Medialens | ukwatch.net

An Interview with Media Lens

JamieSW — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:05:37 +0000

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:

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.

Iran and the British Media

Alex Doherty — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 20:05:14 +0000

Exclusive to ukwatch.net an interview on the British media’s coverage of the confrontation between Iran and the United States with David Edwards and David Cromwell, editors of Medialens

The noises being made by the British and american governments are eerily reminiscent of the build up to the Iraq invasion. How has the media responded to this propaganda re-run?

The US-UK governments and media have quickly managed to transform another defenceless Third World country into another apparently looming threat. It is only five years since the media were rejecting the idea that Iran was a credible part of an “axis of evil”, emphasising its vibrant, modernising culture and increasingly close ties to Europe. The Times, for example, wrote:

“He [Bush] has discerned an ‘axis of evil’ in Iran, Iraq and North Korea… The notion appeared to receive solid support across the country [US], but it is a serious mistake, and the inclusion of Iran the most damaging part… There is no question that Iran can cause trouble… Yet it is a large, sophisticated country, with many friends in the region, including Saudi Arabia.” (Bronwen Maddox, ‘Why America may have to go it alone,’ The Times, January 31, 2002)

The Financial Times commented:

“When George W. Bush used his State of the Union speech this week to place Iran on a par with Iraq and North Korea in an ‘axis of evil‘, he not only dismayed the Tehran government. He also alarmed some of the closest allies of the US, who saw a shift in the administration’s stance… European and US officials believe that Iran has been behaving responsibly in Afghanistan. Some of those involved in the Afghan peace process say that, at least in some areas of Iran’s foreign policy, the ideology of revolutionary Islam has given way to a more pragmatic approach driven by national interests.” (Guy Dinmore and Roula Khalaf, ‘America’s new enemy,’ Financial Times, February 1, 2002)

This was before the US-UK establishment needed a scapegoat to blame for the catastrophe in Iraq, and before it needed a new threat to maintain domestic discipline through fear in the standard manner. Iran is now being presented as a sinister, irresponsible menace determined to wipe Israel off the map – a threat that must be countered. This propaganda closely matches the campaign against Iran: for Saddam Hussein read President Ahmadinejad. For Iraqi links to al Qaida read Iranian links to Shia terrorists. For Saddam’s ’intent’ to develop weapons of mass destruction read Iran’s ‘intent’ to develop nuclear weapons. For the Iraqi Republican Guard read Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

By last January, the likes of the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee were writing:

“Now the mad mullahs of Iran will soon have nuclear bombs, are we all doomed?... Do something, someone! But what and who?” (Toynbee, ‘No more fantasy diplomacy: cut a deal with the mullahs,’ The Guardian, February 7, 2006)

Gerard Baker provided the answer in the Times:

“The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran”. (Baker, ‘Prepare yourself for the unthinkable: war against Iran may be a necessity,’ The Times, January 27, 2006)

Baker explained his reasoning:

“If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik Revolution and the coming of Hitler.”

The January 20, 2005, BBC 1 Lunchtime News saw diplomatic correspondent James Robbins declare that US relations with Iran were “looking very murky because of the nuclear threat”. (BBC1, 13:00 News, January 20, 2005)

The media has failed to learn even the most obvious lessons from four years ago. On February 16, the US media watchdog, FAIR, recalled how, in the wake of its disastrous pre-war reporting on Iraq, the New York Times had implemented new rules governing its use of unnamed sources. And yet the Times’ lead story on February 10 promoting US government charges against Iran contravened these rules. FAIR commented:

“Repeatedly citing the likes of ‘administration officials,’ ‘American intelligence’ and ‘Western officials,’ the article used unnamed sources four times as often as named ones. Only one source in… [the] report challenged the official claims: Iranian United Nations ambassador Javad Zarif, who was allowed a one-sentence denial of Iranian government involvement.” (Fair Action Alert, ‘NYT Breaks Own Anonymity Rules,’ February 16, 2007;
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3042)

The same is true of much of the British media. Beyond the detail, the fundamental media stance is that the outlandish claims of proven liars within the British and American governments should be taken at face value with little need for critical thought or consideration of counter-arguments.

What are the factors that prevent the media offering a more realistic account of the confrontation?

The media is part of an establishment that benefits from war-mongering, militarism and the demonisation of enemies. US-UK policy in the Middle East is driven by Western corporations’ desire to control oil resources on their terms. That means mass violence, intimidation, punishment of ‘rogue states’ defying US-UK control, and so on. There are also huge profits to be made from waging perpetual war. As has been observed the similarity between a factory manufacturing nappies and one manufacturing cruise missiles is that the manufacturer goes out of business if the product isn’t used. In his first few months in office, Bush appointed 32 former arms company executives, board members and major shareholders to key policymaking positions in his administration. So that’s a factor – war is good for a very powerful section of the business community whose influence is deeply entrenched in the political system.

It’s usually not that the corporate media consciously conspire to support this system. Rather, ‘respectable’ comes to be defined as opinion which defers to the establishment’s “necessary illusions“. To challenge those illusions is to be ‘irresponsible’, ridiculed, reviled as ’unpatriotic’. Dissidents are deprived of political and financial support, and generally marginalised. What is left is what we read, watch and hear as mainstream output.

Are the media entirely wrong in suggesting that Iran aims to develop a nuclear weapon?

The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has expressed concern over a lack of transparency in Iran’s nuclear programme, but the fact is that it has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons programme. Phyllis Bennis, a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute, wrote last month:

“Iran is not a threat to the United States. It does not have a nuclear weapon and is not threatening to attack the U.S; it is a signatory to the NPT and the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program; Iran’s nuclear power program, including enriching uranium, is legal under the NPT. Back in 2003 Iran had proposed a comprehensive ‘grand bargain’ with the U.S., which the Bush administration has ignored. The February 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) asserts that Iran’s involvement in Iraq ‘is not likely to be a major driver of violence’ there.” (Bennis, ’Escalating Threats of U.S. Attacks Against Iran,’ February, 20, 2007; http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?itemid=12159)

Frank Barnaby, of UK think tank The Oxford Research Group, said last year:

“They [the Iranians] don’t currently have enough centrifuges working – so far as we know – to produce significant amounts of highly-enriched uranium or even enriched uranium. They would need a lot more.” (Sarah Buckley and Paul Rincon, ‘Iran “years from nuclear bomb“,’
www.bbc.co.uk, January 12, 2006)

Given these and other problems, The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) believes it would take Iran at least a decade to produce enough high-grade uranium to make a single nuclear weapon. Dr Barnaby agrees:

“The CIA says 10 years to a bomb using highly enriched uranium and that is a reasonable and realistic figure in my opinion.”

So why, one really ought to ask, the sense of imminent crisis?

In any case, the question of Iranian nuclear potential is moot. The real issue is the far greater threat represented by the US, Russia, the UK, Israel and other nations that already possess nuclear weapons in abundance.

Frida Berrigan, a columnist at Foreign Policy In Focus, put it well:

“The contradictions between what the [US] administration is demanding of Tehran and other powers, and the capabilities it is pursuing for its own arsenal, are provocative and dangerous – a pernicious form of nuclear hypocrisy…. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States agreed to an ‘unequivocal undertaking’ to ‘eliminate’ its nuclear weapons arsenal. Honoring that commitment – and encouraging other declared and undeclared nuclear states to do the same – would undercut Tehran’s arguments about why nuclear firepower is necessary. Oh, and by the way, it would also make the world feel a whole lot safer.” (Frida Berrigan, ‘Nuclear hypocrisy and Iran’, March 6, 2007;
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=67&ItemID=12269)

At root, the issue is emphatically not about nuclear weapons. It’s about control of the Middle East’s energy resources; oil, in particular. A constant driver of US foreign policy since the end of WW2 has been about dominating the region. The US State Department in 1945 called the Middle East “a stupendous source of strategic
power, and one of the greatest material prizes in history”. (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, ‘Hegemony or Survival’, London, 2003, p. 150).

Iran is now being targeted because it is a convenient scapegoat for the US disaster in Iraq, and because Iran is showing signs of independence. And, like any bully, the US must stamp on the slightest sign of resistance to its authority.

How has the british media responded to the claims that Iran is manufacturing IED’s used by Iraqi insurgents?

By presenting anonymous US government claims at face value and, as usual, by ignoring even the most blindingly obvious questions. For example, do Iraqi insurgents in fact need Iranians to engage in the high-risk strategy of supplying advanced improvised explosive devices (IEDs) known as “explosively formed penetrators” (EFPs)? Michael Knights, chief of analysis for the Olive Group, a private security consulting firm, presented evidence in Jane’s Intelligence Review that Iraqi Shiites have manufactured both the components for EFPs and the complete EFPs.

Knights claims that the equipment required to make EFPs “can easily be found in Iraqi metalworking shops and garages”, and that all EFPs exploded so far could have been manufactured in one or at most two simple workshops with one or two specialists in each – one in the Baghdad area and one in southern Iraq. (Gareth Porter, ‘US Briefing on Iran Discredits the Official Line,’
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021407D.shtml)

Has that elementary observation ever been discussed by the mainstream media? If so, we haven’t seen it. So here’s another question: Is there any evidence that EFPs are being manufactured in Iraq? The New York Times reported as an aside on February 20:

“An Iraqi unit, aided by American advisers, caught militants in the act of constructing devices known as explosively formed projectiles in a house in Hilla, south of Baghdad, on Saturday, according to the American military.” (Marc Santora, ‘Iraqi Militants Launch Attack on U.S. Outpost,’ New York Times, February 20, 2007)

It seems beyond belief that highly-paid journalists supported by teams of researchers are unable to investigate these issues – but that’s the reality.

Has there been much difference in the way in which the “liberal” media have reported the Iran question as compared with the more conservative sectors of the press?

It’s conceivable that the more obviously compromised press on the right wing are more gung ho than the liberal press. There are glimmers of conscience in the liberal press where journalists just cannot help but notice the echoes of 2002-2003 ahead of the Iraq catastrophe. So for example Patrick Cockburn wrote in the Independent:

“The US stance on the military capabilities of Iraqis today is the exact opposite of its position four years ago. Then, President Bush and Tony Blair claimed that Iraqis were technically advanced enough to produce long-range missiles and to be close to producing a nuclear device. Washington is now saying that Iraqis are too backward to produce an effective roadside bomb and must seek Iranian help.” (Cockburn, ‘Washington accuses Tehran, and sets stage for a new confrontation,’ The Independent, February 12, 2007)

By contrast the Telegraph’s Con Coughlin’s is happily repeating his 2002-2003 role of demonising on demand.

But the key point is that the liberal media are fully participating in the demonisation of Iran, as the comments from James Robbins and Polly Toynbee cited above indicate.

Is it really that significant what the journalists say? Surely people can make their own minds up?

Yes, it is very, very significant what journalists say. In many people’s minds now – despite the parallels with the lies over Iraq – there is surely a sense that maybe Iran does represent a threat and that something really does need to be done. Maybe Iran would give the bomb to al Qaeda. Can we afford to take the risk? Maybe Iran would attack Israel with a nuclear weapon, if it got half a chance. The novelist and media commentator Martin Amis said on a leading BBC TV political review last October:

“Iran is our natural enemy.” (Amis, This Week, October 12, 2006)

Amis went so far as to claim that Iran would be willing to pay the price of nuclear retaliation in order to annihilate Israel:

“They feel they can absorb this hit and destroy Israel.”

These are really extraordinary claims – more extreme even than most claims made against Iraq 2002-2003 – and of course they have an effect on people‘s perceptions.

This propaganda is crucial because it means the groundwork is being laid for a military attack. If and when that attack comes, the public may well not be as outraged and opposed as they ought to be. Their response may be one of shock and concern, but they may feel it was in some sense necessary. This means the kind of public horror and revulsion that could lead to genuine rejection of killers like Blair, Straw, Bush and co, and a genuine demand for real alternatives (ie not Brown and Cameron), will once again have been pacified and neutralised, and the killing will continue into the future as it always has in the past. All it needs is for a critical mass of journalists to “normalise the unthinkable” to use Edward Herman’s phrase – to create a sufficient level of fear, doubt and deference to those proclaiming the urgent need for mass violence. Herman has written:

“There are almost no holds barred, and almost nothing in the way of subversion and military attack that the mainstream media won’t normalize. After all we are WE, the good and necessary policeman in service to global interests.” (Edward S. Herman, ‘Nuggets from a Nuthouse, Part 4: Meaningful Elections and Establishment Relativism,’ Z Magazine, March 2007)

When we take a step back from the propaganda we can see that this constant emphasis on mass violence as the solution of choice to the world’s problems is really strange. Why in the 21st century, with all our wealth, sophisticated communisations, technology and interconnected economies, would we believe that employing essentially medieval methods such as firing cruise missiles and dropping bombs is the best or only way to solve these problems? It really is a form of feigned social insanity in our view.

What would a more honest media be telling us about Iran?

That Iran offers no threat to a West bristling with doomsday nuclear weapons. That any Iranian use of nuclear weapons would result in instant national annihilation – it would be history’s first known act of national suicide. That Iran is of course completely aware of this, as was Saddam Hussein (one reason why the latter did not deploy his biological and chemical weapons during the 1991 Gulf War). That high-tech surveillance equipment can detect any attempts to manufacture the components required to produce weapons of mass destruction. That, motivated by greed for oil, Britain and America organised a military coup in Iran in 1952 which toppled the democratically elected government of Mussadiq. That the same Western powers then sent hundreds of tanks and thousands of guns to prop up the terroristic dictatorship of the Shah. That, in the words of veteran Middle East reporter Charles Glass:

“The United States has one strategic interest in the Middle East: oil. Everything else is gravy, sentiment, rhetoric… American transnational corporations do not care about Israeli settlers and their biblical claims, Palestinians who are losing their land and water, Kurds who are caught stateless between gangsters in Baghdad and Tehran [and Ankara], victims of war or torture in Sudan, Afghanistan, Algeria, South Lebanon [Saudi Arabia, Israel, Kuwait, Turkey]...” (Glass, New Statesman, November 15, 1996)

David Edwards and David Cromwell – March 9, 2007