the Prince on his “Kill TV”.

Eighteen months ago the MoD faced a potential revolt in the army. General Sir Richard Dannatt told the Mail that Britain faced losing the war in Afghanistan. The MoD lashed out Blair’s favourite scapegoat for the problems – the media – and launched a campaign to regain the media initiative.

First the MoD banned ITN from embedding reporters with troops. Then it allowed the 15 military personnel captured by Iran to sell their stories to the press. And it banned soldiers from blogging and speaking in public. By the end of last year the MoD had succeeded in re-imposing strict censorship on the media in Afghanistan.

Now senior editors have handed the military establishment a gem. As Peter Wilby has explained, the Prince Harry story “was a PR stunt, from beginning to end”. By lapping it up, editors “dealt another blow to genuinely independent journalism and to the long-term credibility of the media”.

It is a grim irony that, as the Harry story flooded through the media last week, the government gagged the former SAS soldier Ben Griffin, preventing him from speaking out about UK involvement in illegal renditions.

For some well-known journalists, this stuck in the craw. Jon Snow of Channel 4 News asked some probing and critical questions about the media’s collusion on Harry. As a result, however, Snow became the target of a concerted campaign of “flak” in the Mail, Telegraph, Telegraph again, Evening Standard, and the Times, including accusations that he is “left-wing” and “unpatriotic”.

If you haven’t done so already, please write to Channel 4 News – email news@channel4.com – to back Jon Snow’s independent and professional journalism.

digg it

Mounting political and commercial pressures are affecting the freedom to report as never before. Hear leading journalists, broadcasters and union campaigners on why an unfettered media is central to democracy, and how we can mobilise to defend freedom of information and expression

Saturday 26 January 2008
9.30am-4.30pm
National Union of Journalists
308 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8DP
(King’s Cross Underground)

Speakers include:
Alan Johnston, former BBC correspondent in Gaza, recently held hostage, on covering conflict
Martin Bright, New Statesman political editor, on the anti-terror laws
Peter Wilby, former editor, Independent on Sunday, on the Murdoch empire
Granville Williams, media commentator & CPBF, on media ownership
Victoria Brittan, freelance journalist and author, on the narrowing news spectrum
Jo Glanville, editor, Index on Censorship, on secrecy and censorship
Heather Brooke, freelance journalist and author, on the Freedom of Information Act
Joy Francis, managing director, the Creative Collective on reporting diversity
David Crouch, Media Workers Against the War, on bias in war reporting
Jeremy Dear, NUJ general secretary, on defending quality journalism
Chris Frost, NUJ ethics council, on fair reporting
Tony Lennon, BECTU president, on the crisis at the BBC and wider implications
Paul Mason, Newsnight correspondent, on how BBC journalists are organising
Aidan White, general secretary, International Federation of Journalists, on the fight for media freedom world-wide

Download the full conference programme here

Tickets: £10 / £7

Download a registration form here

I’m not an expert on Iran or Iraq. I think I’m here partly because I’ve been a hack, a reporter, not just a journalist but a guy running around with a notebook and a pen, for an extraordinarily, ridiculously long time, but also because in the last couple of years I’ve decided to do something rather weird which is to interrogate my colleagues, which has turned into a book to be published next year called Flat Earth News.

The reason it has that title is that for hundreds of years everyone knew the Earth was flat. Indeed it was a heresy to challenge that statement. Eventually someone, Galileo or Copernicus, bothered to check and discovered they were wrong. But if you look at the way the mass media functions today you’ll see we are riddled with “flat earth” statements.

The most notorious, deadly one of those, or collection of those, was everything we were told in the build up to the invasion of Iraq. It was that in particular which made me want to do this. What I want to try to convey is that we can’t understand what went wrong with the media in the build-up to Iraq unless we understand that what went wrong is part of a much bigger picture in which the media now routinely, consistently convey falsehood, distortion and propaganda. Although this has always happened to some extent, I want to argue that this is now happening on a far greater and destructive scale than it has done previously. Speakers in an earlier session talked about systemic weakness, and that’s what I want to try to explain to you – why we are delivering so much flat earth news.

Remember the Millennium bug story? That’s a classic piece of flat earth news. The global media just consuming falsehood and distortion, pumping out this stuff. It’s wonderful, to look back on the cuttings – utterly unreliable. Most of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton was, to use the technical term, bollocks. Just pushed out on this huge scale.

And there’s flat earth policy. I’ve done loads of work over the years on criminal justice, drugs policy, education, digging deep down into government policy, looking at the factual foundations on which this policy is built, the evidence. And what do you find? Nothing. Just a black hole of populist misconception and self-serving politics. It’s terrifying. Routine, small stories flowing through the media. The scale of it is huge.

If you say that to people outside the media on the whole they’ll rapidly they’ll sign up to the idea that you can’t believe everything you read, but what worries me is that if you ask them why you tend to get flat earth stories back about the media itself. So for example there’s been quite a bit of talk today about proprietor interference. The likes of Rupert Murdoch do interfere, it’s part of the picture, it’s disgusting and immoral that they do, perhaps even more disgusting and immoral that it’s so easy for them to do so. You’ll hear people talking about corporate advertising influencing the content of the media. Maybe it happens. I’ve really tried to find evidence of them doing that successfully. You find it in local papers, you find it in specialist magazines like fashion mags, but in the national media that ain’t where it is.

Sami Ramadani was really interesting about ideology earlier today. But if you take proprietor influence, advertising and ideology and say those are factors that perniciously influence the media and then ask how much of the total picture are they responsible for I want to argue that it’s 5 or 10 per cent. That isn’t where the problem is. There’s a much, much bigger problem at work here.

Let me try to explain. I raised a lot of money from the Rowntree Foundation and gave it to some academics at Cardiff University. One of the things I got them to do was to go back through the annual reports of every Fleet Street company going back to 1985. 1985 is an important year because in January 1986 Rupert Murdoch moved his newspapers into Wapping and broke the print unions. He broke the resistance, such resistance as there was in Fleet Street, to the logic of commercialism, to what those big corporations which had taken all those newspapers over wanted to do.

The academics did two things. Year by year they looked at what happened to the editorial staffing levels of those Fleet Street papers over the next 20 years. The second thing they did was they measured the space which those editorial staff were filling, how many column inches of news. You crunch all those numbers for all these companies and you come up with something that is really important – essentially, your average Fleet Street reporter now is filling three times as much space as he or she was 20 years ago. Turn that round, look at it from the reporter’s point of view: we only have one third of the time to do our job. That’s terribly important.

If you take time away from some processes, like if you’re manufacturing cars and you take time out so you do it quicker you can argue that this improves the process, it makes it cheaper so you can sell more and put more money back into production. But if you take time away from reporters you take away our most important working asset. We cannot do our jobs properly if they won’t give us the time to do it. It’s as simple as that. We’ve been caught in this pincer movement where our staffing levels have been cut, our output has been increased – all the newspapers have extra supplements, you have 24-hour broadcasting – the whole nature of being a reporter and the back-up journalists involved has changed: instead of being active news gatherers we’ve become passive processors. Most reporters nowadays don’t have contacts, we don’t go out and find stories, we don’t check facts.

We did a huge analysis with these Cardiff researchers of the extent to which you can look at factual statements in Fleet Street stories and find evidence of whether or not they’ve been checked. The answer was that there is evidence in 12 per cent of those statements. 12 per cent. It’s pathetic. But that’s the reality. It’s not because the journalists are dishonest. It’s not because they’re being told to do so by advertisers or Rupert Murdoch. It’s because we’re not allowed to do our job. I call this “churnalism”. That’s the first part of the picture.

Nevertheless we’ve got to fill all these supplements, all these 24 hours of broadcasting. Where are we going to get our material from? While we’ve been losing our jobs, somebody else has been getting more and more jobs. Which is the PR industry. There was an invisible moment at some point in the last decade when the number of PR people in this country finally exceeded the number of journalists.

When we’re talking about PR, first it’s the whole magical world of Alastair Campbell in central government, which has flowed down into every local authority in the country, and the police and the health service, every limb of the state now has press officers working for it. Even when I started, 30-odd years ago, it wasn’t like that. When I started on local papers, if you wanted to write a story about a hospital you phoned the hospital you talked to the hospital manager or a doctor. Now you deal with a PR. Across the public sector – and across the private sector. All corporations now defend themselves. And charities and even terrorist groups! Everybody has PR people.

Whereas you should have a system where journalists, working honestly and independently, make what used to be called news judgments and say this story is important, this angle needs to be expressed, this research needs to be done, instead now we sit there passively and those decisions are made by Alastair Campbell and the whole magic world of PR and the public and private and the charity sector and the terrorist groups. They write the press releases and we bung ‘em in.

And it isn’t just about press releases. It’s about deeply manipulative behaviour. So for example, PR companies work very assiduously to set up front groups. These are phony grass-roots groups. There are so many phony grass-roots groups in the US that they have a nice little term for them, they call them Astroturf, because they’re not real grass.

A classic example of an Astroturf group is the Iraqi National Congress, the INC. The INC didn’t just emerge out of nowhere, it was invented and created by a man called John Rendon, a PR guy who used to work for the Democrats, he ran Jimmy Carter’s PR campaign. And since the American invasion of Panama in 1987 has been working on contract for American intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, running PR campaigns to change the way we think and feel about the world. And it’s very easy. Once you’ve reduced journalists to churnalism, all they have to do is feed us stories. So John Rendon says okay, we’re going to change the way the world looks at Iraq, I need a story, I’ve got a huge budget from the State Department, I’ll create the INC, I’ll hire Ahmed Chalabi and all these other guys, we’ll hold conferences in Vienna and London, we’ll invite the hacks, the hacks will write the story, we get them to put it across. It’s easy.

While PR has become so huge and so sophisticated and so successful in effectively writing our stories for us and doing our work for us, alongside that, almost unnoticed since September 11, 2001, there has been a significant increase in old-fashioned propaganda activities. PR on the whole doesn’t deal in fiction. Alastair Campbell and his ilk will lie to you if you put them in a corner, but they don’t really want to lie. Really what it’s about is making our judgments for us, picking which story, which angle, which quote, but often it’s in the realm of truth. Propaganda is about fiction.

There’s always been a threat of propaganda, for years and years going back to Elizabethan times, certainly it was active during the Cold War. That’s got much bigger and institutionalised. The problem with propaganda is that it doesn’t tell the truth about itself. The expression it uses is “strategic communication”, so you find that military, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies, particularly in the United States but also in Britain, France and all the NATO countries, are grouped together in order to manipulate us vulnerable hacks into running stories that are fiction.

There are marvellous examples of it. You can see them running on Iran now. I love the Zarqawi story. Remember Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Huge chunks of the Zarqawi story were produced by this strategic communications machine. Absolute bollocks, to use that technical term again. Remember when he first surfaced Zarqawi only had one leg? Then later on when he was on video cutting people’s heads off miraculously he had sprouted a second one. They’d lost their own story line!

If you’re trying to understand what needs to be done to get the media to tell the truth, it’s not just about the traditional explanations about advertising, owners and ideology. They are there, I’m not denying that, and they are pernicious and wrong. But it’s to do with the structural weakness of our profession. Our jobs are being taken away, our output has been increased, we are now almost infinitely vulnerable to being manipulated – and so we are. And that’s why we are seeing the same thing happening about Iran as you earlier saw with Iraq.

In this book that I have written I did a chapter on the Observer. It’s fascinating and scary. It’ was a model of manipulation of a newspaper in the build-up to Iraq where all of this was at work. The PR people, particular from Downing Street, Alastair Campbell’s people working on Kamal Ahmed, the political editor. He resigned a few weeks ago because of the book, he doesn’t want to tell the truth about it. The intelligence agencies producing the anthrax story were working through David Rose. Very interesting. David Rose is actually a very good, experienced reporter, he was completely flipped over on his head, writing absolute crap because he was being manipulated by MI6 and the CIA. And I’ve traced it all. That’s the propaganda element. It’s just scary.

The impact of that was huge, because that’s the paper that’s read by backbench Labour MPs who had to vote in the House of Commons on the Blair resolution. It really mattered. It’s the sickening ease with which it now happens.

If you want to understand what’s going wrong it’s fascinatingly complex.
The internal procedural workings, the operational pressures that incline us towards more falsehood and distortion – it really is interesting how you look at it and find how rotten it is at its core.

The other thing that concerns this meeting is what we can do to improve it. I’m very pessimistic. I think we’ve lost it, I’m afraid we’ve lost the idea of the mass media are anything like a reliable source of information. In an imaginary world I’d like the media to be put through the same sort of regulation as foodstuffs, so that you have to label the content of a newspaper, so you would need some institution to be funded and set up to test the extent to which a particular media outlet produces falsehood and distortion. So the Guardian would have to run its running average – over say the preceding six months, for example, and say, 56 per cent of this newspaper’s output turned out to be not true.

The trouble is that this is an imaginary world. There is no way that I can see that there is anywhere in this country the political power to engineer that kind of change. The question is whether that’s politically possible. I think everyone who has been critical of the Press Complaints Commission is entirely right. I did a huge analysis of their last 10 years of operation and it’s embarrassing to be told as a professional that this organisation is responsible for holding you to standards. It does absolutely nothing. It is an outrage.

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.

Jane Shallice opened the workshop, describing some of the particular challenges the Stop the War Coalition faces in opposing the “War on Terror” and how and why journalists might portray the perspective of the anti-war campaign more effectively.

Shallice emphasised that activists in the anti-war movement come from various backgrounds but with great experience. She strongly rejected the notion famously expressed by Andrew Marr that the opposition to the Iraq war reflected the “petulant mewlings of amateurs.” She pointed out that such “amateurs” are usually motivated by deep concern and have “studied and fought and argued and expressed ideas in a way that ‘mere’ journalists, as professionals, may not.”

Describing her own direct experience campaigning against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, Shallice highlighted that many campaigners also have a grasp of the way the media operate and how this has changed in recent years. For example, coverage of the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan lacks the visual representation that brought the truth of Vietnam into the mainstream.

Shallice briefly summarised the Stop the War Coalition’s three main founding aims, namely:
1. To stop the war;
2. To prevent the erosion of civil liberties;
3. To prevent the growth of Islamophobia.

Despite huge support, she said, the anti-war movement ultimately failed to prevent war, while the erosion of civil liberties and growth of Islamophobia continue.

Clearly there were sections of the media that supported the Stop the War Coalition and there is no doubt that The Mirror’s backing contributed massively in recruiting protestors to the March 2003 demonstration. But too often editorial decisions were taken in other papers to dampen anti-war sentiment and elevate the pro-war argument, Shallice said.

And the role of New Labour’s communications advisors – specifically Alastair Campbell – and the capitulation of the BBC in the wake of the Hutton enquiry undermined the anti-war message. On this issue Shallice lamented that, while there were understandable reasons for the BBC’s concern, “there is huge support for the BBC that was never really tapped.”

As a result, the anti-war movement developed largely out of “old methods” of organising, i.e. public meetings – and the support it received says much about the government’s arguments. “Whatever the ‘best’ journalists were saying to promote their views, people didn’t believe them,” Shallice remarked.

Acknowledging that there are – and always have been – good journalists, Shallice stressed that strong, remarkable editorial decisions to give space to unpopular stories are few and far between.

Finally, Shallice discussed an emerging theme – the “asymmetry” of the mainstream narrative, which overwhelmingly represents those in power.

Somewhat ironically, she pointed out, the US military’s use of the term “asymmetrical warfare” for suicide bombing and IEDs has been widely adopted by the media, yet the use of air force against people without any air power is never described as such.

“In a sense you feel that about the way the world is expressed. The asymmetry is very clear – those in power have their message given, those without and who are critical of it are still attempting to find ways of having at least a little bit of their argument presented,” Shallice said.

To redress these imbalances, she urged journalists to recognise these fundamental arguments are among citizens and views should not be valued according to whether they are those of amateurs and professionals. She called on all to observe the mantra “doubt everything” when interpreting any line of information.

Peter Wilby continued by making some further observations about how the media influenced the anti-war movement’s impact, aside from its failure to develop an “alternative narrative” which he described in his plenary session talk.

Wilby noted that the movement changed the political course, even if it did not ultimately succeed in preventing war in Iraq. The fact that Tony Blair only won the vote in the House of Commons very narrowly was in that sense a victory, he said.

One “unfortunate” reason the protests did not have a higher profile in the media was that there was not enough drama – there was no violence, no direct action. Wilby recalled that newspapers described the successful anti-Vietnam war demonstration in the spring of 1968 a flop, because alarmist ideas that there were plots to attack Whitehall and the BBC failed to materialise.

He added that the media had marginalised the alternative, anti-war message by focusing on different groups within the Stop the War Coalition and speculating that it was being used as a “front” by the Socialist Workers Party, by Muslim organisations, or by “various undesirables.” Wilby noted that this is a familiar tactic that was used in coverage of anti-Vietnam war protests.

Discussion
Reporting demonstrations

A number of points were raised about the low profile or misrepresentation of anti-war demonstrations in the media. Becky (journalist) said that a poorly attended demonstration about BBC cuts received worldwide media attention, and that although turn-out alone is not the only marker of a movement’s importance, a more proportionate response to anti-war protests is needed.

Sheila (anti-war activist) asked why a Countryside Alliance demonstration one weekend received far greater media coverage, both during the build-up and afterwards, than a Stop the War demonstration of similar size the following week.

Daniel (freelance journalist) noted that the Guardian’s coverage of the 2000 May Day demonstration was no different to that in the Daily Mail – he asked why would this be the case if journalists on the ground are truly “free” to report the facts, as Sami Ramadani proposed? Daniel queried whether journalists should be covering anti-war demonstrations if, from a news editing perspective, the events in themselves are not necessarily newsworthy without something dramatic taking place. Should there be coverage of a movement, its ideas, or the facts on which the various arguments are structured?

He suggested that a bridge between journalists and activists could operate outside of the realm of “who’s in the SWP, or have you done something exciting on the streets today” and instead focus on building up a subcontext that cannot be ignored in the same way the government does.

Maintaining the movement’s profile – countering ‘Iraq fatigue’

People picked up on Peter Wilby’s recent commentary about “Iraq fatigue” in The Guardian. It was suggested this fatigue is due to the constant nature of the events, so despite extremely high level of atrocities there is no element of surprise or a change warranting greater coverage. This may also elevate or somehow legitimise any story about improvements in the situation, for example recent reports suggesting that the US “surge” has worked.

Trish said a similar problem arose in reporting atrocities in Northern Ireland but did not necessarily reflect public disinterest – would somehow changing the way news is delivered generate more interest in stories?

There was some discussion about the continuing interest in other stories about, e.g. Madeleine McCann and Amy Winehouse, and whether in fact this is therefore rather a “selective” fatigue.

Wilby commented that fatigue arises because newspapers feel that their readers cannot identity with Iraqis and their situation, partly because of the massive scale and horror of their problem, but also because they are of another ethnic background, religion, and culture.

Control of the media and how to resist it

The relationship between power and the means to control the narrative was seen as central to the problem. Sue (journalist) highlighted that effective “propaganda machines” from, for example, the US state department and Israel, monitor sensitive issues extremely closely, leading to a kind of censorship. The opposition does not have the necessary resources to counter this kind of media scrutiny.

NGOs, governmental and other institutions have enormous resources of information and it was suggested that there could be an equivalent resource to help journalists substantiate and explore alternative narratives on the war. Briefings to inform journalists about specific issues, e.g. political use of the UN Charter to legitimise wars of aggression, were suggested.

However, it was pointed out that journalists have the power to avoid inaccurate euphemisms such as “friendly fire” and “met the target” in their language. And a number of alternative sources of information were touched on, such as Arab media outlets, citizen journalism and the internet in general.

Daniel described a need to recreate the framing conditions in the newsroom and to think about how this can be influenced.

Jane Shallice stressed the need to follow trusted activists who read systematically and write investigative pieces for alternative publications. She praised an article in the Financial Times about US bases in Iraq, which followed up a more extensive article in the London Review of Books. She suggested that perhaps more analysis is needed rather than straightforward news briefings.

Peter Wilby noted that a serious limitation to setting up a major resource is the left’s lack of funds and inability to raise revenue the way that right-wing institutes and centres can. The rise of the “PR state” has compounded this problem.

By Caroline Price

A winner. Congratulations. Great conference. I only wished I could have divided myself, several times, to have been able to attend more than one workshop. The whole afternoon was excellent. Thought provoking, informative, enjoyable and you had a really good turn out. With at least two thirds from the media or students of media, you should be very pleased.
Shade

I attended the conference on Saturday and firstly wanted to say thank you for a hugely informative and eye opening day. It’s a topic I’m really interested in (actually doing my dissertation on) and think it’s great that more and more well known journalists and politicians are moving into the spotlight to confront this…
Craig

I was at LSE yesterday and congratulate you and all the contributors on a great event. How could I get hold of a copy of ‘The First Casualty? War, Truth & the Media’ shown during the plenaries? I run an Access to Journalism course for Truro College in Cornwall and would like to show the video to my students.
Jane

I hope you don’t mind me taking this opportunity to say firstly thank you for organising the MWAW Conference I attended at LSE yesterday. The range of speakers was excellent.
Helen

That was one of the best political events I have been to. All credit to you. I aim to be at the meeting on Nov 29
Ian

Fantastic day! It was amazing
Caroline

Congratulations to you and the organising committee on a great conference and a sense of a solid grouping of media folk + others wanting to create Peter Wilby’s famous alternative narrative. Hope further discussion of how to do that on 29 Nov. My feeling is that some will try to ignore the resources MWAW has built up already – briefings and website. I think they should be built on.
Judith

Thanks for organising yesterday’s conference, which I found both thought-provoking and inspiring, especially on account of how many people turned up.
Daniel

Just thought I’d drop a line to say well done for such a great event yesterday – an unequivocal success!
Tim

I thought Saturday’s conference was great. I didn’t stay for the last plenary session so can’t comment on that – but the opening session, and the workshop on Iran, were really useful and informative. A great audience, and some really good speakers.
Margaret

Thanks to everyone for working so hard to make Saturday’s conference at the London School of Comics a success. It was particularly pleasing to see so many new faces. Even I was shocked at the amount of information from Iraq and Afghanistan which is not getting into the media. This is the equivalent on D-Day only reporting Allied landings in Normandy but not reporting Allied landings in the South of France or the 8th Army liberating Italy.
Chris

Just to say many congratulations on a brilliant and really useful day on Saturday. I think the issues you were dealing with are absolutely vital because I believe we now have a military-industrial-media complex. I’m a non-media person & for me the day made explicit lots of things about the way modern media operates that I had half realised but not fully taken on board. I am sure that will be helpful in peace campaigning & general activism. Thanks a lot & best wishes for all you are doing,
Mary

London School of Economics

Saturday November 17 2pm-6.30pm
Hosted by Media Workers Against the War

Contributors:

Andrew Gilligan, Peter Wilby, Michelle Stanistreet, Nick Davies, Sean Langan, Catherine Mayer, Sami Ramadani, Phillip Knightley, Moazzam Begg, Andrew Murray, Rachel Morarjee, Amir Amirani, Piers Robinson and others

Tickets: £10 / £7 – buy securely online: http://mwaw.net/conference

Major media outlets are becoming markedly less questioning and critical in their coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan. Independent studies show an overwhelming pro-war bias after 9/11.

The drums of a new war, this time with Iran, are beating. Will we allow the media to be used to sex up the Iranian “threat”? Sometimes it seems like the Iraqi WMD fiasco never happened.

With the recent breast-beating about media integrity, now is the time to look again at reporting the “war on terror”. This conference will set out the issues and debate how best to campaign to improve standards. It will seek to identify the main sources of pro-war bias as a first step to providing media workers with tools and resources for combating it.

* Have the media learned the lessons of Iraq?
* What are the pitfalls in reporting Iran?
* What can the BBC do to stand up to government bullying?
* What should accurate coverage of modern war look like?
* Are Muslims being unfairly targeted in the media?

Come and debate these key issues for our industry.

Tickets: £10 / £7 – buy securely online: http://mwaw.net/conference

“I am very critical of the way in which the media failed to ask the proper questions in the run-up to war, and the way in which much of the British media, if not the US, seems now to have put reporting from Iraq in the “too difficult” category. This is the most important story in the world and it’s amazing how little coverage it gets in the British press. “
Andrew Gilligan, sacked by the BBC
September 2007

“The press has apparently learnt nothing from the dodgy dossiers and phantom WMDs that preceded the Iraq war.”
Peter Wilby, Media Guardian
April 2007

For more information and conference updates email thefirstcasualty@mwaw.net or call 07801 789 297

Aegis in September won the largest single security contract yet in Iraq, awarded by the Pentagon to co-ordinate the 20,000 private armed guards working in Iraq, and worth up to $475m (£234m). (Financial Times, Sep 15)

A US military inquiry into the videotapes has been closed, with no further action expected.

Since 2004 Aegis says it has travelled more than 3m miles throughout Iraq and completed more than 20,000 missions. Aegis is run by former army officer Tim Spicer, former chief executive of Sandline International, which was involved in the 1998 “arms to Africa” scandal during the Sierra Leone civil war.

This is a real problem for the anti-war movement – the notion among senior editors and managers that “we’ve done Iraq” and that it’s time to move on. Here they are just mimicking Blair’s oft-stated desire to “draw a line” under Iraq.

It means reporters and documentary makers can’t get important investigative work published or broadcast.

Of course, the public’s interest in Iraq isn’t constant: the Financial Times noted recently (Oct 23) that “the war in Iraq has ceased to be the US’s hot political issue”

But that is partly because politicians drop the issue in a concerted attempt to divert attention away from the war, and also because the corporate media takes their lead and gets “bored” with the subject.

In fact, Piers’ decision to publish the photos was totally justified. The photos represented what actually took place, even though they were faked.

Stuart MacKenzie, a private in the Territorial Army who served with the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in Iraq, orchestrated the photos. A court martial against him was dropped, however, and he was cleared of all criminal charges in 2005.

Also, Mackenzie kept a diary where he boasted about the violence meted out to Iraqi civilians during his tour of duty in Iraq in 2003. Last year he appeared as a prosecution witness at the court martial of seven soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. The seven soldiers were accused of abusing of 11 Iraqi civilians in Basra, one of whom, Baha Musa, died. Baha Mousa was found to have had 93 separate injuries to his body, including fractured ribs, a broken nose and kidney failure.

The soldiers were acquitted on insufficient evidence, although one of them, Corporal Donald Payne, became Britain’s first convicted war criminal when he admitted that he had treated Iraqis inhumanely and “enjoyed” hearing Iraqis cry out during torture, referring to their screams as a “choir”. He was jailed for a year.

Mackenzie’s diary contained detailed accounts of abuse of Iraqis. Moreover, at the trial Iraqi civilian Muhanned Thaher Abdullah al-Mansouri said that – among other things — he had been urinated on by his captors.

So Piers Morgan published photos of abuse that really happened. He was sacked for depicting the truth of British abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

Those editors of British media who repeated the governments’ lies about the “Iraqi threat”, however, are still in their jobs.

If that wasn’t enough, Philip Stephen’s extraordinary article (Oct 5) demonstrates another theme of this blog – namely, the connection between Islamophobia in the media and pro-war reporting.

Stephens launches a scathing attack on CBBC, the BBC’s TV service for 6-12 year olds, accusing it of a politically correct “pseudo-liberalism”, a “perverse and dangerous mindset” that leads it to be biased in favour of al-Qaeda. He singles out a page on the CBBC website which discusses the events of 9/11 and offers it as proof that the BBC is soft on terrorism:

“The BBC’s omissions, the careful juxtaposition of alleged cause and effect, and the choice of language invite the conclusion that there is moral equivalence between a US presence in the Middle East and the random slaughter of innocents.”

This is Stephens’ cue for a lot of self-righteous guff about al-Qaeda, wheeling out the tired canard of neo-cons the world over – that Bin Laden is the new Hitler and al-Qaeda the new Nazism. You can see what’s coming next… Because the BBC doesn’t support the USA (Stephens would have us believe), it is on the side of the terrorists:

“From a studiously neutral standpoint, it becomes entirely logical to condemn abuses perpetrated by the US, while glossing over the bestial violence of its enemies. … The most the BBC will offer by way of judgment on al-Qaeda-inspired jihadis seems to be as follows: ‘Although they claim to be on a holy war, many Muslims say what they are doing is very wrong.’ That is just not good enough. Impartiality cannot throw out universal values.”

Stephens’ argument is fairly easy to tackle at a factual level.

The page on the CBBC website that gives him such offence is part of a package on 9/11. The previous page of the package describes al-Qaeda as “a militant Islamic group” and points out that Bin Laden laughed and boasted about the attacks – which the package makes clear killed 3000 people – and spoke of his joy. Twice the package makes it clear that al-Qaeda is a terrorist organisation.

The implication seems really quite abundantly clear that al-Qaeda is a dreadful organisation that takes pleasure from mass killing. It is hard to detect any “moral equivalence” at work. CBBC is aimed at young children, after all. Is that really the place for red-faced, table-thumping outrage? Moreover, there is certainly no trace of moral equivalence in CBBC’s treatment of the Iraq war (here and here), while the BBC’s adult package on al-Qaeda is completely different.

So Stephens has taken a children’s website and used it, out of all context, to pin all the crudest right-wing slurs on the BBC ’s coverage of war and Islam. Perhaps this was an original piece of research on his part? Sadly, no. It was taken from The Sun on September 11, 2007.

So the Financial Times, the country’s most serious liberal organ, is reduced to taking crumbs from Murdoch’s table and regurgitating them as pseudo-intellectual outrage. How are the mighty fallen.

The only reason the FT could get away with publishing such an article is because of the prevailing climate in politics and the media which screams at every opportunity that the BBC is “left wing” and a sucker for liberal causes. We need to fight back. The conference on November 17 at the London School of Economics must become the beginning of a real campaign to defend the BBC, and to silence those who use the media to make excuses for war.

“Scribbler”

P.S. I have just watched the stunning documentary “Taxi from the Dark Dide” broadcast on BBC 2 late on Monday (Oct 8th). There could be no better rejoinder to Philip Stephens.

I was in Riyadh reporting for British Satellite News, a government-funded news agency. We were covering an official visit by Bill Rammell, the minister for lifelong learning. Saudi Arabia is keen to educate and train its own teenagers in order to reduce the country’s dependence on imported labour and skills. The visit was designed to establish potentially lucrative educational ties between the two countries.

In line with UK policy Bill Rammell asked the Saudi ministers about democratic and social reform. Sipping mint tea in the sumptuous majlis, or parliament, the minister’s first attempt to tackle the Saudis on human rights was ignored. Instead, the Saudi ministers emphasised their country’s need for welders. The minister took the stonewalling well, seamlessly praising his hosts for limited reforms in local elections, while coaxing them again: when would women get equal opportunity? And when would the Saudi people get the vote?

At this point, the UK Ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, who’d been whispering in the minister’s ear throughout, intervened. The Saudi translator, he said, wasn’t up to the mark, and had made several mistakes. The ambassador, a fluent Arabic speaker, announced that he would take over as the minister’s personal translator, whispering in his ear. Fine for the minister, but impossible for anyone else to hear.

I protested quietly that I wouldn’t know what the Saudis were saying, but I was ignored. Later I was told the Saudis had explained that women were being allowed equal employment and education, but would remain segregated for their own good. They would not be allowed into politics or given the vote.

Nor would anyone else get the vote: the Saudi people had shown that they were perfectly happy with the House of Saud in charge, so why on earth would the House of Saud want to impose democracy?

If this was what Bill Rammell heard he was unable to debate it. The meeting was over, we were off to film at the medina and the minister was off to inspect oilwells in Eastern Province.

Returning to London, I wrote my report, including what I had been able to glean from the exchanges at the Saudi parliament. The report was doctored by the editor, Mike Nolan, to remove the Saudi government’s views on democracy and women’s rights.

We now know, what I did not know then, that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is the man who warned the UK government that the Saudis would end security co-operation if the police investigation into allegations of £60 million worth of hospitality for the Saudis in connection with British Aerospace’s “Al Yamamah” arms deal went ahead. The inquiry of course was duly dropped.

For me as a journalist the Foreign Office’s editorial influence at BSN was making it more and more difficult to do my job. I reported remarks by Dennis McNamara, the UN’s highly respected adviser on displacement, denouncing the west for flooding Africa with arms. Mike Nolan called me in for a little chat. Did I realise who our client was? Why did I persist in writing critical reports?

I tried to argue that our job was not to report professionally, so that the clients – in my view overseas broadcasters, and not the FCO – would trust us. Mike Nolan told me the UN adviser’s words were “too close to the bone” and they were removed from my report._I no longer work at BSN, but its biased and flawed material is being used by hundreds of TV stations in the Middle East and Asia. All this is funded by the Foreign and Diplomatic Service, courtesy of the British taxpayer, to the tune of some £3 million per year.

Another tale that ran into trouble was when I reported perfectly friendly remarks by Tony Blair about Islam, the war on terror and other contentious issues, made on the record to a world audience. Even these were removed by BSN on FCO orders. If the Foreign Office can censor its own Prime Minister to feed distorted news to the Arab world, how can Britain be trusted there?

Mike Nolan told the Journalist: “Unlike Bruce, I have no intention of breaking my confidentiality on what went on between the two of us. I completely refute his version of events. “It is wrong to suggest I doctor scripts. Bruce was certainly not alone in having his material subbed. When material was reduced I nearly always took the time to explain why. Bruce’s claim he ran into trouble when he reported friendly remarks made by PM Blair about Islam is untrue. I am not censored by the Foreign Office; I did not censor Bruce. BSN prides itself on providing accurate and balanced information on news and developments in the UK.”

The survey, by Opinion Research Business (ORB), asked a representative sample of 1,461 Iraqis how many members of their household had died as a result of the conflict. The survey showed that over 1.2 million Iraqis had died, with the death rate now exceeding the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Almost one in two households in Baghdad have lost a family member.

ORB is about as mainstream as you can get. It has been commissioned by the Tory Party, by the BBC (most recently by Newsnight), and its work is cited frequently in the British media.

When an ORB opinion poll in Iraq earlier this year provided statistics that were supportive of the occupation, it was splashed all over the Sunday Times (here and here) and other newspapers internationally.

So far only the Los Angeles Times has carried this story, although this weekend’s Observer mentioned it prominently within another article.

Why hasn’t the story been picked up elsewhere? If this isn’t double standards, what is?

Media Workers Against the War contacted ORB and spoke to managing director Johnny Heald. Mr Heald said that, although the press release had been on ORB’s website since Friday, the results of the survey will be formally launched on Tuesday (September 18).

He said that ORB has no ideological position: after publishing previous poll results on Iraq it was accused of being right-wing, but now he expects that left-wing media will pick up on the new research.

Mr Heald said that an objection to ORB’s latest findings might be that, with so many deaths, where are all the bodies? He said the organsation’s interviewers in Iraq, led by the respected pollster Munqeth Daghir, say people don’t report many murders for fear of reprisal. Four ORB interviews have themselves been murdered, he said.

Mr Heald also pointed out that the survey showed 48% had died from gunshot wounds, which is significant because car bombs and aerial bombardments usually make the news – gunshots rarely get into the headlines.

This figure tallies with the Lancet research, which found that 56% of violent deaths were a result of gunfire.

The plight facing Iraqis “is as significant (as Darfur),” says Margarette Wahlstrom, deputy head of the UN’s aid coordination arm Ocha.

Comparisons between emergencies are difficult but in terms of displaced people alone, Iraq’s crisis, with 4m displaced people, is double that of Darfur. For Iraq to be described in similar terms as Sudan – whose plight has mobilised a new generation of human rights activists – is striking testament to how bad the situation has become.

In early 2003, before US forces crossed the border from Kuwait, Iraqis may have thought things could not get much worse. A crippling conflict with Iran, followed by the first Gulf war and a decade of sanctions, had crippled the economy and left many millions dependent on food handouts.

But, anecdotally at least, the situation in mid-2007 is now even more dire than in 2003. “As far as children’s living conditions go, they are worse now than immediately prior to the war,” says Claire Hajaj, who works for Unicef, the children’s agency, in Amman.

Oxfam, the international aid agency, said in a recent report that 8m Iraqis were in urgent need of emergency aid, while “many more are living in poverty, without basic services, and increasingly threatened by disease and malnutrition. If people’s basic needs are left unattended, this will only serve to further destabilise the country.”

Iraqis are fleeing their homes in their millions, in the largest Middle East population movement since the creation of Israel. Jennifer Pagonis, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency, says the monthly rate of displacement has reached more than 60,000 people.

More than 2m Iraqis are displaced inside Iraq, and struggling to survive. Syria estimates that it now hosts more than 1.4m Iraqis, while Jordan has between 500,000 and 750,000. Both countries’ social services are overwhelmed, and even those Iraqi refugees who once had resources say their money is running out.

Unfortunately, what may now be the world’s biggest humanitarian emergency is – by comparison with the global angst over Darfur – relatively unnoticed. A serious problem, aid workers say, is that rampant insecurity means international relief officials cannot go in, and accurate numbers are almost impossible to find.

Based in Amman, the UN’s humanitarian operation relies mainly on local actors, who have reasons to massage the figures, and most official statistics date from 2005 and early 2006, before the bombing of a major Shia shrine in Samarra precipitated a new surge in sectarian violence.

At that point, indicators broadly did not suggest that Iraqis were faring as badly as before the war. Nevertheless, even then a comprehensive survey published in May 2006 by the World Food Programme revealed that more than 4m people (15.4 per cent of the surveyed population) were food insecure, and in dire need of different types of humanitarian assistance – 11 per cent higher than two years earlier.

The WFP is currently supporting a nationwide Food Security Survey; which should be ready by the first half of January 2008. “Figures are hard to come by. We know that things have got worse particularly in the latter half of 2006 and first quarter of 2007, but we haven’t got the stats to prove it,” says Ms Hajaj.

“All we have is qualitative data from our field people, who report drug shortages in hospitals, long queues at the ante-natal centres, curfews forbidding travel to hospital after dark, closed schools, frightened students and exhausted teachers.”

What can be said is that Iraq’s indicators are almost universally worse than those of its neighbours. Iraq’s maternal mortality rates in 2004 were 1 in 65 deaths, compared to 1 in 130 for Syria and 1 in 450 for Jordan. Immunisation rates were 55 per cent, compared to 68 per cent in 2000 and 95 per cent and 99 per cent in Jordan and Syria respectively.

The UN estimates that only 30 per cent of the population has access to safe water, and with only 17 per cent of Iraq’s sewage treated before release, the majority of Iraqis are living in unsanitary conditions – evidenced by a recent cholera outbreak in northern Iraq.

According to Oxfam, only 60 per cent of 4m Iraqis reliant on food aid have access to rations through the government-run Public Distribution System (PDS), down from 96 per cent in 2004. Forty-three per cent of Iraqis suffer from ‘absolute poverty’, with over half the population out of work.

It also claims child malnutrition rates have risen from 19 per cent before the US-led invasion in 2003 to 28 per cent now; while the number of Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies has risen from 50 per cent to 70 per cent since 2003.

Education is also in crisis. During the last year, the UN warns that many schools in the Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala areas were closed, and at least one in five children did not attend classes nationwide. In the south and north, teachers are struggling to accommodate displaced pupils who were able to re-enroll; many others were not because of bureaucratic hurdles.

“The people of Iraq have a right, enshrined in international law, to material assistance that meets their humanitarian needs, but this right is being neglected,” says Oxfam.

”The government of Iraq, international donors, and the United Nations (UN) system… have a responsibility to find ways to secure the right conditions for the delivery of assistance, both where conflict is intense and in less insecure parts of the country to which many people have fled.”

• That the Deobandi current of Islam “gave birth to the Taliban” and runs half of Britain’s mosques
• A bloke in the Deobandi leadership “loathes the British”, Jews and Christians;
• And of course, he wants Muslims to “shed blood”.

These allegations were generalised into a vituperative Times leader attacking “this virulent, exclusionary, uncompromising extremism”. And then, the icing on the cake – columnist Rod Liddle spelt out what all this is getting at, namely, you can’t make any distinction between moderate and extremist Muslims:

“The terms moderate and extremist are not much use to us when considering Islam; they sort of merge with one another.”

Monday’s Times followed all this up by giving a new twist to the hoary old row about the “mega-mosque” in East London also being controlled by extremists. This in turn was nothing but a re-hash of Friday afternoon’s Evening Standard’s re-hash of the original piece in the Times!

This is all textbook Islamophobic reporting, and it can be pulled apart quite easily.

The accusation that Deobandis are the British wing of the Taleban is laughable; it’s like saying the co-operative movement is responsible for Stalin’s Gulag, or that Cambridge University fosters fascism because BNP leader Nick Griffin got a degree there. As one Deobandi leader put it, it’s just “a load of rubbish“.

Ahmed Rashid, the Telegraph’s Central Asia correspondent, in his masterful book on the Taliban, spells out at some length that “The Deobandis, a branch of Sunni Hanafi Islam, have had a history in Afghanistan, but the Taliban’s interpretation of the creed has no parallel anywhere in the Muslim world.” Taliban madrassas “were run by semi-educated mullahs who were far removed from the original reformist agenda of the Deobandi school”. A clear and detailed exposition of the same position is also to be found in an essay by the historian of the Deobandis, Professor Barbara Metcalf.

The Times bends over backwards to make the bloke at the centre of the allegations, Rihadh ul Haq, look like a new Abu Hamza, but flinging lots of mud doesn’t guarantee it will stick. The quotes taken from his speeches are tendentious in the extreme. Ul Haq is certainly no Malcolm X, but Alex Haley’s autobiography of the great black Muslim anti-racist brings out some of the same themes bitterly expressed in Ul Haq’s sermons – namely, a hatred for the surrounding society that hates black people and persecutes Muslims.

As for “seperationism”, in London there are communities of Jews who still dress the same way they did in Lithuania a century or more ago and do not mix much with outsiders. They receive no great criticism for this. The same is true of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and various Christian sects in the USA. With Muslims, however, the media grab any stick they can to beat them with.

The Times’ reporter, Andrew Norfolk, has a pedigree of Islamophobic reporting – he is a neo-con journalist with an agenda. But he is just a cog in the machine. As even the conservative Wall Street Journal writer Paul Craig Roberts has recently pointed out: “An entire industry has been created that is devoted to demonising Islam”.

In a remarkable article, Roberts continues: “In the US it is acceptable, even obligatory in many circles, to hate Muslims and to support violence against them. … Blind ignorant hate against Muslims has been brought to a boiling point.”

Roberts points out how this Islamophobia is laying the basis for an attack on Iran. It goes without saying that Murdoch’s Fox News is a chief proponent of military action on Iran.

The UK has its own industry demonising Muslims. Its techniques are crude but effective – and a shameful comment on British journalism.
By Dave Crouch

The Mail, after all, had the same story from the same sources on August 31, and the Telegraph on the very next day, as did the Mirror.

In fact the story has been floating around for most of this decade and regularly resurfaces in one form or another.

So why should the Indy run with it now? Could it be that the anniversary of 9/11 found the paper without the obligatory story reminding middle England that those uppity Muslims are still making our lives difficult for us six years on? The other papers had “controversial expansion” of Muslim schools, while Newsnight is banging on about books in libraries.

The Independent quoted the author of the research on Leicester, known for his anti-racist views, saying that discussion of “minority white cities” is a “a crude expression of fear”.

But the fine traditions of Fleet Street have never allowed rationality to get in the way of a good headline.

Sitting in a High Court conference room one cold January day in 2004, little did we foresee the implications for Britain’s last well-loved national institution of what we were hearing. Of course we didn’t. We were too busy fighting to suppress the laughter to find the energy for clairvoyance.

For me, ever the professional, it proved a losing battle. Lord Hutton had weakened resistance by repeatedly pronouncing the word mass, as in WMD, to rhyme with arse, indeed farce. When he then revealed that the furthest he could go, in judging whether Alastair Campbell pressured John Scarlett to spice up the intelligence, was that just maybe, Scarlett had sensed some unspoken desire of Campbell’s that the reports be less equivocal and subliminally reacted to it, that was it. The giggling erupted, and I scurried from the room before His Lordship had me removed. This high point of judicial buffoonery soon lost its comic edge.

Within a day, a flawlessly executed establishment fix had removed chairman Gavyn Davies and director general Greg Dyke, and set the template for the cowardice under fire we now see from the BBC almost daily. Today, thanks to a monumentally clueless retired Law Lord, we look on helplessly as the BBC commits a lingering form of professional suicide.

It was snowing in the Strand that January day, and from memory I’m pretty sure that was the last time any snow settled in London. It should go without saying that one can draw no conclusion about climate change from the meteorological observation that that snowfall in one part of one country has all but vanished, where 30 years ago it was plentiful. It should do, but it doesn’t.

The central reason for the BBC’s abandonment of its climate change telethon Planet Relief is that those who dismiss global warming as a leftie conspiracy to purloin more taxes do not play by the same rules. To them, much as for Messrs Scarlett and Campbell, anything may be adduced as decisive proof.

Almost every paper has its resident climate change gainsayer… a hack with at most a chemistry O-level who, through some mystical process of scholarly osmosis has come to understand this complex subject better than all those hundreds of scientists, armed with powerful computer simulations, who have devoted their working lives to it. There are countless examples of their work, but one will suffice to give a flavour. A while ago, the Daily Mail’s Tom Utley assuaged worries about water levels rising as a result of melting glaciers on this single ground: when the ice in his gin and tonic melts, explained Mr Utley (and one presumes this won him a fellowship of the Royal Society), the liquid doesn’t come spilling over the top of his glass.

There are at least a dozen equally gifted amateurs in the national press, along with a small but vocal band of politicians and even the odd scientist, whose views dissent sharply from the mainstream. Somehow this elite corps has created a weather system of its own to freeze the well-meaning but enfeebled heart of the BBC.

I yield to no one in my disdain for TV marathons in which soap actors and comics brandish their empathy like AK47s, spraying bullets of misplaced moral superiority at the viewer. But I also accept that the likes of Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis are heroes for the barely calculable good they do in raising not merely money but awareness of the gravest global problems.

It isn’t easy to picture Lord Reith sitting in his armchair revelling in the sight of Davina McCall prancing across a stage in a £16,000 designer outfit hectoring the viewership to cough up for the starving of Somalia. But if there is a more effective modern translation of his mission statement about the need to “inform, educate and entertain” than a climate change telethon, I can’t imagine what it might be.

There is plenty of room too, of course, for more rigorous scientific documentaries for those who prefer them, and such a series will apparently replace Planet Relief. But when it comes to engaging a young audience with the perceived attention span of a goldfish in early stage Alzheimer’s, what you need is Ricky Gervais reprising his well-worn parody of the faux-altruistic celeb.

Trailing this latest act of BBC cravenness at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Newsnight editor Peter Barron declared that it isn’t the Beeb’s job to save the world. This brings to mind a politician whom few of you will remember. Long ago, it was the rhetorical gambit of a Mr Tony Blair to address only those arguments that had never been made.

No one to my knowledge has ever said that the BBC exists to save the world, or that this was Planet Relief’s intent. To conflate the desire to inform and educate about what may or may not be a danger to humanity with a megalomaniacal Messiah complex is the cheapest form of intellectual chicanery. If Mr Barron cannot trust his employer to include, in an entire day of programming, sufficient caveats about the reliability of scientific opinion, he might think about working for a less irresponsible broadcaster.

The truth is that this climbdown has nothing to do with the desire to avoid preachiness or partiality; and everything to do with the blind fear of being attacked that is the residue of Hutton and those recent, foolish but trivial misjudgments over that Queen documentary and those “live” TV phone in competitions.

Thirty years ago, when the snow fell freely over London, our elders and betters routinely referred to British institutions with stereotypical English smugness. The Royal Family, the NHS, the police, the judicial system, Lloyds of London and the BBC … each and every one was, to the ever nostalgic inhabitants of a fading post-imperial power, “the best in the world”.

Of the above, only the BBC deserved that reputation then, and only the BBC retains it now. Quite suddenly it is in jeopardy, however, not because there is another broadcaster on this planet fit to lick the boots of a corporation which, for all its foibles and errors, remains peerlessly trustworthy in the facet of public service broadcasting that matters most – the reporting and interpretation of fact. The BBC’s reputation is imperilled because those who run it, still paralysed by post-Hutton traumatic stress, lack the balls to eschew grovelling for every trivial cock-up in favour of telling its critics that they won’t take lectures on ethics and bias from tabloid newspapers and disgraced government propagandists.

The one memorable thing widely known about Mark Thompson, Mr Dyke’s successor as director general, is that one day in 1988, for reasons that remain opaque, he bit a newsroom colleague on the arm. How the Beeb needs him to relocate his incisors and that latent attack dog instinct now.

The programme, “Immigration – How we Lost Count“, was transmitted on July 23 and purported be an impartial look at how the government has lost count of the number of migrants arriving in places like Slough.

However, the programme merely reinforced racist myths about migrants.

It repeatedly claimed that over-stretched council services are the result of immigration, rather than under-funding. The program did not acknowledge that migrants actually contribute more to the economy than they ever take in benefits.

It also featured a number of alleged examples of anti-social behaviour by immigrants – including locals accusing Roma gypsies of defecating on the street – and then invited the audience to generalise to all immigrants.

It stated crime had been rising in Slough and implied that this is linked to the presence of Roma gypsies. The police, as the program reports, actually blame rising population, not any single racial group.

The programme was broadcast after months of racist hysteria in the media about immigration to Slough, much of it led by the BBC. A headline on the BBC website read: “Roma children flood into Slough“.

By Tom Wall

The programme can be viewed in full here.
Here is the BBC’s response to viewers’ complaints. The length of the reply point to the weight of criticism levelled against the Corporation:

Thank you for your email regarding ‘Panorama: Immigration: How We Lost Count’.

Please accept our apologies for the delay in replying. We know our correspondents appreciate a quick response and we are sorry you have had to wait on this occasion.

The programme has responded to concerns raised by some viewers about this edition of Panorama which transmitted on 23 July regarding immigration, the response is below:

“However we look at it, immigration is always a controversial topic which arouses strong feelings from individuals of every political persuasion.

This was a programme about how the government have lost count of the number of people living in our towns and cities and how that impacts on the local authorities who have to provide services to their residents. Obviously the pressure on services is greater in areas of high migration such as Slough.

This was NOT a programme about Asylum seekers or illegal immigrants. It was made quite clear throughout the programme that the majority of people who have come to Slough to work have done so legally. Slough has a long history of attracting migrants from all over the world. It is an extremely diverse town (more than 128 nationalities have registered for work) and it has a strong sense of social cohesion and integration. All these points were made in the programme.

However, since the European Union widened its borders in 2004, many more legal migrants have arrived, and while Slough has welcomed them, they have contributed to the pressure on the town’s infrastructure. As a nation we have encouraged immigration for the economic benefits it brings and the taxes paid by migrant workers boost our governments’ coffers. Buy most of this money stays with central government and does not help the councils who must provide local services. Slough Borough Council are so concerned that they commissioned 3 independent research projects to assess the scale of the problem and have been lobbying Parliament for a solution.

Our aim in this programme was to report the story as we found it and that meant in part reflecting the most commonly held opinions by people who actually live in Slough (many of whom are former migrants themselves).

Inevitably, some of these opinions are unpalatable to many people, but that does not mean that these voices do not also have a right to be heard. Indeed, one could argue that it is possibly more important in a democracy to hear the opinions of those we don’t agree with, than simply hearing the opinions of those we do.

It is a fact that more people create more rubbish and the impact this is having on Slough’s refuse collection service has been well documented. More rubbish in the streets makes people disgruntled and is one of the issues which increases negative feelings towards newcomers. This is an unpleasant reality we would do well not to ignore.

Sometimes, hearing people voicing negative beliefs enables us to dispel myths, such as the notion, commonly held, that migrants are given access to local authority housing on arrival in the country – not true. In fact, our programme tried to dispel that myth and point up both the need for housing and the pressure on Slough’s housing department as well as how some migrants are being exploited by unscrupulous landlords.

Our job as journalists is to report the facts of the situation on the ground. If we presented a report which did not acknowledge the stresses and strains on the town and how these are making normally reasonable people feel, we would not be doing our job. Some viewers have suggested that our reporting may have encouraged racism, we have tried our best for this not to be the case, but just as a programme about obesity may result in some people expressing prejudice, it should not mean issues of major importance are to be avoided.

Some viewers have made comments about the way both the Somali and the Roma residents in Slough were portrayed in the programme. Most of the Somali groups in Slough are legal migrants with Dutch passports, who have come voluntarily direct from Holland. They chose to leave Holland for their own reasons and come to live in Britain instead. This is their right as European citizens to do so. But it is still a fact that they now need housing and other services like any other local residents. As with the other residents of Slough, including the vast majority of Poles, those that work, pay taxes which go back to central government, not to the local council which must provide their services.

While Roma gypsies are indigenous to Europe and are not necessarily from Romania, The Roma featured in this programme were mainly Roma gypsies from Romania. Like the other European citizens, they have chosen to come to live in Slough of their own free will. The pressure put upon the local councils’ resources from some of this community is proportionally far greater than their numbers suggest.

There are also a very large number of residents who have complained to both the council and the police about anti-social behaviour from some of this group. The allegation that some of the Roma have been defecating in public was raised by no less than 50-70 local residents in a meeting which we attended but were not allowed to film. As a result we felt it was appropriate and representative to have 2 locals mentioning a problem felt by so many. While both the council and the police are trying to address these issues, it is indicative of the problem that not one member of the Roma community could be persuaded to attend a wider community meeting. Richard Bilton’s attempt to talk to some of the Roma on the street needed to be seen and their polite refusal on the grounds that people had already judged them was, we felt, very powerful.

Some viewers have taken issue with Slough’s efficiency and suggested that their problems may be more one of inefficiency than dispute over population statistics and under funding. It could be argued that councils can always “do better” and there will always be debate around how funding is distributed particularly as resources become scarce. We have to deal with facts, and critics should note that this year’s independent Audit Commission report on Slough describes it as “performing well – consistently above minimum requirements” and notes that while resources are constrained, the council have secured significant savings without reducing service delivery.

It is likely that the issues raised by this programme will continue to provoke debate for some time to come. This we hope will be a positive thing as it raises legitimate questions about the long term impact of population movement across Europe and how our country is run. We hope it will not be used to further ignorance or prejudice.”

Nevertheless, I would like to take this opportunity to assure you that your comments, concerns and misgivings have been recorded for the attention of senior management and the relevant programme makers.

Thank you once again for taking the time to contact us.

Regards

Colin Thomson

BBC Information

The three soldiers’ deaths, by contrast, warranted two days of front page stories (among them the Evening Standard, Guardian, Telegraph, Observer, Sunday Telegraph) and huge spreads inside about the men who died, the loss felt by their families, and agonised speculation about how further deaths could be avoided.

Comparison with the scale of civilian deaths warranted one line in articles in the Independent, the Scotsman, the Guardian, and right at the end of stories in the Herald and the Daily Record.

A day after the incident, Afghan elders said that airstrikes had killed 12 civilians in Helmand. This incident went unreported in the British press.

Even the Afghan government says some 1,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan during the conflict in 2006 alone. In June, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, a coalition of more than 90 aid agencies, said at least 230 Afghan civilians had been killed by western troops this year. The rate has been increasing. Aid agencies say that in 2006 the number of civilians killed by both sides was 700-1,000, the highest figure since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001.

There is a word for the enormous disparity between the media’s concern for “our” troops and Afghan civilians. It’s called racism.

P.S. The Financial Times covered the friendly fire story as a 60-word brief on page 6 (Aug 25).

West Midlands’ finest set out to investigate Muslim “preachers of hate” after Birmingham Labour MP Roger Godsiff complained that Muslims shown in the documentary were “racist”. The BNP’s Nick Griffin demanded the mosques shown on the programme be shut down as a precaution against the “psychological virus” of Islam.

But the boys in blue feel Channel 4 has cheated them. They have complained to the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, after the Crown Prosecution Service examined the documentary and found that: “The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying.” To reach their conclusion, the CPS looked at 56 hours of footage on which the hour-long programme was based.

The managing director of Hard Cash [surely "Facts"? ed.] productions, which made Undercover Mosque, says it was “one of the programmes I’m most proud of“. Which aspect of the programme, and the reaction to it, was most worthy of pride, one wonders?

Was it the BNP’s gleeful response? Or was it that the judge at the trial of the July 21 bomb plotters told the jury that they should “ignore it completely” because “It’s a very good example of why you should close your mind completely to the media and concentrate on what is said in this courtroom”?

Was it that the programme invited Muslim organisations to respond just two weeks before it was broadcast? Or perhaps that it visited just four out of the UK’s 1,200 mosques, using just two DVDs to smear London’s largest Islamic centre?

Maybe he is proud of sexing up the programme with crude techniques, such as a sound track like “a cheap Fox News report“, as the Press Gazette put it? Is he proud of showing no audience reaction to what preachers had said, implying that Muslims are passive, unthinking dupes?

Is he proud of making dramatic cuts to footage of women in hijabs and burkhas whenever ignorant mullahs spouted off about male supremacy, as if the two were in some way related?

The programme was a textbook example of Islamophobic reporting, repeating the message that, however “moderate” Muslims claim to be, it is the fundamentalists who are really pulling the strings.

Undercover Mosque is part of an established genre, including John Ware’s Panorama programmes and Richard Watson’s reports for Newsnight and File on 4 – both singled out for fulsome praise last week by Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news (Talking Politics, BBC Radio 4, August 4, 2007. Listen to it here).

That the police were forced to complain to Ofcom is a staggering, stunning victory for the Muslim campaigners and their friends who have pursued their critique of “Undercover Mosque”. But it is also a call to action.

It is pointless arguing with the Nick Cohens, the Melanie Phillips’s and the army of media commentators who have never missed an opportunity to attack Muslim’s “culture of victimhood” and dismiss the very notion of Islamophobia. But the scandal of “Undercover Mosque” will have made many journalists look again at some of their methods and assumptions.

This is an opportunity to go on the offensive against those in the media who have made Islamophobia the last respectable form of racism against Asian and black people.

Dave Crouch
Chair, MWAW

Let’s look back at some recent history. In 1988 the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, decided to recognise the state of Israel, in other words, he decided to choose the “two state solution”. The Americans accepted this idea, the ambassador in Tunis opened talks and met Arafat. There were still, of course, lots of arguments among the Palestinians.

Arafat made a big error by appearing to support Saddam Hussein in 1990-1991. But as a politician he knew that his constituency was in favour of Saddam.

In September 1993 Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin met with Clinton on the White House lawn, shook hands and signed up to a system, the “Oslo accords”. On paper it looked quite good, and many Palestinians hoped it would offer a way out. But two basic things were wrong with this.

Firstly, the Israelis kept on building settlements on the occupied territories. 1993 passed, then 94, 95, 96 and still they kept building in a way that divided up the remaining territory, it changed the entire geography and was very intrusive.

Secondly, Arafat realised that he had forgotten about the other Palestinians, those living outside the borders of Israel: some 400,000 in Lebanon, 1 million in Jordan, 300,000 in Syria. These were people who had lost their lands inside pre-1967 Israel. At the Camp David summit in 2000, Clinton and Ehud Barack tried to humble Arafat into making a “final status” agreement, but Arafat decided that even if he signed it would be rejected by his constituency.

The talks broke down. The result was another Palestinian uprising, or the “Al-Aqsa” Intifada.

The West tried to institute elections in the occupied territories. But the “wrong” people got elected – the Palestinians were fed up with Fatah (Yasser Arafat’s political party, the dominant organisation in the PLO). In that part of the world you vote for whoever is going to defend you, and Hamas – like Hezbollah in Lebanon – were doing just that. Since Arafat’s death in 2004, Fatah has been led by Mahmoud Abbas, whom I describe as a Petainist figure, like Marshall Petain (whom the Germans allowed to rule an authoritarian regime in the Vichy region of France during World War II).

I was in Beirut recently. I couldn’t understand why the BBC kept going on about “factional fighting”. Any decent reporter or sub knows that the US has been sending finance and arms to Fata for the past year – you can read all about it in Ha’aretz. But this fact was never part of the mainstream reporting. Yet this was why the fighting was taking place – to get rid of Hamas. [For example, see here, here and here]

None of this was reported properly. One or two BBC reporters try their best, such as Jeremy Bowen [and Alan Johnston?]. But we’re getting the wrong information. The Israeli/western case is being put, but not the Palestinian case.

Q. Are Fatah really corrupt? They are constantly accused of it, but is it true?

A. I don’t think that’s the main reason people voted for Hamas, though that was an element of it. Arafat was an ageing leader of a liberation organisation, he was never in charge of a state. So he had debts to repay, emotionally and politically.

The main reason people voted for Hamas was that they were fed up with the system. Fatah was playing games with the Israelis, arresting people and so on. It’s like Hezbollah – a well-run, efficient set-up, none of the thuggery you might expect in the circumstances. The people on the ground adore it because it is looking after them.

Q. Did you yourself ever experience censorship?

A. Just once. An editor called me up and said would I alter a report I had made to include an Israeli denial of an attack on Palestinians. I refused – the Israelis had been firing into a mosque. I said if they want to deny it they can do it in a separate part of the bulletin. And that is what eventually happened: the Israeli denial ran separately from my report, not inside it, as my line-editor had requested. By the way, he told me he was getting a lot of pressure from the Israelis in London.

Things have changed a lot. The Israelis got a shock in 1982 – they got a very bad press when they invaded Lebanon, they realised that their PR was awful. So during the al-Aqsa Intifada they changed their approach, they put a lot more money and organisation into ringing up editors, reporters and so on.

Moreover, I think the BBC has lost its nerve in recent years, it’s afraid. The government funds the BBC, and of course the government is very close to the Americans and the Israelis.

Q. Why did the Palestinians support Saddam in 1990?

A. That’s a very good question. It was a difficult moment. Many Palestinians had family members working in Kuwait, where they were treated like dirt. Saddam was also seen to be standing up to the west. By the way, if you tried to get that across on the BBC it was very difficult. I was in Baghdad then; the Arab governments were backing the coalition against Saddam, but the people didn’t like it.

Q. Who is pulling Fatah’s strings?

A. There are many Fatahs. Their only respected leader, Marwan Barghouti, is in an Israeli jail. There is a long history of Israelis taking out the leaders, for example the time they blew Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin out of his wheelchair.

Q. Wasn’t Hamas at one point funded by the Israelis?

A. In the early 1980s the Israelis built up Hamas. They saw the PLO and Fatah as the main threat, and so they built up alternative leaderships such as the venal “Village Leagues”. But that all blew up with the Intifada. That’s why Hamas became an independent force.

Q. Is it right for the media to use terms such as “the Gaza takeover” by Hamas?

A. This is one of the things that really outrages me. I was sitting in Beirut listening to the BBC, and they kept saying that Hamas had taken over. But it was the other people who were trying to take over, and they got clobbered.

A lot of this was drowned out by the kidnapping of Alan Johnston. Ordinary Palestinian journalists showed the way in terms of campaigning for his release. But the BBC tried to turn him into a kind of Mother Theresa! He’s very embarrassed by it now.

And it was Hamas who freed him. It’s typical of the arrogance of the west that they won’t allow Hamas any credit.

Q. Why are the media so supine?

There’s an acceptance in the British media that our involvement in the Middle East is “helping people to behave better”. But we are not – we are supporting a country that is behaving like a gangster state. It’s not doing us any good.

I’d like to refer you to an excellent article in the New York Review of Books, entitled “Goodbye to newspapers?”

Let’s we look back now at what was said when they went to war in Afghanistan, what were the war aims? They were very basic. If we look back at the speeches by Bush and the pronouncements of the US military, the aim was to destroy Al Qaeda as a force and capture Bin Laden and Mullah Omar (the leader of the Taliban faction that supported al-Qaeda), dead or alive. That was all. Nothing else was said.

In terms of war aims this was (a) extremely limited and (b) very foolish. If you’re going to announce that this is your main aim, then you wait three weeks, then you go into the country and imagine that the people, you want to capture are going to be waiting for you, and then you’re surprised that these people have actually left the country and found new hiding places – it’s slightly bizarre.

In any event, if we accept that these were the war aims, they failed. Far form destroying al-Qaeda they strengthened it. Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Zawahri – the key people on their list – are still at large. But I think there was another reason. I remember 3 weeks after 9/11 I was debating on TV one of Bush’s most fervent supporters in the American media, Charles Krauthammer. The compere asked me what do you think is the real reason for the war in Afghanistan? I said it as a war of revenge, simple as that, they’ve been hit, there’s no basic war aims, they want to strike back, and it’s just revenge. She then turned to Krauthammer to rebut this but he said I agree, what’s wrong with revenge? The compere was absolutely astonished.

That was the aim for a large chunk of the American military establishment, they had to hit back, and they were backed in this by the entire world. Not a single country opposed it because of the position the USA occupies in the world today. Other countries have been victims of terrorist attacks, before and after 9/11, but no one reacts in the same way. And that in itself is a fact worth understanding. The USA is a very special country because of its strength, it is the only imperial power in the world today, and most governments at the time caved into it, there was no criticism.

Ironically enough there was more criticism in the American media in the first few weeks after 9/11 than in the British media, which became totally servile, just shaken by what had happened. The Los Angeles Times published in the first week a 4-page supplement on US foreign policy in the 20th century, looking at everything the US had done to other parts of the world. But this was not permissible here, the atmosphere was fear, you weren’t allowed to open your mouth. I remember a Cambridge academic in ancient history wrote a piece in the London Review of Books saying what’s the fuss about, all the people I meet in academic circles say they had it coming. She was apolitical, just being honest. All hell broke loose in the liberal media, how dare you even publish it? You can think it but don’t publish it. An atmosphere of fear was created.

And within this atmosphere of fear Afghanistan was invaded and occupied without any big battles being fought. Why? Because the Taliban government basically decided not to fight. Why? Because the Pakistan military told it not to fight. It was very dependent on that army, it was armed by them, in fact the Pakistani general inn charge of the ISI, told them: I have been told by the president of Pakistan and the government don’t fight, withdraw, let them take the country, then we’ll see, don’t lose lives. But my advice to you is to fight back.” He was sacked within 24 hours. I make this point to show the links between these two outfits. Without the support of the Pakistani military the Taliban could not have seized power in the first place. It’s not that they didn’t develop their autonomy – they did. But those three crucial weeks the Americans didn’t attack was to give their Pakistani ally time to withdraw its equipment, air force and officers from inside Afghanistan. They were given Pakistani military bases to use, they couldn’t use these bases to hit Pakistani personnel.

So they took Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance, with the approval of the Pakistani and Iranian governments – the Iranians hated the Taliban. If you look at what these people in Pakistan and Iran are saying now, they say we thought it would be different, we thought that it would be a more democratic dispensation, that the occupying powers would institute power sharing very sharply and transform the country. This last bit is not unimportant. One of the reasons they haven’t been able to get any grip on the country, because they have completely failed to build any social infrastructure. Here it is worth comparing with what the Russians did when they occupied Afghanistan in 1979 for 10 years. Their bad luck was that the Afghan communists were tiny, without a real mass base outside Kabul and consisting of largely of squabbling factions. But what they did do was build an infrastructure. However weak, they built schools, hospitals, they educated women, women teachers and doctors, they did succeed in doing that for a while. Which is why even the Russian troops lasted, that government didn’t fall to the offensive against it. They had some element of support because people could seen what they had done.

Corrupt, iniquitous elite

This occupation has done nothing. It costs less than $5000 to build a cheap home in which an ordinary family can live. Ask anyone in Afghanistan how many have been built, virtually none. Most of the money that has gone into the country has been used by the tiny clique around Karzai to build luxury homes and villas, in the face of the most poverty-stricken people in the world, and all this corruption is being defended by NATO troops, and they are seen now as being defenders of this extremely corrupt, iniquitous elite, a tiny ruling elite that runs the country. Without the backing of foreign troops this little group would collapse.

There is constant confusion of Taliban with Pashtun and Taliban with Afghan. This doesn’t exist only on the level of ignorant journalists. I was told by a senior Pakistani government minister that soon after they took Afghanistan Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, in a meeting with high officials in Pakistan actually said the problem is the Pashtun Taliban, we have to wipe them out. How can we do this? The Pakistani foreign minister said: “Why don’t you ask two members of the Taliban sitting at this table? They are Pashtun. Please try to understand, not every Pashtun is Taliban, it’s very divided. But the way you are operating you are going to antagonise them.”

In February this year there was a senate committee in the US on national security and defence that said the following:

“Afghans have over centuries proven themselves to be fierce fighters, particularly when confronting invaders from outside cultures. They repeatedly defeated the British during the 19th century Afghan wars when Britain was the world’s dominant military power. They routed the Soviets during the 1980s when the Soviet Union was the world’s second most dominant military power. Superior military technology does not always win the day, particularly in an era when suicide bombing and improvised explosive devices have proven themselves to be very effective tools in this kind of war. Afghans are used to killing and being killed. Their society has been in a state of war for most of the last two centuries.”

Now, this is pretty accurate. Seventy per cent of Afghans know how to use weapons. That is part of the culture, they’ve been doing it from a very young age, the men mainly. This means it’s not dificult for them when they join a resistance group to start fighting immediately, they know how to do it.

Secondly, the Taliban now is becoming an umbrella organisation for fighting the occupation. Many people who hate it are fighting underneath its umbrella and that is extremely dangerous for the occupying armies because they are isolated, there is no way they can win the war.

The only way they could have done if they wanted to create a slightly different social infrastructure was to spend billions on completely transforming the country, finding an alternative to poppy production. The sales of heroin have shot right up since the occupation. Ironically the Taliban had put a stop to it in the bulk of the country. Afghanistan is supplying 60-70 per cent of the world’s heroin. And you can’t tell the farmers don’t do it because they have nothing else to do. If you read the surveys conducted by the occupying armies when asked what is the biggest problem you confront, 70 per cent of the population say feeding our families twice a day, and we’re prepared to do anything to do so. This the occupation has been completely incapable of doing. How could they? Many people who initially supported the occupation said the Taliban is a horrible government, anything else is better – including many liberal journalists, not just in Britain but in neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, said that. They are now saying it was a very big mistake, we thought the Americans could do some good in the region. But how can you expect an imperial power and a NATO force that operates in today’s world, a neo-liberal world where they are deregulating and privatising everything in their own countries, to go and build a strong state in Afghanistan and make that state a sort of social-democratic one? It’s just unthinkable! And they are not doing it and it is completely isolating them.

Propaganda and news management

Every single day you read reports: 100 militants dead, 50 dead, 30 – don’t believe it, it is pure propaganda, wartime propaganda that goes back to every war waged by imperial powers, that’s how they report it, they assume everyone they kill is an enemy. Which they may or may not be, but by killing them they are making sure that the bulk of the country now is moving to a stage where they want the occupying forces out.

There’s no doubt about that, because they have failed, they have succeeded in destabilising their ally Pakistan where two provinces are in quite a delicate state. And who knows how this is going to end? One reason we don’t know how this is going to end is precisely because of the way the media have plaid it, Iraq was the bad war Afghanistan was the good war. But it wasn’t a good war ever, and it’s become worse as time goes on. So it has to be seriously analysed, there are very few serious journalists who spend time there and report.

One of the ways in which journalism functions today is as a pillar of the system, not just in times of war. There has been a fundamental shift in journalism in the west, largely in television but also to a certain extent in the print media. Serious coverage of the rest of the world is missing in most newspapers and certainly on the TV. You are given sound bites, there is very little regular reporting from important countries in the world so that when something happens you are surprised, people are deliberately encouraged to have short memories, so you forget, you can’t remember. And now we have this category of embedded journalists, who go in with the army and see what the army wants them to see, and then they report on that, which in itself affects the way they write.

Of course there are exceptions, Robert and Fisk and Patrick Cockburn break these rules. But they are few and far between. When a few journalists on British TV did it during the Balkan wars they were denounced. When John Simpson said he was watching the television station in Belgrade being bombed and he was appalled by it, he was denounced.

News management in all the western countries, but especially in Britain, is reaching the levels of an art form. There is a crisis of this news management thanks to the Iraq war. The fact that you have a majority of the population opposing a war and the majority of politicians in parliament supporting it created a crisis for the system of news management. When the BBC tried to balance it, it wasn’t permitted, even though it was a very strange kind of balancing there was an attempt. But Blair sacked his own placemen at the BBC, Gavin Davies and Greg Dyke, after the bogus Hutton report. As Dyke revealed in his memoirs, the real reason was not Hutton but the constant pressure from 10 Downing Street during the coverage of the demonstrations, the reporting of the war.

University departments teaching journalism have to teach what is the power of journalism. Students have to decide what sort of journalists they want to be, either it’s like selling goods in a shop – that’s one sort of journalism. Or the other sort of journalism is, I’m not saying a biased journalism, but a critical, independent-minded, aware journalism which at least tries to seek the truth.

In Afghanistan this has not existed, with rare exceptions. By and large that country has been written off as a small, poor country. It’s not that small – 29 million people, bigger than many members of the EU, and Scotland. So it’s a country that’s ignored because it’s not covered, and it’s not covered because covering it won’t benefit those who are occupying it. And this is not just a problem with the British media, it’s a European media. The press releases – you can see them in virtually every mainstream European newspaper, the reports are often the same.

I’ll give you another example of how PR dominates journalism. I was travelling two or three weeks ago and could read most of the European papers. There was a story coming out of Saudi Arabia, obviously a PR story, saying we’ve visited a school where those terrorists who supported al-Qaeda are now sitting in a class being re-educated. A total fantasy. Published in the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, Le Monde, El Pais, The Herald tribune. Exactly the same story.

What happens from the Saudi government’s PR agency happens generally because they’ve down-graded serious coverage of the world. Take Somalia – no one knows what’s gong on, it’s just not covered. Afghanistan is not so bad because British troops are being killed, and British politicians go there for a photo-op with the brave boys. But that’s about it.

This is a big, big problem confronting us. We have the problem of Afghanistan and we have the problem of what is happening to journalism. Both have to be fought against because they are both related.

In the index to Alastair Campbell’s The Blair Years, you will find entries for Kosovo and Afghanistan, but not for Iraq. So if you want to search for the inside story of how Campbell spun the war, you will have to plough through the press supremo’s staccato prose. You will be disappointed. Campbell tells us little about what was, after all, supposed to be his main job: keeping journalists onside. Even the Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh puts in only four appearances, while distinguished commentators such as the Independent’s Steve Richards or editors such as the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger don’t feature at all.

There are, however, a few revealing passages. One, for September 10 2002, reads: “Alex F called, really worried about Iraq . . . really on the rampage about the press as well, said we had to do something, they were out of control.” It took me a while to work out that Alex F was Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager. Somehow, I find his role as a government adviser even more alarming than that of Rupert Murdoch, who also crops up more frequently than almost any working hack.

But what struck me most was the assumption, when the powerful speak to the powerful, that the press should normally be under “control”. The extent to which sports pages are controlled – so that football’s corruption went unremarked until it was investigated by BBC Panorama – is a subject for another day. What concerns me here is control of political news.

From 2002, New Labour got a hard time from newspapers, particularly over Iraq, and in his diaries Campbell never stops whining. Yet the press largely supported the Iraq invasion, and presented it as a success until growing anarchy made such a panglossian interpretation impossible. Even most of the war’s opponents didn’t question the main premise: that Saddam possessed WMDs which would soon include nuclear weapons. To this day, it is said experts were unanimous in believing Saddam posed a serious threat.

That simply isn’t true. Many well-informed people, including former UN weapons inspectors, were saying WMDs had most likely been destroyed (with only battlefield weapons possibly remaining) and Saddam was nowhere near a nuclear capability. The press mostly ignored them, both here and in the US. Why?

As American academics argue in When the Press Fails, a book published by the University of Chicago Press this year, newspapers favour “simple, dramatic narratives”. Governments are best placed to provide these, particularly on foreign policy where secret intelligence material and diplomatic manoeuvring are crucial.

When a body of opinion inside government – or inside the mainstream political process – challenges the official version of events, journalists will present competing analyses. But dissidents from outside the establishment lack the standing and resources to sustain an alternative narrative. Unless they have a leading position in a significant opposition party, anyone who is out of office, even if they were once in office, can be depicted as out-of-touch, deranged and embittered. American journalism’s greatest triumph, Watergate, merely proves the point. Deep Throat, without whom the story would have died, turned out to be No 2 at the FBI.

The US press, which critics such as John Lloyd of the Reuters Institute would like our papers to emulate, has the bigger problem. It propagated bigger lies – for example, that Saddam was linked to 9/11 – with greater success and, because it lacks the competitive spur of the UK market, presents a more homogeneous view. To some extent, the US press is a victim of its virtuous insistence on rigour. American journalists have it drummed into them from youth that everything they write must be properly sourced. Whatever the evidence to the contrary, newspapers tend to assume, on most subjects, that official sources are the most “proper” ones.

Even the best British papers have no cause for complacency, however, and unlike the New York Times and Washington Post, they haven’t apologised for misleading readers. What was going on at Abu Ghraib, for example? Most Iraqis – and they should know – would call it torture. So would most continental newspapers. But analysis by American academics shows the term was used far less frequently by the British press (including the Guardian) and hardly at all by the US press. In both countries, official sources insisted incidents at Abu Ghraib were “abuses”, committed by “rogue elements”.

None of this would matter so much if the press showed signs of learning lessons. But the official narrative on Iran – that it is striving to acquire nuclear weapons while arming terrorists in Iraq – is as unchallenged now as the narrative about WMDs before the Iraq war. So is the narrative that all violence in Iraq is caused by a combination of al-Qaida, Iranian meddling, sectarian fanaticism and Saddamite fascism. The possibility that much of it involves an authentic nationalist uprising, which just wants a united Iraq with the Americans out, is ruled inadmissible. Seumas Milne’s report in the Guardian last week was a rare exception.

I do not know enough about Iraq to be sure the official narratives are untrue, any more than I could be sure the WMD claims were untrue – though, on the latter, my instincts proved correct. What I do know is that I would like to read the rival narratives more often. Whatever Campbell and Ferguson think, the more the press is out of control, the better.

The row has raised doubts over the rampant commercialisation of the BBC. But it is also also deflecting attention from the fact that far more important issues threaten to undermine audience trust in the Corporation.

The BBC has been shown in academic research to have followed the government’s line on the invasion of Iraq; since the Hutton report there has been a significant shift to the right in the BBC, including its coverage of many aspects the “war on terror” and opposition to it.

Every staff member at the BBC has received the following email from the BBC’s Director General, Mark Thompson (see below), asking them to help identify “incidents of serious intentional or unintentional deception of the audience” which may “threaten the precious relationship of trust between the BBC and our audiences”.

Given the enormous pressure on BBC staff from senior management and the government to keep quiet about pro-war bias at the Corporation, Media Workers Against the War invites you (whether or not you work at the BBC) to post your criticisms of the BBC’s war coverage in the comment section below – we shall formally forward them to Mark Thompson.
Thompson’s email is as follows:

——– Forwarded Message ——–
From: Mark Thompson
Subject: Recent editorial incidents
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:02:23 +0100

This email is going to everyone
————————————————–

Dear colleagues,

This is an email which is particularly addressed to everyone who works in programme and content parts of the BBC, but I thought it was important that everyone who works in the organisation should see it.

As you will know, there have been a number of incidents – recent problems related to phone use including the controversy over Blue Peter and, in the last few days, the incorrect and misleading edit of Her Majesty the Queen in the BBC One seasonal launch tape – which defy our values and threaten the precious relationship of trust between the BBC and our audiences. We cannot take that trust for granted.

The vast majority of you ensure our TV, radio and interactive content is accurate, fair and complies with our own clear editorial guidelines and Ofcom’s code. We cannot allow even a small number of lapses, whether intentional or as a result of sloppiness, to undermine our reputation and the confidence of the public.

Even before the most recent issue involving the Queen, I had asked the Directors of Vision, Journalism and Audio & Music to work with their senior editorial and creative teams to identify any further issues or incidents of serious intentional or unintentional deception of the audience.

I am writing to you today to ask you to help and support this process in any way you can. If you know of any further incident, please let us know.

Next Wednesday I will be delivering a full report to the BBC Trust. After that, I will write to you again to set out the action that I and the Executive Board intend to take to minimise the risk of anything like these totally unacceptable incidents ever happening again. The vital first step is to ensure that we know about every problem that’s out there.

Nothing matters more for us than honesty, accuracy and fair dealing with the audience. We must now put our house in order. We need your help to enable us to do that as swiftly and as comprehensively as possible. I know I can count on your support.

Mark Thompson

Director-General

Dear Sir,

In the context of the widely-reported ambitions of US neo-conservatives to mount a military attack on Iran, we, Iranian/British academics, are disappointed to note that your article (”Al-Qaeda linked to operations from Iran“, by Stephen Fidler, dated 8th July 2007) adds the Financial Times to the list of “reputable” newspapers prepared to engage in amplifying the drum beats of a new and bloody war in the Middle East.

Would you, for example, have led with the headline: “Al-Qaeda linked to operations from Pakistan”? This would have been far closer to the truth, but no one in the White House is seeking war with Pakistan.

Your report is hardly “news”. The Guardian splashed precisely the same story – also citing anonymous officials – on May 22, alleging that “Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaeda elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq”.

Indeed, the FT is but the last of the British “quality” newspapers, with the exception of the Independent, to run recent front-page stories claiming that Iran is a major factor in the Iraqi insurgency.

However, any Middle-East expert would have told you that the likelihood that the Shia Iranian regime is backing Sunni extremists in Al-Qaeda is slim in the extreme. Of course Iran has its clients in Iraq, as everyone knows, they are members of the Iraqi government. Why should Iran back the mortal enemies of SCIRI and the Da’wa?

Only this weekend, the Associated Press reported that the leader of an al-Qaeda umbrella group in Iraq threatened to wage war against Iran unless it stops supporting Shiites in Iraq. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the group Islamic State in Iraq, said on a website commonly used by insurgent groups that his Sunni fighters have been preparing for four years to wage a battle against Shiite-dominated Iran, the agency reported.

In the run-up to the disastrous invasion of Iraq, Pentagon and MoD officials manipulated a credulous media to plant “news” stories bolstering the case for war. We are witnessing in the same process in the British press once more, this time pushing for military action against Iran.

Briefings with unnamed officials are a classic means by which governments and the military place their propaganda in the media. It is the ABC of journalism to treat such sources with scepticism.

When the New York Times on February 10 splashed with “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made By Iran”, sourced from those same unnamed officials again, the newspaper was widely condemned for resurrecting the “Judith Miller school” of journalism. It is a sad day indeed if the Financial Times has also failed to learn the lessons of the Iraq WMD fiasco and is adding its voice and reputation, wittingly or unwittingly, to those of the Pentagon hawks.

Signatures:

Dr. Mehri Honarbin-Holliday, Canterbury Christ Church University

Dr. Elaheh Rostami-Povey, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Dr. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, London Middle East Institute

Professor Haleh Afshar, OBE, University of York

Professor Abbas Edalat, Imperial College, University of London

Of course not. Yet this is just what the UK media – backed by police and politicians — appears to be doing in response to the terror scares in London and Glasgow.

The London Evening Standard led the way: “Bid to Kill 1,700 in West End” (Friday’s headline, June 29). The Mirror on Saturday followed this up: “The Baghdad-style bomb could have killed and injured hundreds, laying waste to people and property in a 300-yard radius.” The Sun: “London’s worst ever bomb carnage was foiled yesterday…”

Things hardly cooled over the weekend. In breathless tones, Monday’s Independent talked of the bombs “exploding compressed gas in the cylinders at 20,000 feet per second” and “spewing out nails for a hundred feet“, had they exploded. The Times had: ” [The terrorists] intended to cause mass casualties.”

But buried away were other reports painting a very different picture.

The Independent on Sunday: “The London car bombers could not have destroyed the Tiger Tiger club and killed people in it, experts said last night. … It emerged that the Haymarket gas and nail bomb was almost certainly not big enough to have brought down the building, as previously reported. It would have killed and maimed within 100 meters.

“Although deadly – the ambulance crew and any revellers on the pavement would have been killed – it would not have caused serious damage to the club or brought down the building.”

A report headlined “Gas canister bomb ‘an amateur job’” published on the Guardian’s website, but not in the newspaper, quoted an explosives expert: “Putting [nails] on the floor is an incompetent way of building a bomb. They would go straight into the ground. … The main impact of the device would be in the economic disruption caused by closing off the normally bustling shops, restaurants and businesses of central London.”

Friday’s Newsnight was even more guarded about the threat posed by these bombs, pointing out how difficult it was to make a car bomb like this actually work. The programme emphasised that the police said that the bombs were only “potentially viable”, as opposed to actually “viable”.

Newsnight: “There was no explosive in this car”

“In this case it is an important distinction,” Newsnight’s diplomatic editor Mark Urban explained. “My understanding is there was no explosive in this car. To have a fireball effect with propane gas cylinders you really need to break them immediately at very high speed with a military or commercial type high explosive. That was not there.

“It seems that the technique that was going to be used was simply to turn on the tap, let the car fill with gas and then try and ignite it using a flammable material that was also found in the car. So one has to question whether some of this analysis of Iraq-type bombs is really appropriate at all because in Iraq insurgents have access to hundreds of shells, large quantities of military grade high explosive, with which of course these similar ingredients, gas bottles, nails, can be turned into extremely lethal devices. In this case I don’t believe that was right.

“Instead I think there was an intention to hurt people. Clearly that’s obvious. … But equally perhaps there was a realisation that if it didn’t work, politicians, the media, would go through the motions as they usually do after an incident like this and amplify any effect that just placing those devices there might have had.”

Adding to this analysis, ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson told Keith Olbermann on MSNBC cable television: “This is not one of the truck bombs or car bombs we see going off in Iraq – what’s really striking about this is that you had two non-bombs in London when we had at least five bombs in Baghdad in which U.S. soldiers were killed in one of those, so I think it’s just out of proportion – this was an incendiary, this was not a high explosive.”

Johnson said that had the gas been ignited properly, there would have been a loud boom that would have split the tank but that no projectiles would have even escaped the car: “If someone was within 20, 30 feet of it they would have ear damage but not much more.”

We have been here before

The media should strive to balance the need to present accurate information to warn the public of a genuine risk, while dampening the terrorists’ goal of producing widespread panic. In this instance, the UK media have failed yet again to provide a pubic service, instead serving the needs of those who want to manipulate public opinion in favour of more wars, more clampdowns and more limits on civil liberties. By doing so, they have also played into the hands of the jihadist murderers.

We have been here before. In the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings, columnist Simon Jenkins issued a stinging attack on the panic-mongering of the police and press: “Apart from the gratuitous damage to public confidence and business, why stoke the very fears, hatreds and antagonisms which the bombers want stoked?”

He continued: “The truth is that those who want to subvert freedom can always rely on “useful idiots,” a phrase Lenin is said to have used of liberal apologists for extremists (but never did). Modern terrorism neatly inverts this attribution. It relies on “useful idiots” of the right to exploit any terrorist incident to foment xenophobia, suspend civil liberties and seek revenge on any ethnic group vaguely linked to the incident. …

“The useful idiots demand new powers, new restrictions and new measures against the Muslim community. Above all they declare ‘war on terror,’ turn murdered into warriors and incite Islam to proclaim jihad in response.”

And finally, if we really want to get events into perspective: “‘Up to 80 civilians dead’ after US air strikes in Afghanistan“

P.S. The new government appears to be showing admirable constraint in refusing to blame Muslims for the bomb attempts and avoiding “war on terror” rhetoric. But the media are already ratcheting up the pressure for another bout of Muslim-baiting. Is Hassan Butt another useful idiot?
By Dave C

Mainstream media discussions of media balance are limited to a single question: is the media too critical of powerful interests?

Earlier this month, the press described how an internal BBC report had revealed that the organisation was guilty of “institutional left-wing bias” and “being anti American”.

Senior BBC managers and journalists were happy to agree. Broadcaster Andrew Marr responded by noting that the BBC is a publicly funded organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, people of ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large”. All this, he said, “creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC”.

Of course words like “liberal” and Left-wing” can mean pretty much what you want them to mean. But the fact is that the BBC consistently presents the perspective of government and business as commonsensical, and rarely feels the need to offer any kind of balance.

Blair shares Marr’s views on journalism. In a recent speech at Reuters’ headquarters in London, Blair condemned “the increasingly shrill tenor of the traditional media”. The problem, he observed, is that it is not enough for journalists to expose the errors of public figures: “It has to be venal. Conspiratorial.” Blair claimed: “The damage saps the country’s confidence and self-belief; it undermines its assessment of itself, its institutions; and above all, it reduces our capacity to take the right decision, in the right spirit for our future.”

This analysis of journalism surfaces every three or four years and always focuses on the alleged aggressive nature of the media.

Writing in The Guardian in April 1996, James Fallows, then Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly, described “how the media undermines American democracy”. The problem, Fallows argued, was that the media forever portrayed public life in America “as a race to the bottom”. The emphasis was forever on “what is going wrong”.

In 2004, former New Statesman political editor John Lloyd condemned constant journalistic “aggression” and “suspicion”. And senior Guardian journalist Martin Kettle agreed, lamenting the “strident and confrontational press becoming yet more strident and confrontational”.

Mainstream taboo

But in fact, there is a second question: is the corporate media biased in favour of big business of which it is a part? This is one of the great mainstream taboos and is essentially never discussed.

Last year, John Pilger presented a more sobering picture to an audience at Columbia University in New York. He said: “If we journalists are ever to reclaim the honour of our craft, we need to understand, at least, the historic task that great power assigns us. This is to ’soften-up’ the public for rapacious attack on countries that are no threat to us.”

This is the true role journalists so often perform, Pilger explained, and it is achieved by their dehumanising the official enemy by talking of “regime change” in Iran “as if that country were an abstraction, not a society”; by legitimising the invasion of Iraq; by erasing Palestine’s historic injustice.

On June 18, Newsnight journalist Gavin Esler observed on the BBC website: “the schism between Gaza and the West Bank leaves Israel with the unpalatable possibility of a kind of ‘three state’ solution – two hostile Palestinian entities on its borders.”

A regular poster on the Medialens message board exposed this outrageous distortion. The message read: “At this very moment, irrespective of imaginary scenarios, Israel is actually in Palestinian borders, occupying it illegally and creating facts on the ground in its ever expanding illegal settlement building! Isn’t it Palestine that has a hostile Israeli entity on and in its borders?”

Edited by Larry Herman

What are the war lies that you will remember Blair for? Here are a few of them:

Please add you own by posting a comment below

1. 1998: US bombs Sudan

On Aug 20, 1998, the US bombed the al-Shifa chemicals plant in Sudan, claiming it was a “terrorist base”. The plant turned out to provide 50 percent of Sudan’s medicines; its destruction left the country with no supplies of chloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria.

Tony Blair and the then defence minister, George Robertson, rallied to the cause, claiming that America was justified and defending the apparently unassailable evidence. They were, however, alone in supporting the action and rejecting accusations that Clinton had ordered the attacks as a distraction from the unfolding Monica Lewinsky saga.

Noam Chomsky was one of many who pointed out: “One can scarcely try to estimate the colossal toll of the Sudan bombing, even apart from the probable tens of thousands of immediate Sudanese victims.”

2. 1998: US/UK bomb Iraq

In December 1998 the US and Britain bombed Iraq for four days as part of a new strategy of “regime change”. The attacks took place during Clinton’s impeachment hearings. Britain was the only ally to join the US, setting it at odds with almost all its European partners – even Kuwait refused to support the attacks.

Blair said war was necessary because Hussein never intended to abide by his pledge to give unconditional access to UN inspectors trying to determine if Iraq had dismantled its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.

But UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said the inspectors were sent in to carry out sensitive inspections that “had nothing to do with disarmament but had everything to do with provoking the Iraqis. This was designed to generate a conflict that would justify a bombing.” They were then withdrawn on instructions from Washington.

3. 1999: NATO bombs Serbia

NATO, led by the US and Britain, launched military action knowing that it would provoke a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign by Milosevic. This indeed occurred in stark fashion, with immense consequences, which then enabled NATO leaders to claim they were acting to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe that they had provoked.

With bombing under way, NATO military figures publicly refuted political leaders’ whole justification for the war by saying that the military strategy could not prevent the humanitarian disaster.

Human Rights Watch said: “We are concerned that NATO bombed the civilian infrastructure not because it was making a significant contribution to the Yugoslav military effort but because its destruction would squeeze Serb civilians to put pressure on Milosevic to withdraw from Serbia”

The war was undertaken without UN authorisation and complete with the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the use of cluster bombs. “We will carry on pounding day after day after day, until our objectives are secured”, Tony Blair said two weeks into the bombing in April 1999, revealing the brutal reality of NATO’s supposedly “humanitarian war” over Kosovo.

4. 2001: US/UK invade Afghanistan

Tony Blair, Oct 2, 2001: “To the Afghan people we make this commitment. The conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away, as the outside world has so many times before.”

Cherie Blair, Nov 19 2001: “The women in Afghanistan are as entitled as the women in any country are to have the same hopes and aspirations for ourselves and for our daughters. … We need to help them free that spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see.”

The reality today: “Without a huge injection of foreign aid – and there is no evidence that anyone wants to provide it – it may not be long before British commanders start saying: ‘Let’s get out of Afghanistan as well as Iraq.’” Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian, June 21 2007

The reality today: “In a filthy corner of a clinic in Lashkar Gah, a heavily pregnant 12-year-old lies wailing at a curt, dismissive doctor. Down the road some of the thousands of widows in the area beg in the mud. In the local hospital, women lie recovering from the horrific burns of failed suicide attempts. The brave new world promised by Tony Blair, President George Bush and Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, appears not to have reached the women of Helmand.

“When asked whether life was better now than under the Taliban, Fowzea Olomi, 40, the director of the women’s centre [in Helmand], laughs: ‘The Taliban have gone?’ Life now, she says, is worse.” Terri Judd in the Independent, June 13 2007

5. 2003: US/UK invade Iraq

Over to you…

Impartiality is a good thing to aspire to, but almost impossible to achieve, not least because philosophers don’t agree on what it is. According to a BBC Trust report published last week, it “involves a mixture of accuracy, balance, context, distance, even-handedness, fairness, objectivity, open-mindedness, rigour, self-awareness, transparency and truth”. The trust assessed the BBC’s programmes – drama, comedy, even the weather, as well as news and current affairs – against these criteria and found them sometimes wanting. Which, given the severity of the test and the quantity of the BBC’s output (408,415 hours a year), is hardly surprising.

It is impossible to imagine any newspaper conducting a similar self-examination, still less publishing it. Even achieving accuracy, etc, in covering the report proved beyond the press. “BBC report damns its ‘culture of bias’”, shouted a Sunday Times headline. The phrase “culture of bias” does not appear in the report. The papers reply that the BBC is different because everyone is compelled to pay for it. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not absolve mass circulation newspapers from responsibilities to be, for example, truthful, rigorous and transparent, particularly in news reports. With rare exceptions, their response to any lapse – such as the News of the World phone-tapping affair – is to sweep it rapidly under the carpet.

An even more egregious example of press hypocrisy followed the offensive anti-Muslim cartoons published in Denmark last year. The BBC, frequently accused of cravenly appeasing Muslim sensitivities, reproduced them on Newsnight. No paper would touch them. Again, several British papers have portrayed the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as a Soviet-style dictator because he withdrew a licence to broadcast on public airwaves from a channel that supported an attempted coup. (It can still transmit on satellite and cable.) Yet columnists demand the BBC be similarly punished for non-violent promulgation of “political correctness”.

The British right, vociferously supported by the Mail, the Telegraph and the Murdoch press, is trying to pull off the same trick as the American right: to convince the public that key sections of the media are gripped by a leftwing conspiracy. The BBC Trust shows the campaign is succeeding. Its report, though nuanced and thoughtful, is itself biased. Its examples of possible lapses from impartiality include the failure to feature more about Ukip in the 2005 election campaign, lack of airtime given to “socially authoritarian” views, uncritical support for the Make Poverty History campaign, general prevalence of “politically correct” views, and over-representation of ethnic minorities. Even support for “saving the planet” is apparently thought controversial. There is brief mention of the generous airtime given to religion but that is treated as unproblematic. The report focuses on a supposed “liberal” bias.

Yet different complaints against the BBC are made by, for example, John Pilger, the Medialens website and the Glasgow Media Group. These allege a bias towards a western, free market view of the world, so that, for example, the corporation fails to tell the whole truth about US and British military interventions. If ever there was an example of a lapse from balance, open-mindedness and rigour, it occurred in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the BBC accepted Saddam had WMDs, despite former UN inspectors saying he had been fully disarmed. None of this is mentioned in the BBC Trust report. Nor is Top Gear which, many would say, glorifies reckless driving and carries anti-green messages.

The report, however, is correct to say that achieving impartiality (or rather the appearance of it) is more complex than it was. Once, it was enough to give the major political parties equal airtime. Now, the parties cluster on a consensual centre ground and the big divisions in public opinion are as much cultural as political: religion, ethnicity, sexuality, abortion, for example. The report argues the BBC should not “close down debate”. It should achieve “a balance of opinion across the intellectual spectrum”, and should not exclude unfashionable views.

This is surely right, but it is tricky territory. According to a poll last year, more than a third of Britons believe in creationism or intelligent design. Do they count as part of the “intellectual spectrum”? Do the climate change deniers? The Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre has accused the BBC of disenfranchising “countless millions” of Britons who don’t subscribe to its world view. But the BBC addresses a worldwide audience, in which countless millions would agree with Pilger on most issues rather than with Dacre. Should their views get more airtime?

Impartiality is of its nature elusive. The BBC is one of the few British brands that still commands worldwide admiration, it is a significant export earner and we should all be proud of it. The supposedly patriotic rightwing press is doing it incalculable damage and the journalists and editors responsible should, if I may borrow their own language, hang their heads in shame.

As if any proof were needed, Downing Street actually banned broadcasters from screening the questions Blair answered at the end of the speech after ITV News asked him whether he regretted the way intelligence was used in the run-up to Iraq.

Amid the blizzard of comment on the speech, however, only one newspaper understood that this was all about Iraq – the paper singled out by Blair in his assault. The Independent’s front-page headline was spot on: “Would you be saying this, Mr Blair, if we supported your war in Iraq?”

In contrast, in the words of Simon Jenkins in the Sunday Times, “a stage army of sycophantic columnists leapt forward to hug Blair and say how right he was”. Most sickening among these was the Guardian, whose leader drooled over the speech and talked of the prime minister’s “courage” to say what he said. Courage?! Blair might have displayed some courage if he had stood up to Murdoch and Rothermere, but not by whingeing about the Independent.

On Iraq, Blair speaks in code aimed at senior editors of the “liberal” media. This is much more effective than stating outright his real opinions, namely that those who question the war are anti-American, appeasers of terrorism and soft on Saddam.

He is not always so coded. In January he said the public are “constantly bombarded by the propaganda of the enemy, often quite sympathetically treated” by the media. A year earlier Blair denounced the BBC’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina as “full of hatred of America” and “gloating” at the country’s plight.

As the American journalist Jeff Cohen notes in his recent book on his time as a presenter at Fox news, Fox’s pretence of impartiality appeals to its reactionary viewers because, “like voters who want to support a candidate who appeals to their biases (say, against blacks or gays), many are happier supporting a candidate who communicates in code, rather than one who is overtly prejudiced.” Blair’s code has the same effect on editors.

The fact that he could devote an entire speech to the media without mentioning Iraq is already a massive clue as to how this code works. So Blair talked about the “radically altered” media environment being to blame for “sensationalism” – read, don’t you dare call me a liar, warmonger or criminal.

He said “the real reason for cynicism” is “how politics are reported” – read, stop talking about why millions hate me because of Iraq.

He said “attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment” – read, stop questioning why we went to war and what we are really doing in Iraq and Afghanistan (for a classic example from the BBC, click here).

He said “opinion and fact should be clearly divisible” and singled out the Independent as a “metaphor” for opinionated journalism – read, cut out anti-war opinion from the media. This has long been a bee in Blair’s bonnet. According to Greg Dyke’s memoirs, on March 19, 2003 – on the eve of the invasion – Blair wrote a letter to the BBC complaining about its coverage of Iraq and alleging “a real breakdown of the separation of news and comment”.

Nothing Blair said in his speech was remotely new – another point missed in the coverage. He merely repeated the line long pushed by a bevy of Blairite commentators led by John Lloyd of the Financial Times. They maintain that “contempt” shown for politicians by the media is undermining democracy. Indeed, the tone, targets and tactics of Blair’s speech seemed to have been lifted from some of John Lloyd’s writings on the subject.

But this is little more than pseudo-sophisticated, faux-academic cover for the Blairite assault on the media’s coverage of the “war on terror”, which started in earnest with the Hutton Report and is taking the mainstream media further and further to the right. Where this is leading is demonstrated by Lloyd’s piece in the Guardian (June 20). If you can fight your way past the mumbo-jumbo, Lloyd’s argument boils down to an allegation that the BBC is too liberal and a call to give Daily Mail readers a louder voice.

Perhaps the most astonishing part of Blair’s speech has been overlooked – his reference to the Watergate scandal, which was exposed by the dogged investigative reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Blair said: “Watergate was a great piece of journalism but there is a PhD thesis all on its own to examine the consequences for journalism of standing one conspiracy up.”

This is a revealing comment. The right have long insisted that it was the media that lost the Vietnam war (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary). Watergate severely weakened the White House at a crucial period in Vietnam, revealing to millions of Americans that Nixon’s war was not worth the price in terms of domestic abuse of power.

Blair clearly sees himself wronged by the media. But now we know just how deep is the grudge he bears against it: he sides with Nixon and Kissinger against Woodward, Bernstein and the anti-Vietnam war movement.

Nixon resigned in disgrace. Blair has survived, but his disgrace is none the less for it.

By Dave Crouch

An experienced British officer serving in Iraq has written to the BBC describing the invasion as “illegal, immoral and unwinnable” which, he says, is “the overwhelming feeling of many of my peers”. In a letter to the BBC’s Newsnight and Medialens.org he accuses the media’s “embedded coverage with the US Army” of failing to question “the intentions and continuing effects of the US-led invasion and occupation”.

He says most British soldiers regard their tours as “loathsome”, during which they “reluctantly [provide] target practice for insurgents, senselessly haemorrhaging casualties and squandering soldiers’ lives, as part of Bush’s vain attempt to delay the inevitable Anglo-US rout until after the next US election.” He appeals to journalists not to swallow “the official line/ White House propaganda”.

In 1970, I made a film in Vietnam called The Quiet Mutiny in which GIs spoke out about their hatred of that war and its “official line/White House propaganda”. The experiences in Iraq and Vietnam are both very different and strikingly similar. There was much less “embedded coverage” in Vietnam, although there was censorship by omission, which is standard practice today.

What is different about Iraq is the willingness of usually obedient British soldiers to speak their minds, from General Richard Dannatt, Britain’s current military chief, who said that the presence of his troops in Iraq “exacerbates the security problem”, to General Michael Rose who has called for Tony Blair to be impeached for taking Britain to war “on false grounds” – remarks that are mild compared with the blogs of squaddies.

What is also different is the growing awareness in the British forces and the public of how “the official line” is played through the media. This can be quite crude: for example when a BBC defence correspondent in Iraq described the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as “bring[ing] democracy and human rights” to Iraq. The Director of BBC Television, Helen Boaden, backed him up with a sheaf of quotations from Blair that this was indeed the aim, implying that Blair’s notorious word was enough.

More often than not, censorship by omission is employed: for example, by omitting the fact that almost 80 per cent of attacks are directed against the occupation forces (source: the Pentagon) so as to give the impression that the occupiers are doing their best to separate “warring tribes” and are crisis managers rather than the cause of the crisis.

There is a last-ditch sense about this kind of propaganda. Seymour Hersh said recently, “[In April, the Bush administration] made a decision that because of the totally dwindling support for the war in Iraq, they would go back to the al-Qaeda card, although there’s no empirical basis. Most of the pros will tell you the foreign fighters are a couple of per cent and they’re sort of leaderless… there’s no attempt to suggest there’s any significant co-ordination of these groups, but the press keeps going ga-ga about al-Qaeda… it’s just amazing to me.”

Ga-ga day at the London Guardian was 22 May. “Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq”, said the front-page banner headline. “Iran is secretly forging ties with al Qaeda elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq,” wrote Simon Tisdall from Washington, “in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition int- ended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.” The entire tale was based on anonymous US official sources. No attempt was made to substantiate their “firm evidence” or explain the illogic of their claims. No journalistic scepticism was even hinted, which is amazing considering the web of proven lies spun from Washington over Iraq.

Moreover, it had a curious tone of something-must-be-done insistence, reminiscent of Judith Miller’s scandalous reports in the New York Times claiming that Saddam was about to launch his weapons of mass destruction and beckoning Bush to invade. Tisdall in effect offered the same invitation; I can remember few more irresponsible pieces of journalism. The British public and the people of Iran, deserve better.

A chance to see some of John Pilger’s classic documentaries has been provided with the release of a set of 12 dvds – John Pilger: In the Name of Justice. Although his more recent programmes are more immediate, these DVDs each uncover ugly realities that our rulers would prefer to have hidden.

One in particular – The Truth Game – has a terrible relevance to today. Made in 1983, it uncovers the US, UK and the then USSR’s lies surrounding the build up of nuclear weapons.

It follows the classic Pilger format: present a lie – that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima was a military necessity, that the Russians have “massive nuclear capacity”, and vice versa, that cruise missiles are “an insurance policy for the west” – and then demolish it. Gripping interviews, devastating facts, followed by shamefaced justifications from those supposedly in control, are all part of the powerful mix.

Two other classics in the set are about Vietnam – the country which Pilger covered as a war reporter for around 10 years. In one, made in 1978, Pilger revisits the country three years after the US was finally booted out to see how the Vietnamese were recovering from the devastation their country had suffered.

In Vietnam: the last battle, made on the 20th anniversary of the US defeat, Pilger presents a brief, bitter history of the war and the dreadful weapons the Americans deployed, and attacks relentlessly the claim, then being broadcast by the US administration, that the war had been a “noble cause”.

Three documentaries uncover the scandals, lies and corruption in Pilger’s homeland, Australia, with one focussing on the history of successive governments “sending people off to fight other people’s wars”, and another delving into its immigration policies.

Into the mainstream

John Pilger’s massive body of work, most of it for TV, shows that, despite their built-in bias towards the establishment, the mainstream media can sometimes be forced to broadcast programmes that challenge ruling class propaganda. Opportunities to air alternative viewpoints have to be fought for, however.

This is an important point. The alternative media, such as Indymedia and ZNet, are important operations. But the mainstream media is still the place where most people get their news and information, and must therefore remain the arena within which media workers who want to follow in Pilger’s footsteps fight for space.

Of course, it’s important to see how Pilger and (until his tragic death in July 2004) Paul Foot both won their credentials as great journalists during a brief period when independent channels made efforts to make an impact and distinguish themselves from the BBC with hard-hitting programs.

As Pilger has recalled: “Almost all of the more than 50 films I have made (mainly for the ITV and some for Channel 4) have had to navigate a system that rarely declares its intention to create and shape public opinion. The BBC exemplifies this, with its specious neutrality, mythically balancing contending extremes while turning out a flow of official assumptions and deceptions as ‘news’. In its youth, British commercial television was different.”

Since then, media workers have suffered massive attacks on their unions which have not only damaged their capacity to maintain conditions, but also their capacity to challenge the editors and broadcasters over what and how to present the news, both in casts and documentaries.

The intervening period has also seen the rise of neo-liberal policies which have themselves brought greater restrictions on the ability of journalists to buck the system – the “embedding” of war reporters being one clear example.

That said, however, even BBC2 was prepared to show one of the most hard-hitting documentaries about the build up to the war on terror – Adam Curtis’s three-part The power of nightmares – and that was after Lord Hutton had panicked the corporation’s executives. Nor have such programs been unique.

Of course, it is more difficult for journalists to “navigate” the system today, and particularly in the post-Hutton BBC. And requirements for “balance”, cast-iron facts, no hint of bias, and certainly no chance that people will sue, are greater than ever. But that does not mean the doors are completely barred to hard-hitting programs.

As Tariq Ali said at a recent Media Workers Against the War public meeting, media workers who want to present programs that uncover the truths our rulers want to hide will have to fight for space in the media. That space can be attained, but only through a campaign that brings together media workers sickened by the increasing contempt that their employers have for the truth.

Apart from those already named, films featured in this DVD set are: The Mexicans, Street of Joy, Pyramid Lake is dying. A faraway country, Do you remember Vietnam?, Japan behind the mask, Apartheid did not die, and the three one from Australia – Heroes unsung, Secrets and other people’s wars.

By Alan Gibson

The BBC that helped keep this immigrant in Britain has sold out to ‘right wing populism’ and allows extreme, angry voices too much airtime.

There have been two moments in my life in England as an immigrant when I have made serious plans to quit and move to Canada. The first was in 1975 when I had finished my M.Phil at Oxford. Relatives and friends who had moved to Canada from Uganda (where I came from in 1972, the year Asians were expelled) had settled better, were welcomed more warmly than we who had ended up here. Remember we were not refugees but ultra-loyal British subjects. Enoch Powell was the hero then and we had entered a bitter place.

In 1975, a Canadian friend I’d made in Oxford contacted his local MP and together they persuaded my ex-husband and myself to migrate. We didn’t. One reason was that I couldn’t part from the BBC and Call My Bluff and Just a Minute and the trademark sombre, planetary voices delivering the news that sounded truer than any other truth. (That was back then, when I was not a sceptical journalist).

The second time was in 1996 when I had a newspaper job lined up in Toronto and just as we made final moves, I got a column to write in the Independent, a dream I had had for years. Again, when assessing whether it was the right decision, the BBC floated right up, joining the top reasons why Britain still had a hold on my heart.

So I have stayed, unable to wean myself off the BBC, which played into my ears as a child in Africa, like perennial soothing sounds of an ocean washing in imagined worlds. My dad, a news junkie and anglophile, never went out in the evenings before listening to the World Service news. He missed birthdays, funeral prayers, weddings all for his BBC.

I picked up his passion. Even now, in order for the broadcasts to sound as authentic and dependable as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s, I need crackles to disturb the reception. It gives the impression that the powerful are trying to stop us listening.

When Idi Amin came to power, I was at Makerere University, then one of the finest in the world. Radio Uganda was playing My Boy Lollipop all day long interspersed with ominous warnings from military men. The crackling, valiant BBC told us what we needed desperately to know, though I now realise it was never the whole truth. It passed over the fact that Idi Amin was supported by Britain, the US and Israel, chosen to be their placed man in the Cold War playing out in Africa. Still, that trust and devotion would not be shaken.

Defenders of the Blairite onslaught

Of course a love like that sometimes hurts and disappoints. For too many years I have moaned about the lack of black and Asian reporters, editors, managers, controllers, and brand names. That wilful neglect continues to wound. As one of the two political columnists of colour in the national press (Gary Younge being the other) I expect to be seen as equal to my white peers. I am not. My colour and now culture limits what the Beeb believes I can or should do. Ah well. At least I have what is patronisingly called ‘access’.

However, I always, always defended the corporation and licence fee because it projected universal, good, liberal values – decency, justice, fairness, democracy, civil rights, national confidence, a common humanity, freedom, civilised conduct and the belief, if not the practice, of equality.

Thatcherism arrived and with it an onslaught on these principles denounced as ‘leftie’ or ‘politically correct’. The decade of Blairism produced further pressures, this time by the new right disguised as the new left. More alarmingly, the big boys and some girls too who lead the BBC were now sympathetic to these New Labour state controllers. In the aftermath of the Gilligan affair, I was truly shocked by how many journalists and editors privately told me they agreed with the Blairite onslaught and that Dyke was out of order.

Gilligan was proven right but the centre of gravity at the BBC is now to the right of where it was under Dyke. As my colleague Johann Hari wrote recently in the Independent: ‘The BBC’s most famous and high profile presenters today are figures on the right and make increasingly little effort to hide it.’ They chase each other for copies of the Daily Mail; they ceaselessly rail against feminism, equality campaigns, state interventions to promote health and safety and of course immigration. All progressive action these days gets stamped with the words ‘politically correct’ and the consensus at the BBC is that PC is always mad, bad and highly dangerous.

And still they cry foul, the right wing tabloids and parliamentarians.

Enigma of ‘radical impartiality’

This new century brought the extraordinary force of people power to radio, the web and new technology. It is shaking up all media outlets. The BBC, already too open to right wing populism and charged up to fight political correctness, is set for a further lurch away from its old values. BBC ‘shock jock’ presenters and producers know their fortunes can only get better. Vocal people use phone in programmes and the web to incessantly complain they are not being heard.

The trick is now used by experts too. Andrew Green, the anti-immigration prophet of Migration Watch, is never off the BBC but claims he is not allowed to present his views. The perpetually angry are also more than likely to be anti-immigration, anti-Europe, anti-equalities provision, anti-Muslim, nationalistic, pro-punishment, fearful and bursting with self pity and self righteousness.

I was recently asked to chair an internal BBC debate – part of the Audio and Music Festival. The subject was the enigmatic term ‘radical impartiality’, a new brand, potentially a bold new direction for the massive ship that is the BBC. It was floated by Peter Horrocks, head of television news, a man who from his demeanour is powerful, intellectual and an impeccable trend spotter.

Simply put (and he describes it in more complex terms) Horrocks believes the BBC needs to bring in voices and campaigners hitherto kept out of the corporation’s respectable broadcasting studios. This means, he says, a move away from the ‘no-platform’ posturings of student politics. On this I agree with him. But when he argues the BNP or extremist Muslim campaigners can be allowed to make their case, with robust interviewers ensuring ‘balance’ my blood freezes. The BBC was never a coliseum, a bloody arena for a fight to the death. That is already what I feel it sees itself as. And it wants more extreme action.

For the first time ever, I resent paying the licence fee because the BBC is not fulfilling its public service role with the integrity it always had.

Broadcasts impact on lives, on perceptions, on the sense of security of vulnerable citizens. Take one example. Day after day, the BBC arranges for an anti-immigration and anti-asylum mood to grow, which it has done over three years. Named asylum seekers are not put up to make their cases – they are always numbers; no equivalence exists between pro and anti immigration views.

A profoundly illiberal agenda is presented by respected presenters. And people like me get more afraid of the future. Some years ago Norman Tebbit, on the Today programme, told me I could never be British. Maybe he was right and I should have emigrated when I could have, before I had to witness the fall from grace of my BBC.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a columnist, author and broadcaster

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

It doesn’t matter what kind of journalist you are; we all want to report the facts truthfully and comprehensively. That means explaining context, including alternative views, questioning and challenging official statements and policies, and above all, opposing what’s morally wrong and illegal.

The issue of flawed and biased coverage is becoming ever-more problematic. The media was prone to supine and lazy journalism in the build up to both wars in the Gulf. Politicians and lobbyists must no longer be allowed to bully a weakened and pliable media to sell a misguided war on terror by perpetuating armed aggression in Iran and Afghanistan.

That is why we are organising Media Workers Against the War Scotland to oppose the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and to warn against attacking Iran, through fair reporting and better scrutiny of government policy and military conduct. If we can organise in workplaces to give media staff confidence in standing up to their editors and managers to insist on ethical standards of fair and balanced reporting, then we have made a start in telling the unvarnished truth.

DEBATE THE ISSUES ON APRIL 21

With speakers:

ON NEWS, TRUTH AND POWER

Professor John Eldridge, a member of the Glasgow University Media Group, the foremost centre for media research and analysis in the UK. Professor Eldridge will talk about the issues which war reporting raises, particularly the way the media is used in war coverage to build support for, and to normalise, state aggression.

ON ANTI-WAR ACTIVISM INSIDE THE MEDIA

Dave Crouch is the chair of Media Workers Against War and has been instrumental in organising its successful campaign. MWAW has protested, leafleted and debated with the major media organisations including the BBC, ITN, BSkyB, CNN and other broadcasters and with newspaper editors and politicians. Recent speakers at MWAW meetings included Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Gary Younge, Craig Murray, Yvonne Ridley and NUJ president Jeremy Dear.

Media Workers Against the War Scotland’s launch meeting is being held at the annual conference of Scotland Against Criminalising Communities, in the STUC, 333 Woodlands Road, Glasgow G3, Saturday 21 April at 1230-1400.

Contact: Bruce Whitehead Email: brucek3@aol.com Mobile: 07944 928 702 www.mwaw.net

Media Workers Against the War in believes not is the time for journalists to campaign against the waste of Scotland’s young people, press-ganged by poverty into fighting Blair’s wars.

For me, MWAW is a very simple issue for journalists. It’s an issue of health and safety. Over 170 media workers have died in Iraq, and the toll continues to rise. In many cases – like that of Terry Lloyd – the killings were the direct action of American troops.
MWAW began by campaigning to save Farzad Bazoft, the observer journalist hanged by Saddam Hussein.

Calling for the war to end is directly related to the freedom of journalists to do their job in safety. MWAW can help give journalists the confidence to stand up and speak out.

By Pete Murray, member of the NUJ national executive committee (personal capacity)

Nor was about the views of colleagues, many of whom defended the cartoons publication as a right in a free society. A motion even appeared on an internal BBC message board with a considerable number of signatories subscribing to this message: ”Bush House journalists express their solidarity with the newspapers and editors involved in the publication or re-publication of the Danish cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed. Criticising or satirising religion in general and any religion in particular is a non-negotiable right in a free society and a vital prerogative of the media in Liberal democracies. We are appalled by the threats to European journalists and other citizens in parts of the Arab or Muslim world and unreservedly condemn political pandering to religious bigotry.”

What forced me to bow my head in disappointment was the NUJ’s statement in support of the BBC’s decision to broadcast the cartoons on Newsnight.

The NUJ applauded what they called “BBC journalists’ impartial and responsible reporting of the issues surrounding the publication of the cartoons” and “supported the decision to show the cartoons”, saying “they gave a legitimate news story proper context” – basically rolling out the perennial sacred cow of the right to free speech.

Over the years I thought I had developed a thick skin to the anti-Muslim bias in the media, but something stirred in my heart when I read the NUJ statement. To me it was like my best friend was not understanding me. And if your best friend doesn’t know you, then who does?

The cartoons debate provides a perfect example of how the treatment of Islam has become so neglectful and sloppy that it’s confusing and dividing even friends. Justifying this as ‘freedom of speech’ and the right to publish are lazy and convenient arguments. What happened to creative writing? What happened to respect? Why couldn’t journalists have described the pictures using words?

What is going on in the press these days is good old-fashioned racism. Muslim-baiting is not an expression of press freedom, its racism.

Those who want to fight for media freedom should ask what role the press played when the government put forward its arguments for invading Iraq, or during the Iran hostage crisis that never was? Or they should look at how a handful of businessmen own the British press.

You don’t need a background in religious affairs to understand Muslims, you don’t have to be religious – the criteria are better understanding and respect for others of different cultures and faiths.

Many journalists know this already but basically they just don’t care – they deliberately treat stories to do with Islam in a certain way.

For example, I produced an item for BBC2 about how some Muslim activists were trying to turn the turn the tide of bad press coverage and reclaim Islam from extremist elements. The activists said the press didn’t have time for their grass roots work and community projects. So we carried out a stunt: we invited the broadsheets to a “Muslim” charity event. The response? Journalists seemed only interested if there was going to be violence or flag burning afterwards. Shameless.

The use of the word Islamaphobia is doing us no favours. Having a ‘phobia’ is acceptable, but nobody wants to be a racist.

So how can we counter this bigotry? During my training at the Beeb I was told there are six principal questions to ask when writing a story; who, what, when, where, why and how. To encourage conscientious story telling, I’d like to add a seventh question to the list: ‘Am I being racist?’

Finally, I’d like to quote one of my colleagues who responded to those who supported publishing or broadcasting the Danish cartoons.

“People like Ghandi and Martin Luther King will give up their lives to uphold the basic values of respect and understanding, not because they’re cowards and not because they want to appease the extremists but because they know that nothing can replace understanding and respect.

“It is this which will prevail in history and not the Bin Ladens and Abu Hamzas, or the editors and weak journalists who want to provoke unnecessary reaction by inflicting insults on more than a billion-and-a-half people with a particular faith.”

You can’t argue with that. If you do then it’s like arguing with a drunk. Make mine a lime soda – I’m a Muslim.

By Uzma Hussain, a BBC staff member who has worked in a variety of journalism and other roles at the organisation for nearly 10 years. She gave this speech at an MWAW fringe meeting at NUJ national conference

Perhaps the most memorable is the use of the word “kidnap” last summer when we were reporting on the Israeli soldier being held by the Palestinians.

In our newsroom we ruled that the word “kidnapped” implies an unlawful abduction. And if a man is armed, in military uniform, and taking part in a military operation, his capture by the enemy doesn’t amount to an “unlawful” act.

Corporal Gilad Shalit was taken by fighters from Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, during “Operation Summer Rain”, an Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. Given that Hamas is – let’s not forget – democratically elected and hence representative of the Palestinian people, the capture is as lawful as any other capture of a prisoner of war.

Let’s remind ourselves of what a prisoner of war is: a combatant who is imprisoned by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict. To be a POW the service member must have conducted operations according to the laws and customs of war, be part of a chain of command, wear a uniform and bear arms openly. In short, there is no doubt that Corporal Shalit fits the criteria; and so to call him a hostage, or a kidnapped soldier, is simply wrong and misleading.

But what was surprising to see is that it wasn’t just the right-wing, pro-Israeli, Zionist news organizations using the word “kidnap”, but also those who are supposedly giving an Arab perspective; a sign perhaps that we journalists don’t care to question and challenge anymore. We’re beginning to sound more and more like politicians.

And when a Palestinian is taken from his home and imprisoned by Israel, before being tried in a military court, there’s no question over whether it’s a justified detention or not, no debate over whether it’s unlawful or lawful. There are thousands of children in Israeli jails, some as young as nine.

We’ll never see the word “kidnap” used when referring to Taliban fighters (who, incidentally don’t wear uniforms) or members of Al Qaida (no rules of engagement in their fights) being held in Guantanamo Bay. But perhaps that’s just another case of “George Bush says, journalists do”.

Sadiya Chowdhury, reporter, Islam Channel News

The general conclusion we reached was that using the term “hostages” was wrong, and we opted for “detainees” instead – apart from a few slips. We even carried an article about how UK diplomats were desperate to avoid using the word.
According to the Collins Dictionary – not the Oxford one, I know, but it’s just as thick – a hostage is “a person given to or held by a person, organisation, etc. as a security or pledge or for ransom, release, exchange for prisoners”; while to detain means “to delay; hold back; stop; to confine or hold in custody – detainee is a person kept in custody”.

The difference might seem subtle, but it is very important.

For example, the Daily Mail’s headline on March 13, the day after the crisis began, was “Marines taken hostage by Iran”, while the Daily Telegraph went with “Marines seized by Iranian guards”. What do these headlines tell the reader?

The Mail’s suggests that 15 UK citizens have been withheld for a ransom, i.e. The Iranians want something in return for the release of the sailors.
The Telegraph’s tells us that 15 UK citizens have been withheld, but the reason remains unclear and therefore is more balanced — i.e. the Iranians have captured 15 UK citizens, but we cannot tell you (the reader) exactly why because we don’t know.

Later on, the Iranians claimed that 15 British navy personnel entered their waters; the British government flatly denied it. What emerged in this case was an international dispute.

We as reporters and subs – unless we have compelling evidence – can’t take sides in our work. So if there is a dispute we must attempt to use the most neutral and least inflammatory term possible.

The MoD’s “GPS evidence” was as reliable as the coordinates given by the Iranians. This meant that no journalist was in a position to determine if the 15 marines had committed a crime or not, just as we couldn’t confirm whether the British marines had trespassed into Iranian waters or not.

Therefore the correct term to define the 15 UK citizens held in Iran had to be detainees, captives or prisoners, as the Iranians did not capture them to blackmail Britain, but opted to hold them for having allegedly committed an incursion.

If someone is accused of killing another person, the police will arrest a suspect as a precautionary measure. That does not mean that the police have abducted them or taken them hostage — they have arrested them for a suspected crime. The person arrested might dispute that, but will have to prove their innocence.

In the UK the red tops and the mid-market papers didn’t bother with any of this: for them the main issue was to sensationalise. However, this is hardly news. What was more worrying in the whole affair was to see how the broadsheets switched from “detainees/captives” to “hostages”.

The shift clearly occurred after George W. Bush demanded on March 31 that “The Iranians must give back the hostages.” This, in some way, permitted the “responsible press” to change the tone of their reporting. The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph and The Times all switched to “hostages”.

However, the appearance of “Iran” and “hostages” in the same headline is highly inflammatory. It takes us back to the 1979-80 crisis when Iran stormed the US embassy in Tehran to take over 50 US citizens hostage, after making a revolution that ended US power in the country and kicked out a regime backed by the CIA.

The Americans have never forgiven Iran for that. Equating the recent crisis with that of 1979-1980 is a gift to the hawks and fuels the drive for war on Iran.

In 1979 Iran wanted the US to hand over the former Shah of Iran, who had fled to America, to face justice in Iran. The exchange was clear in the 1979-81 crisis, not in 2007.

Of course, during the crisis the US allowed Iran access to five of its citizens held in Iraq, while the Iranian diplomat Jalal Sharafi, who went missing in Iraq in February, was released by his captors. There were suggestions that these moves were made as part of a bargain for the British sailors’ release.

Does that make them “hostages”? If so, you have to be consistent and draw the necessary conclusion that the five Iranians held in Iraq are also hostages held by the Americans, that Jalal Shafari was taken hostage by the Americans, and indeed that all prisoners of the United States held in Iraq, in Guantanamo or under “rendition” schemes in Middle East dictatorships are hostages kidnapped by the US in order to pursue its political goals.

Now that “our” marines are back home, newspapers have taken an even more lax approach to the issue and the word hostage seems “prettier” than “captives” or “detainees”.

If you are an editor or sub-editor and you are reading this, make sure that you try your best to change things in your newsroom.

Financial Times journalist

Was Iran’s release of the 15 British sailors last Wednesday an occasion for relief and rejoicing? Not as far as the press was concerned.

The storyline had been mapped out. There would be blindfolded captives, torture and show trials. Britain would respond with Churchillian rhetoric, gunboats, SAS raids and stiff upper lips and, if it didn’t, Tony Blair, along with Margaret Beckett’s caravan, could be given one last kicking. Instead, we had an Easter “gift” from President Ahmadinejad. The newspapers’ disappointment at the peaceful end to a story that had been boiling up nicely was palpable.

“Humiliated: Iran’s evil president has made Britain look weak and foolish,” stormed the Express. The sailors, noted Stephen Glover in the Mail, offered “supine effusions of gratitude”. In no previous era, Glover asserted confidently, “would British servicemen have behaved in such a manner”. We were now an “unmartial” people, sadly diminished from the halcyon days of Good Queen Maggie. Worst of all were the suits the Iranians provided for the released sailors. They were “shiny”, declared the Mail, and the “denial” of ties was thought to be particularly insulting by the Sun.

The Iranians’ actions were explicable only in terms of Oriental wiliness. The sailors’ release, according to the Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent, Tim Butcher, was “a cynical ploy” to “buy time for its nuclear programme”. The plan, he reasoned, must be to convince gullible Europeans that diplomacy could work, thus protecting Iran against a US-led attack. Iran, a Times leader concluded, was “an enigmatic mixture of fanaticism and pragmatism”.

In other words, what the hell was that all about? From the moment the sailors were seized last month, press coverage discounted the two most obvious explanations. First, it was possible the British service personnel had indeed strayed into Iranian waters. Given threats of a western military strike or even invasion, Iran might be justified in feeling jumpy about British inflatables in the Gulf. It might also suspect deliberate provocation by wily Occidentals, determined to provide further evidence of an aggressive and capricious regime ripe for Washington-imposed change.

But the press has apparently learnt nothing from the dodgy dossiers and phantom WMDs that preceded the Iraq war. British governments may be capable of all manner of dissembling over pensions, NHS waiting lists and school exam results but, when they are laying down the law to foreigners, they are still assumed to be as honest as the day is long. So a Ministry of Defence map purporting to show the sailors were well inside Iraqi waters was accepted by most papers without question.

Only Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who headed the Foreign Office’s maritime section from 1989 to 1992, pointed out that no maritime border between Iran and Iraq has ever been agreed and that the MoD’s map was, to all intents and purposes, a fake. His revelation was buried on page 59 of the Mail on Sunday and largely ignored by other papers. Since Murray was sacked by the Foreign Office and later stood for election against Jack Straw in his Blackburn constituency, it may be thought he has an axe to grind. But the press’s refusal to take him seriously recalls its similar treatment of Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector who insisted before the Iraq war that Saddam had been “fundamentally disarmed”.

The second obvious explanation was that Iran had retaliated for the seizure of its own citizens by western forces in Iraq. These include five alleged “intelligence agents” taken during a US raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the Kurdish city of Arbil. But they, as the press told it, were “detained” – just like the people in Guantanamo Bay, I suppose – while our sailors were “kidnapped” and automatically became “hostages”.

Most early accounts of the sailors’ detention – sorry, illegal capture – mentioned the Arbil incident only in passing. Not until last Tuesday did the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn reveal the real targets of the US raid: two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit. Cockburn compared it to a hypothetical attempt by Iran to kidnap the heads of the CIA and MI6 during a visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan. If newspapers were so minded, they could make other interesting comparisons – for example, between the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s fairly open seizure of British sailors and the American CIA’s secret seizures of Muslims for “extraordinary rendition” to countries that use torture.

But sections of the British press have been suckered into portraying the Iranian regime as bent on making nuclear weapons and wiping Israel off the map, while arming and largely controlling militias in Iraq. The evidence for all these allegations deserves more scepticism than it gets in most papers. For example, when a bomb killed four British soldiers near Basra last Thursday, the Mail’s front page hailed it as “Iran’s real Easter gift”, though army sources told the Guardian there was no hard evidence of this. As Cockburn wrote in February, it seems odd that a country which, four years ago, could supposedly produce long-range missiles is now unable to make a roadside bomb without Iranian help.

The press is always willing, as it was over the capture of the sailors, to criticise a British government for putting its service personnel in harm’s way and for not responding with sufficient resolve when they get into trouble. But it treats foreigners, particularly Muslims, as always in the wrong. The Iranian regime may be as evil, aggressive and oppressive as the US and British governments want us to believe, though I find the case that it poses a signifi cant threat to anybody even less convincing than the case made in 2003 against Saddam (remind me when Iran last invaded another country). All I ask from the press is a little scepticism, a bit of inquiring journalism and an occasional attempt to test out the idea that Iran’s rulers are just normal, blundering politicians making it up as they go along. It’s not much to ask. Is it?

It is extremely rare for such views to be published in a newspaper that is traditionally staunchly pro-Israel, so please let the Telegraph know that publishing Smith’s commentary is welcome and necessary, and encourage them to publish such views more often.

AMW can confirm that the newspaper is receiving many complaints from the pro-Israel lobby, so we should counter this straight away. When AMW called the Telegraph’s comment section to express a desire to thank Smith, the response was very positive.

The commentary, which should be read in full, is available here.

Write to dtletters@telegraph.co.uk, dtcomment@telegraph.co.uk, and/or post your comments in the “have your say” section at the end of the commentary, which is inundated with negative and abusive comments.

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Jackie Chase cannot understand why Britain’s foreign policy has failed to reflect the anti-war sentiment swelling around her during a peace rally in Trafalgar Square recently. The music teacher is one of tens of thousands of protesters who poured into the square, holding placards demanding everything from Blair’s resignation, a withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, to an end to Britain’s nuclear weapons program. They also voiced fears over a possible confrontation with Iran.
Whatever their gripe with the government, most protesters agreed on two things: They want Blair to stop war mongering, and they want the people of the Middle East to know they care.

Chase walked through the march in an orange jumpsuit with a black hood over her head chained to several campaigners, to protest the illegal detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

She started the “Save Omar Deghayes” campaign in the hope that British authorities would not condemn an innocent man to the torture and abuse Deghayes has allegedly been subjected to during his time in prison.

Deghayes was a Brighton resident who went to Afghanistan hoping to export dry fruit to wholesalers in the United Kingdom. By the time the Americans began to bomb the country, Deghayes had settled in, and married an Afghani girl. When the situation worsened, he tried to flee across the border to Pakistan to get a British visa for his bride. He was captured in Lahore, taken back to Afghanistan, held at Bagram airbase, and labeled an “Enemy Combatant.”

Five years later, he is one of many “suspects” being held by US authorities at Guantanamo Bay on secret evidence that is presented only to “Combatant Status Review Tribunals.” That evidence is not subject to legal, public or independent scrutiny and is often based only on speculation.

Chase and several Brighton residents said they were there to “put a stop to the atrocities committed in the name of keeping us safe.”

Deghayes’ family believes his predicament may be a case of mistaken identity. A photograph of a man named Omar Deghayes from a Chechen training camp, bearing no resemblance to the dry-fruit vendor Deghayes, was aired on Spanish television on the FBI’s most wanted list. Experts have testified since then that the only thing dry fruit vendor Deghayes shares with the man in the photograph is his name.

“But Omar is still in prison and we know he has been beaten, blinded, his arm broken. We are very concerned for his mental well being and frankly I don’t think the British government can handle the embarrassment of bringing him home now after five years of this abuse, what’s left of him?” said Chase, whose 17-year-old son Sam was also marching to protest illegal military action in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

“What frightens me is our ability to switch off from suffering,” said Chase, “I know people will watch us on the news and say, ‘they look annoyed about something,’ change the channel, and go back to enjoying their warm meal and Ikea furniture.”

According to him, anti-terror legislation, introduced after 9/11 to help the West combat an abstract enemy, has turned a system of representation into a system of top-down government.

“(George Orwell’s) 1984 scenario is not far when you can send a man to prison without evidence, we are completely controlled and all of us in Britain are complicit in making a democracy into a system where we no longer have representation. The government does what it wants,” said Sam, who is outraged that Blair took his country to war and that Blair will let innocent men remain in Guantanamo Bay.

Redoune Zghizhe, a friend of the Deghayes family who works in the food and beverage department of a hotel, is still bemused over his friend’s detention.

“He was just a business man. It is illegal, it is wrong to imprison a man who saw a business opportunity for export and sent to find work abroad, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but this is the world today,” Zghizhe said.

As they walked through cordoned-off streets, tourists snapped photos, while onlookers sometimes clapped, sometimes gawked and jeered at them. They walked on, unconcerned. The campaigners are determined that if they fail to find justice in a court of law, they will continue to seek redress in a court of public opinion.

Keegan, who works for website www.onegreenearth.com said, “We are against this illegal war, all war is unjust, we want it to stop.”

They came out because they find “the mainstream media is not doing its job so it’s up to every individual to draw attention to the injustice of war.”

On the outskirts of the congregation, twenty young demonstrators danced incessantly to music coming from a makeshift sound system.

Ben Gray, who works in the music industry, thinks he has found the ultimate way to get that very message across.

He decided to “sidestep mainstream media and give all these protesters a concrete way to have their voice heard,” by releasing a single called “War what is it good for.” Gray hopes Tony Blair will find it humiliating and is appealing for residents of Britain to text peace1 to 78789 to get it into the charts.

Gray is one of a growing number of Britons enraged that Blair took his country to war over “a pack of lies.” And he is annoyed with the media for not exposing those lies.

“I saw masses of people march in 2003, they were against the war then, and they are against it now, but the government doesn’t listen,” he said. “But if the single makes it into the charts everyone will have to listen. Otherwise we are just preaching to the converted.”

Gray realized that new legislation allowing downloaded songs to enter the charts without having to physically release a single meant they could pull off “a musical referendum.”

“From January downloads can propel singles into the charts and the media, the police, the government can distort the numbers of protesters who show up – when you attend you know there were a lot more than gets reported the next day – but no one can deny the numbers when people are buying the single, and getting Tony Blair into the charts,” he said.

Gray finds delicious irony in the fact that “Blair called his college band “Ugly Rumors,” and now he’s known for spreading ugly rumors,” which is why the music video is available on a site called – you guessed it – www.uglyrumours.com.

“We have been duped and we must resist, and we will not be fooled into an act of aggression with Iran,” said Gray. “I was never an activist, but we all have to speak up now. We have all been betrayed.”

[Written for http://www.arabnews.com]