Could you briefly tell us how and why you decided to create Media Lens?
We (David Edwards and David Cromwell) met in 1999 when the latter was working on his book Private Planet. David E mentioned that he thought there should be a UK-based website comparable to the US-based Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (www.fair.org). After a friend put us in touch with a webmaster, who had the web skills, Media Lens was up and running in the early summer of 2001. The present webmaster is Olly Maw.
Media Lens is a project based on our conviction that ‘mainstream' corporate newspapers and broadcasters provide a profoundly distorted picture of our world. The increasingly centralised, corporate nature of the media means that it acts as a de facto propaganda system for the state, big business and other establishment interests. The costs incurred as a result of this propaganda, in terms of human suffering and environmental degradation, are incalculable. We started Media Lens to raise public awareness of these problems in the hope that we might encourage passive bystanders to become compassionate activists.
In your book "Guardians of Power. The Myth of the Liberal Media" (Pluto Press, London, 2006) you analyse the media coverage of the war in Kosovo, Afghanistan, East Timor, Iraq, the coup in Haiti, Nicaragua... Is there a pattern which repeats in each case?
Every case is slightly different but the general trend is consistent: the views of ‘authorised' sources - the White House, 10 Downing Street and corporate headquarters - are regarded as authoritative and credible. The 'official' version of events is reported by journalists as Truth. The testimony of critical observers and participants - nongovernmental organisations, humanitarian and aid workers, prisoners, doctors, and especially those on the receiving end of Western firepower - are routinely marginalised, ignored and even ridiculed.
In the case of East Timor, the tireless efforts of the East Timorese themselves, and the links made with peace activists around the world, made the difference in bringing pressure to bear on Suharto relinquishing control of that country and, indeed, in bringing about his own downfall. Noam Chomsky has written about this in several places (see, for example, ‘Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky', edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, New York, 2002).
Amazingly, and tragically, the pattern appears to be repeating itself over Iran, a mere five years or so since the corporate media played an insidious role in channelling US-UK government propaganda, raising fear levels in the West over Iraq's mythical weapons of mass destruction.
John Pilger also analyses some of these issues in his latest documentary "The War on Democracy". What importance do you grant to independent journalists like Pilger who manage to transmit silenced information in the corporate media?
Pilger has been a huge inspiration, and a great friend to us, in the six years we've been working on Media Lens. He is, quite simply, the most honest journalist working in the mainstream UK media system. He is a very rare individual - someone who has achieved such worldwide public respect and interest that mainstream editors feel they have to publish his work, at least occasionally, even though they would normally not report the facts and ideas he highlights. He is pretty much unique in this respect. And this connects with the problem of his appearing. Pilger has described himself as a ‘fig leaf' at the New Statesman - his appearance helps give the impression that the magazine is more open and honest than it actually is. So, on the one hand, his work has a tremendous effect in enlightening a lot of people. On the other hand, his work is used to strengthen the propaganda system‘s false claims of honesty and openness.
This is a problem that faces everyone who appears in the mainstream. Our own position is that we will appear as long as we are allowed to criticise the media without censorship (so, in part, countering the ‘fig leaf' problem). Pilger is all but alone in delivering regular, powerful criticisms of the media. Other journalists do excellent work on other issues - Robert Fisk and George Monbiot, ‘fig leaves' for The Independent and the Guardian, respectively. But barring very rare exceptions, their performance in exposing the failings of the corporate media system in their mainstream articles, particularly in Fisk‘s case, has been extremely poor. This is also true of writers like Mark Curtis and Naomi Klein. It's a sad fact that appearance in the mainstream media is pretty much conditional on failing to discuss the propaganda role of that media.
As Pilger and your media alerts "Ridiculing Chavez" demonstrate, the Venezuelan government is one of the main targets of mainstream media critique. How do you view the recent deal to subsidise bus travel in London between Chavez and Livingstone and how did the media portray it?
We haven't followed the particular issue of subsidising bus travel closely, but the general pattern of media coverage has been to demonise Hugo Chavez. It's the standard pattern - leading figures like Bush and Blair, have declared Chavez a "tyrant" and a "threat", and so journalists have come to accept this as the reality. It's a kind of voodoo - when politicians label a leader or country a particular way, journalists come to believe this is the reality!
You have also written a lot about the media coverage of climate change. You've been very critical of The Independent, which proclaims itself the champion of the struggle against climate change. Which are the main points of your critique?
Our point in focusing on climate change is to show the limited bounds of the corporate media debate - it's pretty much a perfect example. It's all well and good to report the latest climate-related disasters and ominous reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even featuring dramatic front-page covers as The Independent does. But what you won't see in The Independent (or elsewhere in the corporate media) is any focus on the underlying insanity and unsustainability of the capitalist system; the blocking by corporations of rational action to combat climate chaos; the billions spent annually on corporate propaganda and consumer advertising; and the intrinsic ties with foreign policy that have killed millions in the Third World and crushed aspirations for liberation from Western control. We've addressed this at length in our book, ‘Guardians of Power', and in many alerts since we started in 2001. The most recent one that is directly relevant is probably the following:
"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist." (‘Deterring Democracy', Vintage, London, 1992, p. 79)
Chomsky's observation is fully borne out in any rational and serious analysis of climate reporting. The omissions and biases in such coverage are hugely revealing, conforming to the usual agenda of state-corporate power which is desperate to protect its interests at all costs - all just as the propaganda model would predict.
It is in fact painfully ironic that the Independent - a profit-seeking corporation dependent on advertisers for 75% of its revenues - presents itself, as you say, as "the champion of the struggle against climate change". It is the corporate system of which the Independent is a part that is the cause of the disaster overtaking us. The paper tirelessly tries to persuade readers through its advertising to buy new cars, to fly on long-distance holidays, to buy new gadgets, clothes and fast food. The Independent is an integral part of a system that is endlessly encouraging us to see our high consumption way of life as normal, sane, ‘just the way things are'. Currently almost nothing is being done to stop climate change, and much is being done to make it far, far worse - the media system, including the Independent, is playing a key role in making this possible.
In Spain, many people view the BBC as a model of public broadcasting television. The financing system suggests that it should act more like a public service than a corporation. What do you think?
The BBC has always protected the establishment of which it is very much a part. The BBC's founder, Lord Reith, noted in his diary of the government:
"They know they can trust us not to be really impartial."
The BBC's senior managers are appointed by the government of the day. Before joining the BBC, the previous chairman Gavyn Davies was chief economist at Goldman Sachs where he was touted as the next Governor of the Bank of England. At the time he became chairman, Davies was estimated to have amassed a personal fortune of £150 million. His wife ran Gordon Brown's office. The chairman he replaced, Sir Christopher Bland, became chairman of British Telecom.
The overall strategic direction of the BBC is set by the BBC Trust. There are twelve trustees, mostly high establishment figures. Jeremy Peat recently retired as Chief Economist of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Dermot Gleeson is Executive Chairman of Gleeson Group plc. Diane Coyle, a former economics editor of The Independent, is Managing Director of Enlightenment Economics, an economic consultancy to large corporate clients and international organisations. In short, the BBC is run by elites with fingers in any number of political and corporate pies.
The BBC is publicly funded by a licence on televisions. However, consider the profit orientation of the BBC: its drive to sell its products - television programmes, DVDs, books, magazines and so on - around the world, trading on the famed BBC "brand". For example, during 2004-2005, BBC Worldwide achieved sales of £706 million. It increased its profit before interest and tax to £55 million and its cash flow to the BBC to £145 million. In July 2004, it was announced that Worldwide's DVD release company, BBC Video was to be merged with VCI, a video release company controlled by Woolworths Group plc. The new company, '2 entertain Ltd', is controlled 60% by Worldwide and 40% by Woolworths Group plc. The merger created the sixth biggest video company in the UK market, and the largest British-owned brand.
The BBC is under pressure to reflect the values of elite corporate interests, but also to reflect the values of state power. Even a glance reveals that the BBC is far more patriotic and flag-waving than, say, the Guardian and The Independent. The Guardian doesn't expect its senior journalists to commentate patriotically on Trooping The Colour, a military parade celebrating the British monarch's birthday, for example. But on June 11, 2005, top BBC news reader, Huw Edwards, did exactly that, describing how the parade was ‘a great credit to the Irish Guards' (BBC1, June 11, 2005). This is very standard for BBC performance - patriotism is a constant theme, almost to a comical degree, and surely well above the norm for the 'quality' media.
To the credit of Peter Barron, editor of the flagship BBC news programme, ‘Newsnight', we were invited to write an article explaining how and why the BBC's coverage of Iraq has been so unbalanced:
The BBC does occasionally provide space for dissident opinions, but these are vanishingly rare moments of honesty swamped by an overwhelming pro-establishment bias.
Iraq is a very good example. The BBC buried the truth that US-UK sanctions were killing 100,000s of Iraqi civilians between 1990-2003, describing it as Saddam Hussein‘s "propaganda". It also buried evidence that Iraq had cooperated with UN weapons inspectors to the extent that the country was "fundamentally disarmed" of "90-95%" of its weapons of mass destruction as long ago as December 1998, according to senior weapons inspectors. It then buried the illegality of the invasion. It claimed that the May 2004 "handover of sovereignty" was just that - it wasn't. It claimed that the January 2005 elections in Iraq were "democratic" - they weren't. The BBC has consistently hidden the truth that 100,000s of Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the war. Most recently (September 14), it almost completely ignored a credible opinion poll by ORB, a reputable British firm, revealing that 1.2 million Iraqis had been murdered since 2003. So the performance has been far more than just poor or shameful; it has been criminally complicit in truly vast war crimes. We need to be serious about this because literally 100,000s of people are paying with their lives for propaganda produced by media like the BBC.
Last March Gilbert Achcar told AlterZoom that "now, after the experience of Iraq which demonstrated that the Bush Administration had lied, the media are much more critical and prudent than after 9/11". Do you agree? What do you think of the media treatment of the confrontation between the USA and Iran? Is history repeating itself again?
We'll answer these questions together. Achcar is badly mistaken, in our view. What is so shocking is the extent to which media performance is rooted in the structures and needs of power, rather than in the real world. The US political leadership decided to demonise Saddam Hussein, to present Iraq as a threat - in response, the media performed their structural role in boosting these claims. The ‘threat' was then exposed as a charade, a giant hoax. The same US leadership has since decided to demonise Iran and present it as a threat to the West - the media are again performing their structural role in boosting these claims as though nothing had happened in Iraq. Time and again, journalists fail to learn the most obvious lessons from even the most recent past. The reason is that power has needs, and the media has evolved and been designed to service those needs. Journalists who respond to their conscience, to the obvious facts facing them, rather than to those needs, don't last long.
It's quite striking to look at UK media performance on Iran from even six years ago. Then, before the onslaught of government propaganda, Iran was viewed as a modernising, vibrant member of the international community - journalists openly mocked the idea that it belonged in the same category as North Korea and Iraq as part of the "axis of evil". Now almost everyone accepts that Iran is a threat, even one that far exceeds Iraq 2002-3 and North Korea. This transformation has been achieved in a very short of space time, and despite all the lessons of Iraq. It highlights a point we've made many times - that journalists move as an intellectual herd, basically on the instructions of power. It's a deeply shocking and, in fact, frightening example of human conformity.
Finally, it surprises me the large number of editors who reply to your alerts because, basically, you are accusing them of collaborating with a propaganda system, a claim that they usually deny (Andrew Marr's interview with Chomsky is a clear example: ‘The Big Idea', BBC2, February 14, 1996; transcript available at http://www.zmag.org/Chomsky/interviews/9602-big-idea.html). Did you expect the editors and journalists to engage in such debates?
Journalists and editors, like most professionals, pride themselves on their authority, knowledge and high-status position. If they encounter a rational, calm challenge to their reporting they can either (a) not respond at all (pretty common); or (b) out of self-respect and/or a perceived need to defend themselves, attempt to put us in our place.
Actually, what surprised us most in the beginning was how ill-informed many professional journalists really are. We initially thought, as two enthusiastic freelancers, that BBC journalists, for example, would be highly knowledgeable, armed with considerable resources, that would make it very difficult for us to debate with them. This turns out not to be the case - journalists are often astonishingly ill-informed. They are also arguing with ‘one arm tied behind their back', as it were, because they're not able to be honest - there are many things they can't say, issues they can't discuss. If you ask a Guardian journalist, 'What do you think of the Guardian's performance on Iraq?' they can't answer - at least not honestly. The Guardian's performance on Iraq has been appalling. A Guardian journalist can disagree with us - but they've got no serious evidence - or agree, in which case they put their job on the line, as they well know. Of course, journalists might well disagree that we've demonstrated their lack of knowledge and/or skewed reporting - but the results documented in nearly 3000 pages of media alerts, and in our book, really do speak for themselves.
Our alerts helped generate over 400 emails to the paper from readers and ended up in a rather critical judgement made by the paper's own readers' editor. This appears to have been the 'final straw' for Rusbridger in dealing with us. As for Andrew Marr, our exchange with him in the early days of Media Lens, over his support for the Nato bombing of the former Yugoslavia, was clearly a one-off. However, some criticism of him since seems to have hit home to a limited extent. First, read the following snippet of a review by The Independent's Thomas Sutcliffe on a recent BBC television series presented by Andrew Marr:
Andrew Marr finished off his documentary series History of Modern Britain with a helter-skelter rush in which the invention of the world wide web, the shock of 9/11 and the two Gulf wars had to jostle for space with the Bulger case and Tory sleaze. As a result it was less satisfying than the earlier episodes, though it was still distinguished by the series' refreshing absence of donnish equivocation. Marr doesn't bother with the get-out clauses of television punditry, words like "arguably" or "perhaps" or "it could be said". He also included a neat mea culpa noting that the swift completion of the invasion of Iraq had caused some commentators to jump the gun about overall victory, before playing a clip of himself outside Downing Street. "Tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger Prime Minister as a result" was how he summed up Blair's war at the time. As a journalist he was helping to write the first draft of history; as a historian he was telling you that the first draft was crap. (Sutcliffe, television review, The Independent, June 20, 2007)
In fact, the quote, "Tonight he stands as a larger man...", has been featured in several media alerts we put out over the years and even ended up in Marr's entry in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marr). There's little doubt that it was our work that brought the quote to his attention. Perhaps he felt that by addressing it in his series he could lay that particular ghost to rest. What Sutcliffe didn't say, though, was that often subsequent drafts of history are "crap" too - but almost invariably biased in favour of powerful interests.
David Edwards and David Cromwell are editors of Media Lens.
Could you briefly tell us how and why you decided to create Media Lens?
We (David Edwards and David Cromwell) met in 1999 when the latter was working on his book Private Planet. David E mentioned that he thought there should be a UK-based website comparable to the US-based Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (www.fair.org). After a friend put us in touch with a webmaster, who had the web skills, Media Lens was up and running in the early summer of 2001. The present webmaster is Olly Maw.
Media Lens is a project based on our conviction that ‘mainstream' corporate newspapers and broadcasters provide a profoundly distorted picture of our world. The increasingly centralised, corporate nature of the media means that it acts as a de facto propaganda system for the state, big business and other establishment interests. The costs incurred as a result of this propaganda, in terms of human suffering and environmental degradation, are incalculable. We started Media Lens to raise public awareness of these problems in the hope that we might encourage passive bystanders to become compassionate activists.
In your book "Guardians of Power. The Myth of the Liberal Media" (Pluto Press, London, 2006) you analyse the media coverage of the war in Kosovo, Afghanistan, East Timor, Iraq, the coup in Haiti, Nicaragua... Is there a pattern which repeats in each case?
Every case is slightly different but the general trend is consistent: the views of ‘authorised' sources - the White House, 10 Downing Street and corporate headquarters - are regarded as authoritative and credible. The 'official' version of events is reported by journalists as Truth. The testimony of critical observers and participants - nongovernmental organisations, humanitarian and aid workers, prisoners, doctors, and especially those on the receiving end of Western firepower - are routinely marginalised, ignored and even ridiculed.
In the case of East Timor, the tireless efforts of the East Timorese themselves, and the links made with peace activists around the world, made the difference in bringing pressure to bear on Suharto relinquishing control of that country and, indeed, in bringing about his own downfall. Noam Chomsky has written about this in several places (see, for example, ‘Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky', edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, New York, 2002).
Amazingly, and tragically, the pattern appears to be repeating itself over Iran, a mere five years or so since the corporate media played an insidious role in channelling US-UK government propaganda, raising fear levels in the West over Iraq's mythical weapons of mass destruction.
John Pilger also analyses some of these issues in his latest documentary "The War on Democracy". What importance do you grant to independent journalists like Pilger who manage to transmit silenced information in the corporate media?
Pilger has been a huge inspiration, and a great friend to us, in the six years we've been working on Media Lens. He is, quite simply, the most honest journalist working in the mainstream UK media system. He is a very rare individual - someone who has achieved such worldwide public respect and interest that mainstream editors feel they have to publish his work, at least occasionally, even though they would normally not report the facts and ideas he highlights. He is pretty much unique in this respect. And this connects with the problem of his appearing. Pilger has described himself as a ‘fig leaf' at the New Statesman - his appearance helps give the impression that the magazine is more open and honest than it actually is. So, on the one hand, his work has a tremendous effect in enlightening a lot of people. On the other hand, his work is used to strengthen the propaganda system‘s false claims of honesty and openness.
This is a problem that faces everyone who appears in the mainstream. Our own position is that we will appear as long as we are allowed to criticise the media without censorship (so, in part, countering the ‘fig leaf' problem). Pilger is all but alone in delivering regular, powerful criticisms of the media. Other journalists do excellent work on other issues - Robert Fisk and George Monbiot, ‘fig leaves' for The Independent and the Guardian, respectively. But barring very rare exceptions, their performance in exposing the failings of the corporate media system in their mainstream articles, particularly in Fisk‘s case, has been extremely poor. This is also true of writers like Mark Curtis and Naomi Klein. It's a sad fact that appearance in the mainstream media is pretty much conditional on failing to discuss the propaganda role of that media.
As Pilger and your media alerts "Ridiculing Chavez" demonstrate, the Venezuelan government is one of the main targets of mainstream media critique. How do you view the recent deal to subsidise bus travel in London between Chavez and Livingstone and how did the media portray it?
We haven't followed the particular issue of subsidising bus travel closely, but the general pattern of media coverage has been to demonise Hugo Chavez. It's the standard pattern - leading figures like Bush and Blair, have declared Chavez a "tyrant" and a "threat", and so journalists have come to accept this as the reality. It's a kind of voodoo - when politicians label a leader or country a particular way, journalists come to believe this is the reality!
You have also written a lot about the media coverage of climate change. You've been very critical of The Independent, which proclaims itself the champion of the struggle against climate change. Which are the main points of your critique?
Our point in focusing on climate change is to show the limited bounds of the corporate media debate - it's pretty much a perfect example. It's all well and good to report the latest climate-related disasters and ominous reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even featuring dramatic front-page covers as The Independent does. But what you won't see in The Independent (or elsewhere in the corporate media) is any focus on the underlying insanity and unsustainability of the capitalist system; the blocking by corporations of rational action to combat climate chaos; the billions spent annually on corporate propaganda and consumer advertising; and the intrinsic ties with foreign policy that have killed millions in the Third World and crushed aspirations for liberation from Western control. We've addressed this at length in our book, ‘Guardians of Power', and in many alerts since we started in 2001. The most recent one that is directly relevant is probably the following:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/061024_eating_the_planet.php
As Noam Chomsky observed:
"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist." (‘Deterring Democracy', Vintage, London, 1992, p. 79)
Chomsky's observation is fully borne out in any rational and serious analysis of climate reporting. The omissions and biases in such coverage are hugely revealing, conforming to the usual agenda of state-corporate power which is desperate to protect its interests at all costs - all just as the propaganda model would predict.
It is in fact painfully ironic that the Independent - a profit-seeking corporation dependent on advertisers for 75% of its revenues - presents itself, as you say, as "the champion of the struggle against climate change". It is the corporate system of which the Independent is a part that is the cause of the disaster overtaking us. The paper tirelessly tries to persuade readers through its advertising to buy new cars, to fly on long-distance holidays, to buy new gadgets, clothes and fast food. The Independent is an integral part of a system that is endlessly encouraging us to see our high consumption way of life as normal, sane, ‘just the way things are'. Currently almost nothing is being done to stop climate change, and much is being done to make it far, far worse - the media system, including the Independent, is playing a key role in making this possible.
In Spain, many people view the BBC as a model of public broadcasting television. The financing system suggests that it should act more like a public service than a corporation. What do you think?
The BBC has always protected the establishment of which it is very much a part. The BBC's founder, Lord Reith, noted in his diary of the government:
"They know they can trust us not to be really impartial."
The BBC's senior managers are appointed by the government of the day. Before joining the BBC, the previous chairman Gavyn Davies was chief economist at Goldman Sachs where he was touted as the next Governor of the Bank of England. At the time he became chairman, Davies was estimated to have amassed a personal fortune of £150 million. His wife ran Gordon Brown's office. The chairman he replaced, Sir Christopher Bland, became chairman of British Telecom.
The overall strategic direction of the BBC is set by the BBC Trust. There are twelve trustees, mostly high establishment figures. Jeremy Peat recently retired as Chief Economist of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Dermot Gleeson is Executive Chairman of Gleeson Group plc. Diane Coyle, a former economics editor of The Independent, is Managing Director of Enlightenment Economics, an economic consultancy to large corporate clients and international organisations. In short, the BBC is run by elites with fingers in any number of political and corporate pies.
The BBC is publicly funded by a licence on televisions. However, consider the profit orientation of the BBC: its drive to sell its products - television programmes, DVDs, books, magazines and so on - around the world, trading on the famed BBC "brand". For example, during 2004-2005, BBC Worldwide achieved sales of £706 million. It increased its profit before interest and tax to £55 million and its cash flow to the BBC to £145 million. In July 2004, it was announced that Worldwide's DVD release company, BBC Video was to be merged with VCI, a video release company controlled by Woolworths Group plc. The new company, '2 entertain Ltd', is controlled 60% by Worldwide and 40% by Woolworths Group plc. The merger created the sixth biggest video company in the UK market, and the largest British-owned brand.
The BBC is under pressure to reflect the values of elite corporate interests, but also to reflect the values of state power. Even a glance reveals that the BBC is far more patriotic and flag-waving than, say, the Guardian and The Independent. The Guardian doesn't expect its senior journalists to commentate patriotically on Trooping The Colour, a military parade celebrating the British monarch's birthday, for example. But on June 11, 2005, top BBC news reader, Huw Edwards, did exactly that, describing how the parade was ‘a great credit to the Irish Guards' (BBC1, June 11, 2005). This is very standard for BBC performance - patriotism is a constant theme, almost to a comical degree, and surely well above the norm for the 'quality' media.
To the credit of Peter Barron, editor of the flagship BBC news programme, ‘Newsnight', we were invited to write an article explaining how and why the BBC's coverage of Iraq has been so unbalanced:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2007/03/bbcs_iraq_coverage_biased_o...
The BBC does occasionally provide space for dissident opinions, but these are vanishingly rare moments of honesty swamped by an overwhelming pro-establishment bias.
Iraq is a very good example. The BBC buried the truth that US-UK sanctions were killing 100,000s of Iraqi civilians between 1990-2003, describing it as Saddam Hussein‘s "propaganda". It also buried evidence that Iraq had cooperated with UN weapons inspectors to the extent that the country was "fundamentally disarmed" of "90-95%" of its weapons of mass destruction as long ago as December 1998, according to senior weapons inspectors. It then buried the illegality of the invasion. It claimed that the May 2004 "handover of sovereignty" was just that - it wasn't. It claimed that the January 2005 elections in Iraq were "democratic" - they weren't. The BBC has consistently hidden the truth that 100,000s of Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the war. Most recently (September 14), it almost completely ignored a credible opinion poll by ORB, a reputable British firm, revealing that 1.2 million Iraqis had been murdered since 2003. So the performance has been far more than just poor or shameful; it has been criminally complicit in truly vast war crimes. We need to be serious about this because literally 100,000s of people are paying with their lives for propaganda produced by media like the BBC.
Last March Gilbert Achcar told AlterZoom that "now, after the experience of Iraq which demonstrated that the Bush Administration had lied, the media are much more critical and prudent than after 9/11". Do you agree? What do you think of the media treatment of the confrontation between the USA and Iran? Is history repeating itself again?
We'll answer these questions together. Achcar is badly mistaken, in our view. What is so shocking is the extent to which media performance is rooted in the structures and needs of power, rather than in the real world. The US political leadership decided to demonise Saddam Hussein, to present Iraq as a threat - in response, the media performed their structural role in boosting these claims. The ‘threat' was then exposed as a charade, a giant hoax. The same US leadership has since decided to demonise Iran and present it as a threat to the West - the media are again performing their structural role in boosting these claims as though nothing had happened in Iraq. Time and again, journalists fail to learn the most obvious lessons from even the most recent past. The reason is that power has needs, and the media has evolved and been designed to service those needs. Journalists who respond to their conscience, to the obvious facts facing them, rather than to those needs, don't last long.
It's quite striking to look at UK media performance on Iran from even six years ago. Then, before the onslaught of government propaganda, Iran was viewed as a modernising, vibrant member of the international community - journalists openly mocked the idea that it belonged in the same category as North Korea and Iraq as part of the "axis of evil". Now almost everyone accepts that Iran is a threat, even one that far exceeds Iraq 2002-3 and North Korea. This transformation has been achieved in a very short of space time, and despite all the lessons of Iraq. It highlights a point we've made many times - that journalists move as an intellectual herd, basically on the instructions of power. It's a deeply shocking and, in fact, frightening example of human conformity.
Finally, it surprises me the large number of editors who reply to your alerts because, basically, you are accusing them of collaborating with a propaganda system, a claim that they usually deny (Andrew Marr's interview with Chomsky is a clear example: ‘The Big Idea', BBC2, February 14, 1996; transcript available at http://www.zmag.org/Chomsky/interviews/9602-big-idea.html). Did you expect the editors and journalists to engage in such debates?
Journalists and editors, like most professionals, pride themselves on their authority, knowledge and high-status position. If they encounter a rational, calm challenge to their reporting they can either (a) not respond at all (pretty common); or (b) out of self-respect and/or a perceived need to defend themselves, attempt to put us in our place.
Actually, what surprised us most in the beginning was how ill-informed many professional journalists really are. We initially thought, as two enthusiastic freelancers, that BBC journalists, for example, would be highly knowledgeable, armed with considerable resources, that would make it very difficult for us to debate with them. This turns out not to be the case - journalists are often astonishingly ill-informed. They are also arguing with ‘one arm tied behind their back', as it were, because they're not able to be honest - there are many things they can't say, issues they can't discuss. If you ask a Guardian journalist, 'What do you think of the Guardian's performance on Iraq?' they can't answer - at least not honestly. The Guardian's performance on Iraq has been appalling. A Guardian journalist can disagree with us - but they've got no serious evidence - or agree, in which case they put their job on the line, as they well know. Of course, journalists might well disagree that we've demonstrated their lack of knowledge and/or skewed reporting - but the results documented in nearly 3000 pages of media alerts, and in our book, really do speak for themselves.
Bear in mind, however, that some journalists and editors simply will no longer engage with us - or have never done so. We've never had a single response from Simon Kelner, editor of the Independent, for instance. And Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger no longer replies to our emails. This silence dates from his paper's attempted smear of Noam Chomsky in October 2005 which we featured in two media alerts (http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/051104_smearing_chomsky_the_guardian.... http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/051121_smearing_chomsky_the_guardian....).
Our alerts helped generate over 400 emails to the paper from readers and ended up in a rather critical judgement made by the paper's own readers' editor. This appears to have been the 'final straw' for Rusbridger in dealing with us. As for Andrew Marr, our exchange with him in the early days of Media Lens, over his support for the Nato bombing of the former Yugoslavia, was clearly a one-off. However, some criticism of him since seems to have hit home to a limited extent. First, read the following snippet of a review by The Independent's Thomas Sutcliffe on a recent BBC television series presented by Andrew Marr:
In fact, the quote, "Tonight he stands as a larger man...", has been featured in several media alerts we put out over the years and even ended up in Marr's entry in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marr). There's little doubt that it was our work that brought the quote to his attention. Perhaps he felt that by addressing it in his series he could lay that particular ghost to rest. What Sutcliffe didn't say, though, was that often subsequent drafts of history are "crap" too - but almost invariably biased in favour of powerful interests.
David Edwards and David Cromwell are editors of Media Lens.