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Comment Is Closed

Ellie Keen — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:48:30 +0000

MEDIA ALERT: INTELLECTUAL CLEANSING: PART 3

In Part 1 of this alert, we noted how journalists who threaten their employers’ interests – and the interests of their key political and corporate allies – tend to be unceremoniously dumped. We also described how the force of the law can be deployed to silence dissidents seeking to expose chronic media bias.

In Part 2, we hosted journalist Jonathan Cook’s splendid analysis in response. Cook’s main point was that media managers rarely have to take such extreme measures because few journalists “make it to senior positions unless they have already learnt how to toe the line.”

An interesting question arises, then, in the age of the internet: To what extent will these same ultra-sensitive media companies tolerate public criticism? For example, will they allow visitors to their websites to post material that is critical of their journalism, and perhaps even damaging to their interests? Last month, we tested the limits of dissent on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free (CiF) website.

On September 20, we posted a message on CiF in response to an article written by Guardian journalist Emma Brockes. Brockes had commented wryly on Tania Head, a 9/11 survivor, “of whom it has been alleged that she was not on the 78th floor of the South Tower on September 11th as she claimed, but may have been in Spain at the time…”

Brockes added:

"But well below the level of mental illness a lot of low-level fakery is actively embraced and rewarded." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/20/uselections2008.usa?commentpage=1&commentposted=1)

We posted the following comment:

“This is from the same journalist [Brockes] who wrote in October 2005:

"’[Noam] Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.’”

In our post, we described Chomsky’s outrage at the suggestion that he had denied that the Serb killings of Bosnians at Srebrenica in 1995 constituted a massacre. In 2005, Chomsky wrote to us of Brockes’s article:

“Even when the words attributed to me have some resemblance to accuracy, I take no responsibility for them, because of the invented contexts in which they appear… her piece de resistance, the claim that I put the word ‘massacre’ in quotes. Sheer fabrication.”

Chomsky described his treatment by Brockes and the Guardian as "one of the most dishonest and cowardly performances I recall ever having seen in the media.” (See our media alerts: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/051104_smearing_chomsky_the_guardian.php and http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/051121_smearing_chomsky_the_guardian.php)

We were interested to see how these comments would be received by the Guardian website. In the event, our message remained in place for 48 hours but was then deleted. The site moderator explained in an email:

“The article that Medialens replied to was about emotional fakery and its role in American political culture. The comment that was removed did not address this topic but instead raised a past journalistic error by the author.” (Email to Media Lens, September 23, 2008)

In fact, while Brockes had discussed emotional fakery, focusing on “self dramatisation”, she had also written: “fakery no less shameless goes on every day in the political debate and the way we the audience internalise it. McCain flatly contradicts himself within the space of a single day.”

Political fakery and self-contradiction were exactly the themes of our post, but it was deleted as “off topic” by the Guardian gatekeepers.

Only a handful of comments had been posted in response to Brockes’s article. When we and one or two other people posted messages protesting the deletions, these were also deleted and someone called the Community Moderator shut down the debate, writing: “This discussion will now close, as it has mostly been off topic.” A final message appeared: “Comments are now closed for this entry.”

The website shows five messages deleted alongside just nine posts remaining. Other posts had been removed altogether: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/20/uselections2008.usa?commentpage=1&commentposted=1

Self-Deceits Held In Common – Groupthink

We have seen how the propaganda system is filtered by a range of carrot and stick pressures: professional training, selection for obedience, promotions and demotions, sackings, legal pressures, and the rest. The final piece of the jigsaw is much more elusive and mysterious.

In his book Vital Lies, Simple Truths, psychologist Daniel Goleman examined the human capacity for self-deception. According to Goleman, we build our version of reality around key frameworks of understanding, or “schemas”, which we then protect from conflicting facts and ideas. The more important a schema is for our sense of identity and security, the less likely we are to accept evidence contradicting it. Goleman wrote:

“Foremost among these shared, yet unspoken, schemas are those that designate what is worthy of attention, how it is to be attended to – and what we choose to ignore or deny… People in groups also learn together how not to see – how aspects of shared experience can be veiled by self-deceits held in common." (Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths – The Psychology of Self-Deception, Bloomsbury 1997, p.158)

Goleman concluded: "The ease with which we deny and dissemble – and deny and dissemble to ourselves that we have denied or dissembled – is remarkable."

Psychologist Donald Spence noted the sophistication of this process:

“We are tempted to conclude that the avoidance is not random but highly efficient – the person knows just where not to look.” (Ibid, p.107)

This tendency to self-deception appears to be greatly increased when we join as part of a group. Groups create a sense of belonging, a “we-feeling”, which can provide even greater incentives to reject painful truths. As psychologist Irving Janis reports, the ‘we-feeling’ lends “a sense of belonging to a powerful, protective group that in some vague way opens up new potentials for each of them.” (Ibid, p.186)

Members are thus reluctant to say or do anything that might lessen these feelings of security and empowerment. In this situation, even pointing out the risks surrounding a group decision may seem to represent an unforgivable attack on the group itself. This is ‘groupthink’. Individual self-deception, combined with groupthink, helps explain why journalists are able to ignore even the most obvious facts.

In our September 16 Media Alert, we wrote that the Independent had devoted 153 words in the first two weeks of September to the flooding catastrophe in Haiti. By that time, 1,000 people were reported killed with 1 million made homeless out of a population of 9 million. (http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080916_not_very_interesting.php)

In response, the Independent’s former Washington correspondent, now Asia correspondent, Andrew Buncombe, wrote to us:

Dear Davids, Hello and best wishes. Hope all is well. Your latest alert about Haiti is as thought-provoking as ever but I think there are a couple of clear errors you’ve made that ought to be cleared up. Firstly you say The Independent did not report the hurricanes raging down on the country and that "the Independent has not mentioned Haiti since September 5. But the paper has at least helped explain its own prejudice". That simple point clearly is not true. Guy Adams filed on September 7 a page lead pointing out the chaos facing untold thousands.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/haiti-in-crisis-after-tropical-storm-claims-more-than-500-lives-921716.html

But beyond that you also claim "This indifference has led to an appalling level of non-reporting, not just of the latest floods, but also of the killing of unarmed civilians by United Nations forces (Minustah), the Haitian National Police, and death squads". You say a raid in Cite Soleil in July 2005 was reported only by a few US newspapers but that is not the case. The Independent reported on the raid and revealed evidence collated by Kevin Pina that unarmed civilians were killed.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/peacekeepers-accused-after-killings-in-haiti-500570.html

This was followed up in Feb 2007 by more details of civilians being killed by UN troops.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/civilians-caught-in-crossfire-during-portauprince-raids-434723.html

You’re correct in saying that Haiti does not get as much coverage as the US but your claim that the paper has not reported on Haiti, its problems and its ongoing challenges is not true. A simple search on Google for articles about Haiti over the last few years would quickly show that. Best wishes, Andy Buncombe

Andrew Buncombe
Asia Correspondent
The Independent

We replied on September 21:

Dear Andrew

Many thanks for your email. You’re right about Guy Adams’ September 7 article. For some reason, that wasn’t picked up by our LexisNexis search. We note, though, that the piece devoted 360 words to the disaster in Haiti. At the time we wrote the alert, that figure could have been added to the 153 words mentioning Haiti in the paper that month. That would have totalled 513 words for a 16-day period when perhaps 1000 people died and utter catastrophe befell the island.

You write:

"You say a raid in Cite Soleil in July 2005 was reported only by a few US newspapers but that is not the case."

In fact we weren’t commenting on UK reporting in that section. We were describing research presented in Dan Beeton’s report on US media performance: ‘Bad News From Haiti: U.S. Press Misses the Story.’ We wrote:

"... only a few US newspapers mentioned the incident. These mostly portrayed the incident as a successful UN attempt to eliminate gang members – reports of civilian deaths were ignored.

"The US press has given similar treatment to atrocities committed by the Haitian National Police."

We thought it was clear that we were referring to Beeton’s analysis solely of the US press, but perhaps we could have been clearer.

It’s hard not to reflect on the deeper significance of your response. You’re right that the Independent devoted 513 rather than 153 words to the devastation of Haiti from September 1-16. But, really, so what? Would you be focusing on this tiny difference in assessing the Independent’s performance if you were not working for the paper? Wouldn’t a dispassionate, rational observer join with us in criticising the Independent’s appalling indifference to the disaster this month rather than arguing that "your claim that the paper has not reported on Haiti, its problems and its ongoing challenges is not true"? We did not argue that the Independent has "not reported on Haiti". We argued that its performance, particularly this month in offering a few hundred words – less than one word per death – was pitiful. We have a great deal of respect for you. But isn’t your response on this occasion an example of a kind of corporate ‘groupthink’?

Best wishes

David Edwards and David Cromwell

It is painful for a journalist to be aware of both his or her employer’s shortcomings and his or her powerlessness to remedy them. As Daniel Goleman has noted, “when one can’t do anything to change the situation, the other recourse is to change how one perceives it.” (Goleman, op. cit, p.148)

This, finally, is the key human trait that enables "brainwashing under freedom" – journalists are able to perceive as important only that which allows them to thrive as successful components of the corporate system. The price is high, as Norman Mailer noted:

"There is an odour to any Press Headquarters that is unmistakeable… the unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly in the service of a machine." (Mailer, The Time of Our Time, Little Brown, 1998, p.457)

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to Matt Seaton, editor of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website. Ask him why he rejected Greg Philo’s excellent piece.
Email: matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk

Write to the the Sunday Herald. Ask them why Martin Tierney will no longer be reviewing books for them:
Email: letters@theherald.co.uk and books@theherald.co.uk

Please send a copy of your emails to us
Email: editor@medialens.org

Please do NOT reply to the email address from which this media alert originated. Please instead email us:
Email: editor@medialens.org

This media alert will shortly be archived here:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/1015_intellectual_cleansing_part3.php

The Media Lens book ‘Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in 2006. For details, including reviews, interviews and extracts, please click here:
http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php

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How the corporate media filter out dissent

JamieSW — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:22:31 +0000

Lesson 1: It’s all about money

In many ways, my introduction to journalism was far from typical. In the mid-1980s, after university, I was casting around for a career and decided to “try” journalism. I called the local free newspaper in the city in which I had graduated, Southampton, and offered my services.

Free newspapers were a new and rapidly growing form of print media. Cheap production had been made possible by the new technologies about to revolutionise the working practices of all papers, including those in Fleet Street. I was using a small Macintosh computer, writing stories and designing the pages, at a time when the nationals were still laboriously typesetting. At the Southampton Advertiser, we produced a weekly newspaper with just four editorial staff: an editor, two reporters and a photographer. The advertising staff was more than twice that size.

By definition, free newspapers are advertising platforms – since they have no other way of raising revenue. But when they first emerged, some of the independently owned ones were not as dire as they uniformly are today – for reasons we will come to. The Southampton Advertiser was one of a small chain of free newspapers on the south coast owned by a local businessman. He made no effort to conceal the fact that he saw his newspapers simply as vehicles for making money.

Most ambitious journalists start out on a daily local newspaper (I would soon end up on one), owned by one of a handful of large media groups. There, as I would learn, one quickly feels all sorts of institutional constraints on one’s reporting. As a young journalist, if you know no better, you simply come to accept that journalism is done in a certain kind of way, that certain stories are suitable and others unsuitable, that arbitrary rules have to be followed. These seem like laws of nature, unquestionable and self-evident to your more experienced colleagues. Being a better journalist requires that these work practices become second nature.

The Advertiser, however, offered a far more enlightening and free-wheeling environment for a young journalist. Larger newspapers structure their offices in such a way as to ensure that editorial and advertising staff keep an ostentatious distance from each other, usually on separate floors – as if underscoring to everyone that editorial judgments are free of commercial concerns. At the Advertiser we dispensed with such niceties. The advertising staff were next door and we freely mingled and socialised.

Nonetheless, on the Advertiser the official motto was that we were there to satisfy the readers. I remember in my first week being given a slide show by the advertising manager, whose various independently audited surveys revealed that the Advertiser was better liked and more read in the city than the paid-for local evening newspaper – including, he added proudly, by the ABs, professionals with money to spend on consumer goods.

I doubt he was lying. Invariably when I went out on a story, local people welcomed me into their homes telling me how much they admired the paper and often asking why the evening paper could not be more like ours. People seemed genuinely excited at the prospect of being included in our coverage.

It seems almost paradoxical to me now. How could a newspaper entirely dependent on advertising outperform a newspaper part of whose revenues came from a reading public who had to pay for it? Surely the evening newspaper had far more incentive to come up with reports that appealed to its readers than the free sheet? We will come to a full explanation soon, but here I will highlight a major part of the answer.

An important concern of the Advertiser’s owner was getting his paper better read than the evening paper so that he could attract advertising away from it and charge more per page to the advertisers. It was a form of genuine – and short-lived – competition between local newspapers. Independently owned free sheets like the Advertiser created a real battle for readers with the paid-for evenings, a situation that had been unknown for many decades in almost all Britain’s cities.

It also meant that free sheets like the Advertiser that were not part of a media corporation had a real motivation to write stories that were popular with readers and dispense with the fusty, deferential reporting that had typified the monopolistic evening papers for decades. The Advertiser preferred to risk upsetting officials if it meant gaining readers.

To this end, the Advertiser’s owner had recruited an award-winning former investigative reporter from the Daily Mirror. Our paper was full of hard-hitting news reports and investigations. I remember being sent out to take on shotgun-wielding “cowboy clampers”, conmen who at that time had the freedom to clamp cars and then demand money with menaces; we exposed council corruption; and I was put in charge of running a campaign to bully the city into beginning recycling projects.

Soon council officials were refusing to speak to me. It felt like we were in a low-budget remake of All the President’s Men. Our efforts were amply rewarded too. That year we won the Free Newspaper of the Year Award.

Incredibly, this was the most exciting time I would ever experience in newspapers. Most of the time it felt like we were free to write anything. On the rare occasions we did make a “mistake”, however, it was clear that it was because we had upset an advertiser rather than the readers. It was a lesson not lost on me.

Today, free newspapers are derided. And there is good reason. The Advertiser’s rapid fate has been shared by all the other free sheets that tried to compete with a local established daily paper.

The Advertiser became a genuine threat to the commercial interests of the local Evening Echo (as it was then known). Even with a tiny staff, the Advertiser had far more interesting stories than the evening paper. Humiliatingly, the Echo was forced to run follow-ups of our stories when our exclusive reports raised questions in the city council chamber. Readers started abandoning the evening paper: why pay for your news when you can get it better written and delivered through your door for free?

Shortly after I had been poached by the Echo, the Advertiser was bought out by the evening paper’s owners. The staff of the free sheet were relocated to the Echo’s building and my former paper was eviscerated.

Within a short time a new editor was appointed and the paper’s hard-hitting reports were ditched. Life-style features and syndicated material dominated instead. One of my former colleagues would confide in the pub that his job was now to rewrite press releases. The Advertiser stopped being a rival to the Echo; it became simply an advertising supplement to it.

Lesson 2: Forget about Woodward and Bernstein

It is, of course, no surprise that a large newspaper would want to devour a threatening smaller one. That is the nature of the free market. But, given journalists’ assumptions about the workings of a free press, should the Echo not have had every interest, after destroying the Advertiser, in learning from the latter’s success? Even given the restoration of its monopoly, would it not have a commercial interest in seeking to win back for itself the loyalty of local readers?

At first it looked as if that was going to happen: both I and the Advertiser’s former editor were taken on by the Echo. But it soon emerged that we were to be stymied every time we tried to write the kind of stories we covered for the Advertiser.

Here is a typical experience I had early on with the Echo. I had been approached by a group of residents concerned that the Church of Scientology was intending to use a local health clinic to promote their work. The residents felt this was a misuse of public space and that the clinic’s reputation might confer some legitimacy on the Scientologists’ claims. When I told the news editor about the story, he looked mortified. “We never run stories about the Scientologists,” he said. Why, I asked. “Because they have money and sue every time we mention them in the paper.”

I am not even sure whether his excuse was genuine. Had I written the story for the Advertiser, I doubt we would have been sued. But, looking back, I think his comment concealed some bigger truths about the difference between the Echo and the Advertiser.

Unlike most media owners, the Advertiser’s original proprietor was not a corporate player; he was a local businessman who had spotted an opening in the media market created by new technology. This created a conflict of interest for him that for a time favoured the readers of his newspapers.

Against the might of the evening paper, the Advertiser was a minnow. Because it depended entirely on advertising revenues, it had to steal readers from the Echo if it was to push up its rates. But to make the paper interesting to readers we needed to upset the local centres of power like the council, even though that could in the longer term potentially harm the owner’s business interests.

It may also be that this was a short-term strategy by the proprietor. He knew that if he could take away readers from the Echo, the evening paper would be forced to buy him out. Interestingly, the Echo set up a rival free sheet to try to kill the Advertiser but it never made a dent in its rival’s popularity.

Also, the Advertiser’s ability to cause harm to powerful interests in the city was limited. We published maybe half a dozen high-profile news stories each week in the paper. We easily found enough material of community interest to fill our weekly newspaper. We concentrated on corrupt council officials, bad planning decisions, conmen, and shoplifting local celebrities.

The Echo was a very different kind of operation. It published a hundred or so stories each day on all aspects of local life. If it had allowed its journalists the freedom to use their critical faculties about stories that were of no concern to the city’s powerful elites, how would it have been able to stop them using the same skills when handling stories that did concern such elites?

And just as importantly, how would the newspaper have been able to maintain the pretence of demanding “balanced” and “objective” reporting from its journalists if it so conspicuously applied double standards, depending on whether a story concerned powerful interest groups or not? It would have been clear to even the most blinkered editorial staff member that the paper’s professional standards – the freedom to write without interference – had been compromised.

So instead the Echo’s reporters learnt to write in a bland and deadening style that made most stories seem either of little or no importance or left the reader terminally confused with a ping-pong of he said-she said. Official sources of information and confirmation were always preferred because they were more “reliable” and “trustworthy”. Council officials were always ready and glad to speak to an Echo journalist.

To many of the Echo’s staff, this had all become second nature. Promotion meant moving on from the lowly beat reporter, covering community issues, to other posts: the city or county council correspondent, who depended on council officials and councillors for information; the court reporter, who loyally regurgitated court proceedings; the business staff, who tried to liven up advertisers’ press releases; and the crime correspondent, who spent all day hanging out with policemen.

In other words, success at the newspaper was gauged in terms of obedience to figures of authority, and the ability not to alienate powerful groups within the community. Ambitious journalists learnt to whom they must turn for a comment or a quote, and where “suitable” stories could be found. It was a skill that presumably stayed with them for the rest of their careers.

Those who struggled to cope with these strictures were soon found out. They either failed their probationary periods and were forced to move on, or stayed on in the lowliest positions where they could do little harm.

I followed the professional guidelines as laid down by my bosses but found myself deeply dissatisfied with the Echo and its institutional constraints. My overwhelming impression was of the Echo’s failure as a newspaper – though at that time I attributed it simplistically to cowardice on the part of the paper’s editors.

Possibly my eyes were more open to this failure than some of my colleagues because I had enjoyed relative freedom to report at the Advertiser. At the Echo, unlike the free sheet, reporters were rarely allowed to write reports based on readers who phoned in with their stories – tip-offs that had been the bread and butter of my earlier work. Investigations too were out. Sources for stories were always official sources.

It is interesting that investigative journalism, always a rare form of the reporter’s craft, has all but died out – and is nowadays largely restricted to the internet.

Most young journalists, myself included, were raised on the idea that we had joined a profession that aspired to Woodward and Bernstein-type exposes. We understood, and our profession’s own mythologising encouraged such an understanding, that investigative reporting was the purest form of the journalist’s craft. In many ways it was the ideal.

It is therefore instructive to consider how newspapers treated investigative reporting in its heyday.

Of note is the fact that such investigations, when they occurred, were carried out almost exclusively by a national media desperate for accolades; investigative teams were numerically tiny in comparison with the main editorial staff; the investigative reporters were restricted to their own discrete teams with almost no contact with other editorial departments; and their choice of subjects was closely “supervised” by senior editorial staff.

In other words, the investigative reporter is the exception in journalism rather than the model. He or she is the loose cannon whose reports can bring the paper great acclaim but only if the reporter is kept on a tight leash. The honour they bring the paper can equally turn disastrous if the wrong subjects are pursued or the story leads in unpredictable directions that threaten powerful interests. This is why investigative reporters have always been a small and threatened breed and have always been closely scrutinised.

Lesson 3: Professional means servile

Most journalists learn their trade by working on local media with periods of study spent at one of dozens of journalism colleges around the country. Typically, the young journalist is taken on by a newspaper for up to two years on probation (indentures) at very low pay, and the study periods are paid for by the newspaper.

During this period, when they are both financially and professionally vulnerable, journalists are taught the main skills: how to structure and write news stories, master shorthand, navigate through the system of local government, and abide by the laws of libel. The newcomer is offered proper employment if he or she passes the exams, shows competency and is considered to have absorbed satisfactorily the constraints described above.

I travelled a slightly different route. After working at the Advertiser, I went off to get myself trained and won a scholarship to Cardiff University’s journalism post-graduate course, one of only two such programmes in the country then. Of the 50 or so idealistic trainees alongside me, all hoped to leapfrog the local papers and TV and arrive in a plum job in the national media.

The course spent a lot of time reminding us that we were following in the footsteps of the country’s leading journalists, many of whom had attended Cardiff. Instead of two years of probation on a local newspaper, we had an intensive year-long period of study to groom us for our probable rapid ascent through the ranks of the media.

Cardiff therefore spent a great deal of time persuading us that we were professionals: that is, members of a profession with rules and ethics just like our counterparts in the law and medicine.

That is actually a departure from the historic view of journalists, which was that they belonged to a trade and that they learnt their craft on the job through what were effectively apprenticeships. Journalists in the nineteenth century understood that they were little different from cabinet-makers: you learnt the rules of the craft from your elders and then applied them.

If that sounds difficult to believe today, my experience living in Nazareth – the largest Arab city inside Israel – may be helpful. Here journalists are essentially party political functionaries, working for newspapers established by and closely allied to those parties. Most journalists write little more than press releases for their party and then publish this propaganda as news reports in the party’s newspaper. Unsurprisingly, journalists are generally held in low esteem.

Until the twentieth century that was pretty much the situation in Britain and the United States. A journalist worked for a proprietor with a clear political agenda and produced copy in keeping with that agenda. Such journalists were sometimes derogatively referred to as “hacks”. According to Wikipedia, “hack” in this context derives from “hackney”, “a horse that was easy to ride and available for hire”. The proprietor was, of course, the rider.

The press earned its reputation as the Fourth Estate largely because the interests of these newspapers, representing different elite groups, sometimes clashed. In such circumstances a journalist was briefly able to shine a light on corruption or intrigues in the corridors of power. (Much the same could be said of the judiciary, yet few would suggest that nineteenth-century judges represented interests any more varied than those of the ruling classes from which they were drawn).

A change in the media’s view of its role began in the early stages of the twentieth century, provoked by several parallel developments, among them: universal suffrage, the emergence of large corporations, the establishment of psychology as a field of study, and the consolidation of the PR industry.

Media Lens have described the process of the “professionalising” of journalism in detail in a previous alert (http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040728_Bias_Balanced_Journalism.HTM) so I will not dwell on it again. But several points should be highlighted.

The most urgent battleground for the press barons, and the financial interests that lay behind them, was the winning of a popular mandate for the corporations to accrete even greater power. The chief tool for sanctioning this agenda would be the media. As part of this concentration of power, the proprietors waged a relentless war against the radical and socialist presses, gradually starving them of advertising until their demise was inevitable. (The free sheets of the 1980s would pose a similar threat and be dealt with in much the same way by the established local newspapers.)

But there was a catch: once only a few rich individuals exclusively owned the country’s media, the propagandastic nature of their papers’ journalism would be even more evident. After all, the public understood only too well that newspapers were there to serve the interests of their proprietors. This impression needed to be changed if the public was to be successfully pacified in the face of the corporations’ agenda.

And so dawned the era of the “professional” media. Journalists were no longer to be seen as tradesmen; they were professionals. Their Hippocratic oath was balance, objectivity, neutrality. Unlike their predecessors, they would be trained in academic institutions and could then be trusted to offer only facts in news reports. Opinion would be restricted to the comment pages to give a newspaper “character”. That conveniently explained why there was so little differentiation in the various papers’ coverage or in their selection of news stories.

Be sure: the product was the same as it had always been. But now the media became much better at packaging itself. While reporters on the red tops continued to be characterised as “hacks”, journalists on “quality papers” started to be trusted as reliable and impartial conduits of information.

The campaign of “professionalising” the media was so successful that, after their training, even the journalists believed they were disinterested parties in reporting the news. The selection of certain stories as newsworthy and the further selection of certain facts as relevant to the story had once been understood to be dependent on the biases of the organisation a journalist worked for. Now reporters were made to believe that these arbitrary criteria were inherent in a category of information called ”news”. And that only through their training could journalists recognise these criteria.

The success of this campaign can be seen in the huge rise in the popularity of journalism as a career among middle-class children. The rate at which this “professionalisation” of the media has accelerated can be judged by the fact that 20 years ago when I was training there were only two post-graduate courses in the UK. Today, there are more than a dozen. There are also numerous undergraduate programmes teaching journalism.

By making journalism appear so attractive as a profession, the corporate media have gained an additional benefit, familiar to anyone who understands the laws of supply and demand.

When I was at Cardiff, our teachers used to warn us of the difficulties of finding employment as a journalist. There were just far too many people interested in working in the media, and not enough vacancies. The competition today must be far fiercer than it was then.

Journalism has always been a precarious career. By having too many journalists chasing too few vacancies, the media’s owners retain the whip hand. Any individual journalist who questions the framework within which he or she works will be sure to find someone ready to take their place. In this way a craven workforce can be maintained.

Lesson 4: There is no home of the brave

Like many British journalists, my ambition was to reach the national media. I had been working for several years at the Echo, learning my craft, proving I was a professional, slowly moving up the hierarchy in terms of promotion but not much in terms of responsibility. I seemed to have a hit a glass ceiling, and I had a vague sense of why.

A damning criticism I have often heard in newsrooms was that someone is not a “team player”. Nobody said this to my face at the Echo but I had no doubt that it was a suspicion held by the senior staff. I thought of them as cowardly, failing in their role as watchdogs of power. Maybe my contempt showed a little.

In those days, my experiences at the Echo did nothing to shake my faith in the profession. I assumed that these failings were restricted to the paper and its lily-livered editors. Were new editors to be appointed, or were I to move to another paper, I would find things were different. The national newspapers, I had no doubt, were braver.

Working on a national is seen as the pinnacle of a professional journalist’s career. Very few make it that far. The competition is fierce, and acceptance is slow. As we have seen, there are many stages in the early career of journalists designed to handicap and weed out those who do not conform or who question the framework within which they work. Noam Chomsky refers to this as part of a “filtering” process. Are the nationals different?

It worth examining how a journalist who works for the Guardian, Independent, BBC or any other major media institution gets a job. There are several stages on the way to a secure position in the national media.

The most common requirement is to have completed several years in the local media. As we have noted, the turnover of staff at the local level is high, with most “non-team players” identified very quickly. Those who survive tend to share the professional values of the editors they serve. If there is any doubt in the case of a particular individual, the national media can always check his or her track record of published articles.

A tiny number of privileged individuals manage to avoid this route and come direct from university. At the Guardian, where I worked for several years, it was seen as a mild amusing idiosyncrasy that the newspaper recruited the odd trainee direct from Oxbridge, and more usually from Cambridge. It was generally assumed that this was a legacy of the fact that the paper’s editors had traditionally been Cambridge graduates. These journalists invariably worked their way up the paper’s hierarchy rapidly.

This preference for untested Oxbridge graduates can probably be explained by the filtering process too. The selected graduates always came from the same predictable backgrounds, and were the product of lengthy filtering processes endured in the country’s education system. The Guardian appeared to be more confident that such types could be relied on without the kind of “quality control” needed with other applicants.

For a journalist like myself who was well trained and had spent several years in the local media, getting a foot in the door of the nationals was relatively easy. Keeping my feet under the desk was far harder. Few recruits are given a job or allowed to write for a paper until they have completed yet another lengthy probationary period.

On national newspapers, this usually means spending considerable time as a sub-editor, as I did, a role in which the journalist is slowly acclimatised to the newspaper’s “values”. The sub sits at the bottom of the newspaper’s editorial hierarchy, editing and styling reports as they come in for publication. Above him or her are the section editors (home, foreign etc), a chief sub-editor (usually an old hand), and a revise sub to check their work. Subs invariably spend years as freelancers or on short-term contracts.

The subs’ primary task is to stop errors of fact and judgment getting into the newspaper. But their own judgment is constantly under scrutiny from editors higher up the hierarchy. If they fail to understand the paper’s “values”, their career is likely to stall on this bottom rung or their contract will not be renewed.

Reporters who avoid a period of sub-editing are in an equally insecure position. They are usually taken on as a freelance writer before getting a series of short contracts. During this period news reporters are mainly restricted to the night shift, when their job is to update for the later editions stories that have already been filed by senior reporters during the day. Writers offering material from abroad fare little better. The best they can usually aspire to is being taken on as a stringer, retained by the paper for an agreed period.

Hollywood films may perpetuate the idea of reporters, even junior ones, regularly initiating new stories for their papers, but actually it is relatively rare. In truth, reporters are more usually directed by senior editors on which stories to cover and how to cover them. Unless they are senior writers, usually specialist correspondents, they have little input into the way they cover events.

If they are to survive long, writers must quickly learn what the news desk expects of them. Newcomers are given a small amount of leeway to adopt angles that are “not suitable”. But they are also expected to learn quickly why such articles are unsuitable and not to propose similar reports again.

The advantage of this system is that high-profile sackings are a great rarity. Editors hardly ever need to bare their teeth against an established journalist because few make it to senior positions unless they have already learnt how to toe the line.

The media’s lengthy filtering system means that it is many years before the great majority of journalists get the chance to write with any degree of freedom for a national newspaper, and they must first have proved their “good judgment” many times over to a variety of senior editors. Most have been let go long before they would ever be in a position to influence the paper’s coverage.

Journalists, of course, see this lengthy process of recruitment as necessary to filter for “quality” rather than to remove those who fail to conform or whose reporting threatens powerful elites. The media are supposedly applying professional standards to find those deserving enough to reach the highest ranks of journalism.

But, of course, these goals – finding the best, and weeding out the non-team players – are not contradictory. The system does promote outstanding “professional” journalists, but it ensures that they also subscribe to orthodox views of what journalism is there to do. The effect is that the media identify the best propagandists to promote their corporate values.

It is notable that there is not a single large media institution dedicated to providing a platform to those who dissent or express non-conformist views, however talented they are as journalists. Only at the very margins of what are considered to be left-wing publications such as the Guardian and the Independent can such voices very occasionally be heard, and even then only in the comment pages.

Surprisingly, most national newspapers talk a great deal about their “values” and the special character that marks them out from their rivals. And yet when I was seeking a job on the national newspapers, it was striking how interchangeable the staff were. I spent periods working freelance for the Guardian, Observer and Telegraph, and kept meeting the same aspiring journalists trying to get work at these apparently very different newspapers.

As freelancers we quickly became aware of what each newspaper expected from us in terms of story presentation, and the differences were not great — it was more about nuance (that favourite term of professional journalists). Similarly, the nationals regularly poached senior staff from each other.

Journalists like to argue that this is not surprising in a “professional” environment. After all, the point of “professional” standards is that all newspapers should apply the same principles of supposed neutrality and objectivity.

Where, then, is this difference of character to be located in our media? According to most journalists it is to be found in the commentary pages and in the selection of news stories. This is where a paper reveals its true values. (We will gloss over the problematic fact that the need for stories to be selected – by whom and according to what criteria? – in itself undermines the idea of impartiality.)

In fact, despite their claims to having distinctive characters, newspapers closely follow the same news agendas, trying to mirror each other’s story lists. One of the jobs I once had on the foreign desk was to scan the pages of the first editions of rival papers to see if they had any stories we had missed. All national papers do this compulsively.

Lesson 5: Success comes with the herd

The mirroring by newspapers of each other’s news agendas is often attributed to human nature, in the form of the herd instinct or the tendency to follow the pack. In truth, this is the way most reporters work out in the field. They attend press conferences, they chase after celebrities together, they speak to the same official spokespeople.

I learnt this myself the hard way when I moved to Israel to report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Naively, I assumed that, in line with my vision of the ideal journalist as an investigative reporter, a Woodward or a Bernstein, that I should be trying to find exclusives, stories no other reporter knew about. After all, most newspapers still include as their motto some variation on the claim to be “First with the news”.

What I discovered, however, was that, when I rung up the news desk back in London, the editor would always start by asking me where else the story had been published. Paradoxically, when I said it was an exclusive, I could hear his interest wilt. Even though he knew I had a great deal of experience, he did not want to take a chance on a story that no one else had reported.

On run-of-the-mill stories too, the demand from the news desk was the same: could I get an official source to confirm the story? It happened even when I had seen something with my own eyes. And an official source meant an Israeli source. It felt almost as if the Israeli government and army had to give their seal of approval before a story could be published.

In fact, more than 95 per cent of the reports filed by Britain’s distinguished correspondents in Jerusalem originate in stories they have seen published either by the world’s two main news agencies, Reuters and Associated Press, or in the local Israeli media. Exclusives are almost unheard of. The correspondent’s main job is to rewrite the agency copy by adding his own “angle” – usually a minor matter of emphasis in the first paragraphs or an addition of a few quotes from an official contact.

This reliance on the wires is in itself a very effective way of filtering out news that challenges dominant interests. The agencies, dependent for survival on funding from the large media groups, are extremely deferential to the main Western power elites and their allies. This is for two chief reasons: first, large media owners like the Murdoch empire might pull out of the arrangement, or even set up their own rival agency, were Reuters or AP regularly to run stories damaging to their business interests; and second, the agencies, needing to provide reams of copy each day, rely primarily on official sources for their information.

The minnow in the battle between the agencies is AFP, the French news agency. And much like the Advertiser in its golden days, AFP needs to beat the Reuters-AP cartel by finding other readers / buyers for its wire service. It does this by trying to provide a limited supply of alternative news, especially of what are called “human interest” stories.

In the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict this sometimes translates into sympathetic reports of Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israeli army or the Jewish settlers, stories hard to find in Reuters or AP. Not surprisingly, the media in countries that do not subscribe to the Western corporate view of world affairs are the main subscribers to AFP.

The main other source of information, the Israeli media, reinforces the coverage trends of the big agencies. Israeli newspapers are subject to all the usual institutional constraints we have considered in the case of the evening paper in Southampton. But they also reflect the dominant values of a highly ideological and mobilised society. The British media’s reliance on partisan Israeli news gatherers for information severely undermines their own claims to objectivity and neutrality.

Being a foreign correspondent in Israel, it should be underlined, is no different from being one anywhere else in the world. The same issues apply.

The inadmissibility of many important details of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – especially when they concern the weaker, Palestinian side – is not confined to news reports. Even the opinion pages of newspapers are closed off to the full spectrum of human, mainly Palestinian, experience and relevant political context, as I have repeatedly discovered.

Through personal contacts and fortuitous circumstances, I managed in the early stages of the second intifada to publish several commentaries in the International Herald Tribune. All were critical of Israel’s behaviour in a way that is rarely seen in any American media.

After a short time, Israel’s powerful lobby, realising that I had evaded the normal safeguards, moved into action. After one of my commentaries, the lobby organised the largest postbag of complaints the IHT had received in its history, as a sympathetic editor confided in me. I was forced to submit a lengthy defence of my article to counter the campaign of pressure from the lobby groups, with the IHT eventually accepting that there were no errors in my piece and refusing to publish an apology. However, they severed all links with me – another triumph for the lobby.

Subsequent efforts by the main Palestinian media organisation in the US to get my commentaries published in American papers and journals have failed dismally. Even publications regarded as progressive by American standards refuse to consider my pieces.

The use of institutional power to silence dissident voices is more savage and ugly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than elsewhere, but similar obstacles face any journalist anywhere in the world who tries to break out of the narrow confines of mainstream reporting, analysis and commentary.

Lesson 6: It’s not really about readers

How is it then, if this thesis is right, that there are dissenting voices like John Pilger, Robert Fisk, George Monbiot and Seumas Milne who write in the British media while refusing to toe the line?

Note that the above list pretty much exhausts the examples of writers who genuinely and consistently oppose the normal frameworks of journalistic thinking and refuse to join the herd. That means that in Britain’s supposedly leftwing media we can find one writer working for the Independent (Fisk), one for the New Statesman (Pilger) and two for the Guardian (Milne and Monbiot). Only Fisk, we should further note, writes regular news reports. The rest are given at best weekly columns in which to express their opinions.

However grateful we should be to these dissident writers, their relegation to the margins of the commentary pages of Britain’s “leftwing” media serves a useful purpose for corporate interests. It helps define the “character” of the British media as provocative, pluralistic and free-thinking – when in truth they are anything but. It is a vital component in maintaining the fiction that a professional media is a diverse media.

Also, by presenting these exceptional writers as straining at the very limits of the thinkable, their host newspapers subtly encourage a view of them as crackpots, armchair revolutionaries and whingers – as they often are described in the paper’s feedback columns.

The case of Fisk is instructive. All the evidence is that the Independent might have folded were it not for his inclusion in the news and comment pages. Fisk appears to be one of the main reasons people buy the Independent. When, for example, the editors realised that most of the hits on the paper’s website were for Fisk’s articles, they made his pieces accessible only by paying a subscription fee. In response people simply stopped visiting the site, forcing the Independent to restore free access to his stories.

It is also probable that the other writers cited above are among the chief reasons readers choose the publications that host them. It is at least possible that, were more such writers allowed on their pages, these papers would grow in popularity. We are never likely to see the hypothesis tested because the so-called leftwing media appear to be in no hurry to take on more dissenting voices.

Finally, it should also be noted that none of these admirable writers – with the exception of Pilger – choose or are allowed to write seriously about the dire state of the mainstream media they serve. Sadly, it seems self-evident that were they to do so they would quickly find their employment terminated.

We are fortunate to have their incisive analyses of some of the most important events of our era. Nonetheless it is vital to acknowledge that even they cannot speak out on an issue that is fundamental to the health of our democracy.

How then do I dare write as I have done here? Simply because I have little to lose. The mainstream media spat me out some time ago. Were it otherwise, I would probably be keeping my silence too.

Jonathan Cook is a British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His reports on Israel-Palestine have been published in numerous journals and websites including the Guardian, the Observer, the Times, Al Jazeera, New Statesman, International Herald Tribune, Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), The National (Abu Dhabi), Electronic Intifada and Counterpunch. His new book, published this month, is ‘Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair’ (Zed Books). His two earlier books are ‘Blood and Religion’ (Pluto Books, 2006) and ‘Israel and the Clash of Civilisations’ (Pluto Books, 2008). He has his own website at www.jkcook.net.

Jon Snow: “Editors sold their souls” to MoD

JamieSW — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:06:35 +0000

Jon Snow, Channel 4 news anchor, reveals his anger on Radio 4 at the news blackout on Prince Harry’s deployment to Afghanistan. On a programme stacked with pro-war journalists, he was asked by media analyst Steve Hewlett how he felt when he found out there had been an embargo. Snow replied:

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.

The Patron Saint of Charlatans

JamieSW — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:32:06 +0000

Does Moore’s law now apply to human civilisation? In 1965 Gordon Moore observed that the density of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every two years or so, and predicted this would continue. Similar laws now seem to apply to every aspect of computing. And, perhaps, to the rest of the world. The information available, the scale of human interactions, the detail involved in financial deals and trading relationships and political decisions appear to be growing exponentially. We are drowning in complexity. To be good citizens we must understand what is done in our name. But how?

We lean ever more heavily on experts. But who can we now trust? Corporate PR has become so sophisticated that it’s almost impossible for most people to tell the difference between genuine science and greenwash, or real grassroots campaigns and the astroturf lobbies concocted by consultants.1 PR companies set up institutes with impressive names which publish what purport to be scientific papers, sometimes in the font and format of genuine journals.2 They accuse real scientists of every charge that could be levelled at themselves: junk science, hidden funding, undisclosed interests and inflated credentials.

If journalists have any remaining function, it is to help people navigate this world: to try to understand the crushingly dull documents that most people don’t have time for, to smoke out the fakes and show how to recognise the genuine article. But we mess up too. The most we can promise is to try not to make the same mistake twice.

So what can you say about a man who makes the same mistake 38 times? Who, when confronted by a mountain of evidence demonstrating that his informant is a charlatan convicted under the Trade Descriptions Act, continues to repeat his claims? Who elevates the untested claims of bloggers above peer-reviewed papers? Who sticks to his path through a blizzard of facts? What should we deduce about the Sunday Telegraph‘s columnist Christopher Booker?

This week Richard Wilson’s book Don’t Get Fooled Again is published.3 It contains a fascinating chapter on Booker’s claims about white asbestos. Since 2002, he has published 38 articles on this topic, and every one of them is wrong. He champions the work of John Bridle, who has described himself as “the world’s foremost authority on asbestos science”.4 Bridle has claimed to possess an honorary professorship from the Russian Academy of Sciences, to be a consultant to an institute at the University of Glamorgan, the chief asbestos consultant for an asbestos centre in Lisbon, and a consultant to Vale of Glamorgan trading standards department.5 None of these claims is true. Neither the institute at the University of Glamorgan nor the centre in Lisbon have ever existed.6 His only relationship with the Glamorgan trading standards department is to have been successfully prosecuted by it for claiming a qualification he does not possess.7 8

None of this deters Mr Booker. Armed with Bridle’s claims, for the past six years he has waged a campaign against asbestos science. White asbestos cement, he maintains “poses no measurable risk to health”.9 He contends that “not a single case” of mesothelioma – the cancer caused by exposure to asbestos – “has ever been scientifically linked with asbestos cement”.10 A paper commissioned by the UK’s Health and Safety Executive, he says, “concluded that the risk from white asbestos is ‘virtually zero’”.11

Booker tells me he has read this paper. Oh yes? The term he quotes – “virtually zero” – does not appear in it.12 It does show that white asbestos (chrysotile) is less dangerous than brown or blue asbestos. But, while there is uncertainty about the numbers, it still presents a risk of mesothelioma, which depends on the level of exposure. People exposed to a high dose (between 10 and 100 fibres per millilitre per year (f/ml.yr)) have a risk (around two deaths per 100,000 for each f/ml.yr) of contracting this cancer. Only when the dose falls to less than 0.1 f/ml.yr does it become “probably insignficant”.13 But Booker’s columns contain no such caveat. He creates the impression that white asbestos is safe at all doses. The paper he misquotes also cites five scientific studies of exposure to asbestos cement, which record “high levels of mesothelioma mortality”.14 15 16 17 18

Two years ago, John Bridle’s misleading CV and dodgy record were exposed by the BBC’s You and Yours programme.19 So the BBC immediately became part of the conspiracy: in Booker’s words “a concerted move by the powerful ‘anti-asbestos lobby’ to silence Bridle”.20 He suggested that the broadcasting regulator Ofcom would clear Bridle’s name.21 In June this year it threw out Bridle’s complaint and published evidence even more damning than that contained in the programme.22 So has Booker changed the way he sees “Britain’s leading practical asbestos expert”? Far from it. He tells me that “my view of Ofcom has plummeted”23: it too has joined the conspiracy.

We are not talking about trivia here. This is a matter of life and death. How many people might have been exposed to dangerous levels of asbestos dust as a result of reading and believing Booker’s columns?

For several years he has been waging a similar war against “warmist alarmists”, by which he means climate scientists. Nine days ago, for instance, he attacked Michael Mann for publishing a paper that shows (alongside scores of other studies) that global temperatures do indeed follow the famous hockey-stick pattern: a moderate long-term cooling trend terminating in a sudden upward bend. Mann, Booker told his readers, had been “selective … in his new data, excluding anything which confirmed the Medieval Warming”.24 But Mann’s paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses every uncluttered high-resolution proxy temperature record in the public domain.25 How did Booker trip up so badly? By using the claims of unqualified bloggers to refute peer-reviewed studies.

Under their guidance he routinely mistakes weather for climate and makes claims about the temperature record that bear no relation to the studies he cites. My favourite Booker column is the piece he wrote in February, titled “So it appears that Arctic ice isn’t vanishing after all”. In September 2007, he reported, “sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration … Its graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13,000 million sq km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost back to 13 million sq km”.26 To reinforce this point, he helpfully republished the graph, showing that the ice had indeed expanded between September and January. The Sunday Telegraph continues to employ a man who cannot tell the difference between summer and winter.

But for the Wikipedia Professor of Gibberish, this patron saint of charlatans, even the seasons are negotiable. Booker remains right, whatever the evidence says. It is hard to think of any journalist – Melanie Phillips included – who has spread more misinformation. The world becomes even harder to navigate. You cannot trust the people who tell you whom to trust.

1. See Chapter 2 (The Denial Industry) of my book Heat: how to stop the planet burning. 2007. Penguin, London.
2. See for example Arthur B. Robinson, Sallie L. Baliunas, Willie Soon, And Zachary W. Robinson, 1998. Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C. Marshall Institute. http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm. This paper was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
3. Richard Wilson, 2008. Don’t Get Fooled Again: a sceptic’s guide to life. Icon Books, Cambridge.
4. Ofcom, June 2008. Broadcast Bulletin No. 111. Complaint by Professor John Bridle brought on his behalf by Fisher Scoggins LLP. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/obb/prog_cb/obb111/issue111.pdf
5. You and Yours, BBC Radio 4, 18th October 2006.
6. ibid.
7. ibid.
8. I wrote to John Bridle twice seeking to put questions to him, but though – according to Christopher Booker – he is aware of my emails, he has not replied.
9. Christopher Booker, 25th May 2008. Farmers face £6bn bill for asbestos clean-up. Sunday Telegraph.
10. Christopher Booker, 31st January 2004. The BBC helps to sex up the asbestos threat. Sunday Telegraph.
11. Christopher Booker, 12th January 2002. Billions to be spent on nonexistent risk. Sunday Telegraph.
12. John T. Hodgson And Andrew Darnton, 2000. The Quantitative Risks of Mesothelioma and Lung Cancer in Relation to Asbestos Exposure. Annals of Occupational Hygiene, Vol. 44, No. 8, pp. 565–601.
13. ibid, Table 11.
14. M. Albin, Jacobson, K., Attawell, R., Johannson, L. and Wellinder, H., 1990. Mortality and cancer morbidity in cohorts of asbestos cement workers and referents. British Journal of Industrial Medicine. Vol. 47, 602–610.
15. M. Albin, Johansson, L., Pooley, F. D., Jakobsson, K., Attawell, R. and Mitha, R., 1990. Mineral fibres, fibrosis and
asbestos products in the lungs from deceased asbestos cement workers. British Journal of Industrial Medicine. Vol. 47, 747–774.
16. M.M.Finkelstein, 1984. Mortality among employees of an Ontario asbestos-cement factory. American Review of Respiratory Disease. Vol. 129, 750–761.
17. M.M.Finkelstein and Vingilis, J. J., 1984. Radiographic abnormalities among asbestos cement workers: and exposure response study. American Review of Respiratory Disease. Vol. 129, 17–22.
18. M.M.Finkelstein, 1989. Mortality among employees of an Ontario factory manufacturing insulation materials from amosite asbestos. American Journal of Industrial Medicine. Vol. 15, 477–481.
19. You and Yours, ibid.
20. Christopher Booker, 14th October 2006. The BBC falls for the asbestos scam. Sunday Telegraph.
21. Christopher Booker and Richard North, 2007. Scared to Death. From BSE to global warming: why scares are costing us the earth. P319. Continuum, London.
22. Ofcom, ibid.
23. Christopher Booker, 22nd September 2008. By telephone.
24. Christopher Booker, 14th September 2008. Climate change chicanery. Sunday Telegraph.
25. Michael E. Mann et al, 9th September 2008. Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. PNAS. Vol. 105, No. 36, pp13252–13257. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0805721105.
26. Christopher Booker, 4th February 2008. So it appears that Arctic ice isn’t vanishing after all. Sunday Telegraph.

NUJ film shows police obstruction of journalists

Ellie Keen — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:59:00 +0000

The NUJ has released a short film highlighting some of the problems faced by journalists covering public demonstrations. View it here

The video was released the day after the TUC in Brighton condemned the erosion of civil liberties and media freedoms in Britain. TUC unions unanimously backed a motion, proposed by the National Union of Journalists, which called for a rethink of government policies that put journalists at risk of imprisonment just for doing their job.

Speaking after the TUC vote, NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear said: “Journalism is facing grave threats in an age of intolerance. Whilst on the streets dissent is being criminalized, independent journalism is being increasingly caught in the civil liberties clampdown.”

The nine-minute video, called Press Freedom: Collateral Damage, includes examples of the police obstructing journalists in their work.

Release of the film follows numerous complaints from media workers who have experiences of the police going beyond their powers in attempting to restrict the ability of journalists to do their work. The NUJ’s motion to the TUC was part of a wider campaign for a greater recognition of press freedom by the UK government.

The motion also highlights cases of journalists, such as Robin Ackroyd and Shiv Malik, who have faced the threat of jail because of legal demands to reveal confidential source information.

In his speech to Congress, Jeremy Dear drew attention to the case of Sally Murrer, who is facing criminal prosecution for receiving information from a police source, and highlighted the problems faced by journalists attempting to cover the recent Climate Camp in Kent.

Jeremy said: “The terrorising of journalists isn’t just done by shadowy men in balaclavas, but also by governments and organisations who use the apparatus of the law or state authorities to suppress and distort the information they do not want the public to know and to terrorise the journalists involved through injunctions, threats to imprisonment and financial ruin.

“The use of the Terrorism Act and SOCPA increasingly criminalize not just those who protest but those deemed to be giving the oxygen of publicity to such dissent. Journalists’ material and their sources are increasingly targeted by those who wish to pull a cloak of secrecy over their actions.”

The speech concluded: “This isn’t over-zealous policing this is a co-ordinated and systematic abuse of media freedom – and we must expose it, challenge it and act against those who undermine the rights of photographers, journalists and media workers.

“And we must do so because if whistleblowers and sources fear speaking out, if photographers and journalists cannot probe the dark corners of business, politics or human rights, the ability of the media – already under threat from concentration of ownership and cost-cutting – to hold power to account, to expose wrongdoing, to provide the information on which citizens can make informed decisions about their lives will be seriously compromised.

“The Terrorism Act and SOCPA are not sophisticated security policies – they are the blunt instruments of an intolerant government.

“As if in some Orwellian nightmare the Ministry of Freedom tells us that the price we must pay for peace and liberty at home is not just a war in Iraq – not just the billions spent on war – but, in the wake of the London bombings, is the fingerprinting of council workers and the covert surveillance of M&S workers. It is ID cards and 42-day detention. It is curbs on the right to protest, the civil contingencies act and it is the extension of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, a snoopers’ charter giving access to personal texts, emails and internet use.

“The price is too high. Less liberty does not imply greater security. It never has.

“Our movement has been at the forefront of the great struggles for human and civil rights over the past century. In this age of intolerance new struggles must be waged and we must lead that fight.”

The Future of Spin

Ellie Keen — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 23:26:36 +0000

Conservatives would perpetuate New Labour control freakery

Hand to hand combat between the government and political correspondents would continue if the Conservatives were elected because an administration led by David Cameron would be just as determined to try to control the news agenda. This was the conclusion of journalists and press officers at a seminar held by the Westminster Media Forum (1 July, 2008). The two sides felt that the politicisation of civil service information officers, and the likelihood that any future government would find itself on the defensive, meant that further trench warfare was inevitable.

There had been a fundamental shift under New Labour because Tony Blair’s government realised that unless it imposed control over the flow of information from the state to the public it would be “torn apart” by the media.

Opening up the Downing Street lobby system to televised briefings was put forward as one option for improving the government’s relations with the media. David Hill, who was Alastair Campbell’s successor as Blair’s director of communications, said the existing structure of lobby briefings for political correspondents had become counter-productive.

He proposed that the twice-daily briefings should be opened up to public scrutiny and whenever possible a senior minister should attend to answer the key questions of the day. Guidance given by the Downing Street spokesman would not only be on the record but televised. And, by forcing senior political correspondents to ask their questions in public, the government would be adding another element of transparency.

Hill, now a director of the Bell Pottinger group, said the problem with the existing system of briefings was that they had become “almost wholly defensive” and rarely gave the government the opportunity to get on the front foot. Because of the frisson caused by the briefings within the Whitehall machine, government departments were only asked to supply defensive information for the rebuttal of questions and civil servants found the process was entirely negative.

A description of how the civil service was politicised was given by Eben Black, formerly political editor of the News of the World and now a director and head of media at the public affairs practice DLA Piper. Black said that soon after Labour won the 1997 general election he telephoned the Department of Education and asked for a county by county breakdown of school class sizes.

With ten minutes of the call he was rung back by Conor Ryan, special adviser to the Secretary of State, David Blunkett, and asked why he wanted the information. A Labour spin doctor was checking out the reason for his request in a way which would never have been done by a civil service information officer.

“Given the intensely political way in which the Whitehall information machine has to operate under Labour, I think a Conservative government would behave in precisely the same way. The days of an impartial relationship between the civil service and the news media have gone and given that Whitehall is no longer above the political fray, I think there will never be anything but war between government spin doctors and journalists”.

Tony Collins, executive editor of Computer Weekly, said he had detected an increasingly aggressive mentality on the part of government press officers. “We often get supplied incorrect information. We know ministers are given incorrect information…the Prime Minister has even been given incorrect information about the NHS computer system”.

Collins claimed that another ploy used by government press officers was to tell Computer Weekly that news conferences were full and there was no more space. “I was told one press conference would not be of interest to Computer Weekly…at another a press officer barred my way. I have seen manipulation of information and control of journalists which I have never seen before”.

Although David Hill was not optimistic about the chances of any future government establishing a more stable relationship with the media, he was still convinced that the government would like to be more open and transparent. But given the fiercely competitive nature of an increasingly fragmented media, all governments would continue to be under pressure.

It would be harder for governments to respond if there was no incentive from the media to offer a calmer analysis. Whitehall press officers were ultra cautious because they feared they would get into difficulty.

“There should be confidence in the government to field officials who have detailed information and who could answer questions but Whitehall falls down and fails to deploy them because they are fearful of being identified and personally attacked in the media”.

From Triumph to Torture

Ellie Keen — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:43:17 +0000

Two weeks ago, I presented a young Palestinian, Mohammed Omer, with the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Awarded in memory of the great US war correspondent, the prize goes to journalists who expose establishment propaganda, or “official drivel”, as Gellhorn called it. Mohammed shares the prize of £5,000 with Dahr Jamail. At 24, he is the youngest winner. His citation reads: “Every day, he reports from a war zone, where he is also a prisoner. His homeland, Gaza, is surrounded, starved, attacked, forgotten. He is a profoundly humane witness to one of the great injustices of our time. He is the voice of the voiceless.” The eldest of eight, Mohammed has seen most of his siblings killed or wounded or maimed. An Israeli bulldozer crushed his home while the family were inside, seriously injuring his mother. And yet, says a former Dutch ambassador, Jan Wijenberg, “he is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel”.

Getting Mohammed to London to receive his prize was a major diplomatic operation. Israel has perfidious control over Gaza’s borders, and only with a Dutch embassy escort was he allowed out. Last Thursday, on his return journey, he was met at the Allenby Bridge crossing (to Jordan) by a Dutch official, who waited outside the Israeli building, unaware Mohammed had been seized by Shin Bet, Israel’s infamous security organisation. Mohammed was told to turn off his mobile and remove the battery. He asked if he could call his embassy escort and was told forcefully he could not. A man stood over his luggage, picking through his documents. “Where’s the money?” he demanded. Mohammed produced some US dollars. “Where is the English pound you have?”

“I realised,” said Mohammed, “he was after the award stipend for the Martha Gellhorn prize. I told him I didn’t have it with me. ‘You are lying’, he said. I was now surrounded by eight Shin Bet officers, all armed. The man called Avi ordered me to take off my clothes. I had already been through an x-ray machine. I stripped down to my underwear and was told to take off everything. When I refused, Avi put his hand on his gun. I began to cry: ‘Why are you treating me this way? I am a human being.’ He said, ‘This is nothing compared with what you will see now.’ He took his gun out, pressing it to my head and with his full body weight pinning me on my side, he forcibly removed my underwear. He then made me do a concocted sort of dance. Another man, who was laughing, said, ‘Why are you bringing perfumes?’ I replied, ‘They are gifts for the people I love’. He said, ‘Oh, do you have love in your culture?’

“As they ridiculed me, they took delight most in mocking letters I had received from readers in England. I had now been without food and water and the toilet for 12 hours, and having been made to stand, my legs buckled. I vomited and passed out. All I remember is one of them gouging, scraping and clawing with his nails at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. He scooped my head and dug his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and eardrum. The pain became sharper as he dug in two fingers at a time. Another man had his combat boot on my neck, pressing into the hard floor. I lay there for over an hour. The room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror.”

An ambulance was called and told to take Mohammed to a hospital, but only after he had signed a statement indemnifying the Israelis from his suffering in their custody. The Palestinian medic refused, courageously, and said he would contact the Dutch embassy escort. Alarmed, the Israelis let the ambulance go. The Israeli response has been the familiar line that Mohammed was “suspected” of smuggling and “lost his balance” during a “fair” interrogation, Reuters reported yesterday.

Israeli human rights groups have documented the routine torture of Palestinians by Shin Bet agents with “beatings, painful binding, back bending, body stretching and prolonged sleep deprivation”. Amnesty has long reported the widespread use of torture by Israel, whose victims emerge as mere shadows of their former selves. Some never return. Israel is high in an international league table for its murder of journalists, especially Palestinian journalists, who receive barely a fraction of the kind of coverage given to the BBC’s Alan Johnston.

The Dutch government says it is shocked by Mohammed Omer’s treatment. The former ambassador Jan Wijenberg said: “This is by no means an isolated incident, but part of a long-term strategy to demolish Palestinian social, economic and cultural life … I am aware of the possibility that Mohammed Omer might be murdered by Israeli snipers or bomb attack in the near future.”

While Mohammed was receiving his prize in London, the new Israeli ambassador to Britain, Ron Proser, was publicly complaining that many Britons no longer appreciated the uniqueness of Israel’s democracy. Perhaps they do now.

johnpilger.com