Medialens | ukwatch.net

Propping up Propaganda

eddie — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:44:10 +0000

Since starting Media Lens in 2001, we have learned that corporate journalists are very often ill-equipped, or disinclined, to debate vital issues with members of the public.

In 2004, the esteemed Lancet medical journal published a study showing that 98,000 Iraqis had most likely died following the US-led invasion (http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/ images/journals/lancet/ s0140673606694919.pdf). John Rentoul, chief political correspondent of the Independent on Sunday, responded with sarcasm when we challenged him about his dismissal of the peer-reviewed science:

“Oh no. You have found me out. I am in fact a neocon agent in the pay of the third morpork of the teleogens of Tharg.” (Email, September 15, 2005)

In 2006, a follow-up Lancet study estimated that the death toll had risen to 655,000. Today, the probable death toll exceeds one million. (Just Foreign Policy, http://www.justforeignpolicy.org /iraq/iraqdeaths.html; ‘Update on Iraqi casualty data’, Opinion Research Business, January 2008; http://www.opinion.co.uk/ Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88)

In 2003, Roger Alton, then editor of the Observer, also did not take kindly to a reader accusing him of peddling Downing Street propaganda on the eve of the invasion:

“What a lot of balls … do you read the paper old friend? ... ‘Pre-digested pablum from Downing Street…’ my arse. Do you read the paper or are you just recycling garbage from Medialens?” (Email, February 14, 2003)

Last week, Matt Seaton, editor of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, was asked why he dismissed readers of Media Lens as a mere “lobby”, but not readers who post comments on his website. Seaton replied:

“because, unlike MediaLens readers, users of Comment is free are not given directives to spam journalists and others – and would not mindlessly follow such directives if they were” (Email, October 15, 2008)

The constant journalistic refrain is that the public is made up of ill-informed idiots, mindless “blog-o-bots” (Robert Fisk, interviewed by Justin Podur, ‘Fisk: War is the total failure of the human spirit’, December 5, 2005; www.rabble.ca), launching “an attack of the clones” (BBC journalist Adam Curtis, email to Media Lens, June 18, 2002). A moment’s thought would tell these journalists that the people responding to our alerts are interested in our efforts precisely to expose methods of public deception, manipulation and control. The whole point of what we are doing is to challenge all forms of psychological goose-stepping.

Little of this professional contempt for public challenge ever makes it into the open. The media sections of the press, where journalism ought to be scrutinised, are reserved for professional navel-gazing, ego-burnishing and insider gossip. At best, media commentary is inoffensive, rarely straying from the anodyne; and even then, only to mock easy targets like the Sun or the Daily Mail. At its worst, corporate media ‘analysis’ props up a brutal propaganda system in which “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business”, as the US social philosopher John Dewey observed.

Swooning Over The British Press

Consider Stephen Glover, media commentator in the Independent, who earlier this month gloried at the supposedly vibrant state of the British press. Glover, one of the founders of the Independent in 1986, described his pleasure in “fingering the redesigned Daily Telegraph” which “looks quite handsome”. Glover also liked the “much-improved Times”, while the “revamped Independent” positively “crackles with energy.” (Stephen Glover, ‘It has its faults, but we should be proud of the British press’, the Independent, October 6, 2008) As though in the pay of “the teleogens of Tharg”, Glover asked innocently, “Am I starry-eyed?”

Undoubtedly. He was also suffering from blinkered, power-friendly vision. It is only two months since Glover belatedly, and superficially, pointed to the failings of the UK press in challenging government propaganda on Iraq:

“I am still awaiting an apology from those newspapers that assured their readers, before the invasion of Iraq, that there was absolutely no doubt that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.” (Stephen Glover, ‘Press were wrong on Iraq’, August 11, 2008)

But media performance was far worse than Glover would have us believe, as we reminded him at the time (email to Stephen Glover, ‘No mea culpa from the British press’, August 19, 2008; http://www.medialens.org/forum/ viewtopic.php?p=9849#9849).

The British media were willing accomplices in the perverse political portrayal of Iraq as a threat to the West. And, because the media simply buried the facts, not many people know that Iraq had already been devastated by thirteen years of brutal United Nations sanctions leading to the deaths of over a million people. Around half of them were children under five.

The two Westerners who knew Iraq best – Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, senior UN diplomats in Baghdad who resigned over the “genocidal” sanctions – were virtually shut out of British press and broadcasting. (For more on their expert and excluded analyses, see Hans C. Von Sponeck, ‘A Different Kind of War’, Berghahn Books, New York, 2006; and Denis Halliday, interviewed by David Edwards, Media Lens, May 2000; http://www.medialens.org/ articles/the_articles/articles_2001/iraqdh.htm)

The ideological role played by the corporate media, as faithful stenographers to power, continued up to and beyond the illegal 2003 invasion. This was a war of aggression, in contravention of the UN Charter, and recognised in law as the “supreme international crime”. If the British media had performed its fairy-tale role, and actually held power to account, perhaps there would have been no Iraq invasion, no cataclysm, no outpouring of grief and misery.

It is all too easy for media insiders to be seduced by the superficial glamour and “vibrancy” of newspapers, and to divert their eyes from the blood-soaked reality underneath.

At the Guardian’s website, an ostensibly rival media commentator, Roy Greenslade, noted that the Independent had ditched its media section. Greenslade, a Guardian veteran and now professor of journalism at City University in London, wrote:

“... ‘the media’ is a part of modern life that deserves to be monitored consistently. Its influence appears to grow rather than diminish. There needs to be public scrutiny of the people who own and control the various media platforms and of those who manage and operate it on behalf of those owners and controllers.” (Greenslade blog, Guardian website, October 6, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/greenslade/2008/oct/06/theindependent)

As this paragraph suggests, Greenslade has mastered the art of saying very little. He could have observed that news operations, the BBC and Guardian very much included, operate as platforms for established interests in society: corporations, business investors and warmongering Western leaders. But such obvious, real-world facts are not allowed to intrude. He added:

“Despite its scant resources, The Independent has played, and is playing, a part in keeping the media honest.”

It is a bold judgement, one that can be made only by ignoring the actual content of the Independent’s media coverage. More crucially, it also overlooks what the paper reports, and does not report, in its news and business sections. In the age of the internet – when honest, non-corporate news sources are readily accessible – it is becoming ever harder to ignore the evidence before our own eyes.

Green Alliance – A Spin Profile

This Alice-in-Wonderland quality extends to the publicly funded BBC whose output regularly contravenes its own guidelines on “impartiality”, “balance” and a stated commitment “to reflect a wide range of opinion.” Consider a recent BBC online piece which proclaimed:

“Green groups have welcomed the creation of a new energy and climate department in Gordon Brown’s government reshuffle.” (Mark Kinver, ‘Greens welcome new climate department’, October 3, 2008;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/sci/tech/7650669.stm)

Which “Green groups” were these? Well, the only group cited was the Green Alliance, which describes itself as “an independent organisation” but which, in fact, has close links with both government and big business. (Source Watch; http://www.sourcewatch.org/ index.php?title=Green_Alliance)

The BBC report quoted Green Alliance director Stephen Hale:

“Hallelujah. A department of energy and climate change, and not before time… The new department puts climate change where it belongs, with its own seat at the cabinet table.”

The BBC was here taking us deep into Orwell territory. Hale was a special adviser to Margaret Beckett when she was Secretary of State for the Environment. The most recently available accounts indicate that Green Alliance has received funding from a range of sources which include government departments: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the Department for International Development. (Green Alliance Trust accounts for year ending 31 March, 2007; http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/ uploadedFiles/About_Us/FinalAccounts0607(1).pdf)

Funding and support for Green Alliance have also come from centres of green activism like BP, Glaxo, Lever Brothers, Shell, the BBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Tarmac and the privatised utilities. (SpinProfiles, http://www.spinprofiles.org/ index.php/Green_Alliance; website to be launched in November 2008)

As the excellent new online resource SpinProfiles says: “Green Alliance looks like an enormously powerful corporate lobby heavily connected to the political forces that have reshaped the globe since the late 1970s.” (Ibid.)

In his BBC report, Kinver did also cite the Sustainable Development Commission. But this is hardly a “green group” as readers would normally understand the term. After all, as Kinver noted, it was set up by the government to which it reports.

All of this makes a nonsense of the headline, leading paragraph and thrust of the BBC piece about environmentalists supposedly applauding the creation of the new department. The BBC’s analysis, as ever, failed to mention the small matter of the government’s lamentable record in tackling the climate crisis, and that this latest initiative has as much substance as previous government assertions of “joined-up thinking.”

Lack of space cannot account for failures of this kind: they occur too consistently right across the BBC’s copious broadcasts and webpages. When asked, “Why can’t the BBC do better than this?”, Mark Kinver responded:

“I did contact the main green groups in the UK (Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and WWF) for their reaction to the news of the formation of the new department. All welcomed the move by Gordon Brown to use his reshuffle to bring the energy and environment portfolios under one departmental roof.

“However, I did not include direct quotes from these organisations because I balanced the left-leaning Green Alliance’s views with the comments from the free-market think-tank, Policy Exchange (their positions were illustrated by the direct quotes I used in the story).

“Because the reshuffle was a change within the Whitehall village, rather than a change of government policy, I felt that the most appropriate comments were from organisations that operated within that sphere – hence quotes from the Green Alliance, Policy Exchange, CBI [Confederation of British Industry] and SDC [the Sustainable Development Commission].”

Longstanding readers of our alerts may recall that we have sometimes highlighted the moribund state, and lack of radical vision, of the main green groups, notably Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace (e.g. ‘Silence is Green’, February 3, 2005).

And we have truly gone down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole when a BBC journalist can describe the Green Alliance as “left-leaning.” The editorial commitment to “a wide range of opinion” is equally surreal when quotes are restricted to elite groups within the “sphere” of “the Whitehall village.” Finally, the BBC’s notion of “impartiality” is exemplified in the “balance” in the piece between the corporate-leaning Green Alliance and the even more rabidly corporate “free-market think tank”, Policy Exchange.

Readers can cast their minds back to New Labour’s ascension to power in 1997 when there was similar optimistic talk of “joined-up” government. Back then, John Prescott’s “super-ministry” was sold to the British public as a great innovation taking responsibility for transport, environment and the regions of the UK. The Independent told its readers that Prescott, a “blunt Northerner”, “regards himself as a moderniser and a man with ideas. He is restless for power, and is likely to turn his office into one of the engine-rooms of the Blair government.” (‘Blair’s magnificent seven: the new cabinet takes shape’, The Independent, May 3, 1997; no byline)

The Observer’s Patrick Wintour assured us that Prescott was a “policy wonk” who was “willing to address policy challenges without prejudice. His record in campaigning on green issues stretches back to long before they became fashionable.” (Patrick Wintour, ‘Five challenges to forge a better Britain: action on the environment’, The Observer, May 11, 1997)

The Guardian’s Larry Elliott announced breathlessly in the early days of the New Labour regime:

“The first fortnight of the Blair administration has proved one thing: Labour may not be as red as it once was, but it is one hell of a lot greener. One of the beneficial spin-offs of modernisation is that the obsession with growth at all costs has been ditched.” (Larry Elliott, ‘Labour’s moral mission: going from red to green with a pollution solution. Environment has moved centre stage in a new government that sees protecting the world as good business and good politics’, The Guardian, May 19, 1997)

More than a decade later and we are supposed to perceive the latest recarving of Whitehall departments as a bold move that will really get to grips with the terrifying threat of climate chaos. We are supposed to believe the prime minister will perform a massive U-turn away from corporate priorities, as the Guardian insists he must:

“Mr Brown must now prove that he is prepared to treat an ailing climate with an injection of political capital to match the vast dose of financial capital he was so willing to invest in the banks.” (Leader article, ‘The greening of Brown’, the Guardian, October 20, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/oct/20/ leader-climate-carbon-gordon-brown)

The required suspension of disbelief is truly farcical. Meanwhile, the world’s life-support systems are continuing to collapse under rapidly escalating global financial and industrial exploitation.

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.

Stephen Glover, media commentator, the Independent
Email: scmgox@aol.com

Roy Greenslade, media commentator, the Guardian
Email: roy.greenslade@mac.com

Mark Kinver, BBC reporter
Email: mark.kinver@bbc.co.uk

Helen Boaden, director of BBC News
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk

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

This media alert is archived here:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/081022_propping_up_brutal.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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Hawking the Technofix

Alex Doherty — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:29:59 +0000

Last month, a senior UK government adviser warned of the real risk of a devastating rise in global temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius. Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said:

“There is no doubt that we should aim to limit changes in the global mean surface temperature to 2C above pre-industrial [levels].

“But given this is an ambitious target, and we don’t know in detail how to limit greenhouse gas emissions to realise a 2 degree target, we should be prepared to adapt to 4C.” (James Randerson, ‘Prepare for global temperature rise of 4C, warns top scientist’, Guardian, August 7, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/ 06/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange )

But what would a 4C rise mean for the planet? According to the 2006 Stern review on the economics of climate change, up to 300 million people would be affected by coastal flooding annually. Water availability in Southern Africa and the Mediterranean could drop by half, and agricultural yields in Africa may be cut by up to 35%, with devastating consequences for millions at risk of starvation, malnutrition and disease. Half of all animal and plant species could face extinction.

Worse, rapid runaway warming could be triggered – for example, by the release of methane hydrate deposits in the Arctic – rapidly escalating the temperature rise far above even 4C. The idea that we should somehow “adapt” to such cataclysmic outcomes is deeply irrational.

Sir David King, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, has backed Watson’s call to “prepare for the worst.” King said that even if a global deal could ever be agreed to keep carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million (ppm), there is a 50% probability that temperatures would exceed 2C and a 20% probability they would exceed 3.5C.

By contrast, Professor Neil Adger of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has rejected the call for “adaptation”, describing it as “a dangerous mindset.”

Unfortunately, it is considered “improbable” by some scientists that, under current policies, global warming will even be kept below 4C. The authors of a new report say that stabilising carbon dioxide at the required atmospheric concentration of 650ppm would require industrialised nations to “begin to make draconian emission reductions within a decade”. (Jenny Haworth, The Scotsman, ‘Temperature rises “will be double the safe limit” for global warming’, September 1, 2008; http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Temperature- rises-39will-be-double.4444056.jp)

The authors also warn that the G8 promise to cut emissions by half by 2050, in an effort to limit the global temperature rise to just 2C, has no scientific basis. Instead, this delusion could lead to “dangerously misguided” policies: “Political inaction on global warming has become so dire” that “nations must now consider extreme technical solutions.” These “geo-engineering options” include dumping iron into the oceans to boost the growth of plankton (which absorbs carbon dioxide) and injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space. (David Adam, ‘Extreme and risky action the only way to tackle global warming, say scientists’, Guardian, September 1, 2008)

As humanity teeters on the brink, the corporate media are sure to give increasing coverage to these dubious and risky “technofixes.” Influential business lobbyists will make ever-greater efforts to push for lucrative, but diversionary, “solutions” to climate chaos. We need to be alert to such self-serving manoeuvres and willing to expose them.

This much is clear: after more than twenty years of ever more urgent scientific warnings, and government and corporate obstructionism, we really have arrived at the edge of the climate abyss.

Pushing Carbon Storage – Pushing Profits

Professor Watson’s response to his own dire warning to “prepare” for a 4C rise was to call for the UK to take a lead in research on carbon capture and storage (CCS). This would require an “Apollo-type programme” akin to the huge resources devoted by the US in the 1960s space race.

So what does CCS entail? First, carbon dioxide is “captured” by separating it out from the waste gases emitted by power stations. The CO2 is then liquefied and pumped into underground geological formations, such as former oil reservoirs, and thus “stored.” Proponents of this technology claim that carbon emissions from power stations could be reduced by as much as 90 per cent.

The words “carbon capture and storage” have now become a standard buzz-phrase along with “pollution permits”, “joint implementation mechanism” and “tradable energy quotas.”

We conducted a Nexis newspaper database search for “carbon capture and storage” in the British press over the 12-month period of Sep 1, 2007 – Aug 31, 2008 and discovered 219 mentions. Almost one half (100 mentions) was in the Guardian alone. This compares with 86 (23 in the Guardian) for the previous twelve month period and 48 (14 in the Guardian) for the year before that. The numbers drop off quickly going further back, with the first mention in a Times article in 2004. This article reported that people who had been interviewed about CCS had, understandably, never heard of it:

“They said it sounded dangerous and unnecessary… They don’t like the idea of a quick fix or burying the problem. Most people would rather see a move to renewables and improved energy efficiency.”

But when “the problem of emissions was explained”, we were told, “they came round a bit” and understood that “CCS could solve a problem over the next few decades. People are more inclined to accept it as part of a package of measures, policies and ideas.” (Anjana Ahuja, ‘A global threat buried’, The Times, May 20, 2004)

As indicated by its rapidly escalating media profile, CCS has been hyped into the foreground with serious discussion of alternative “measures, policies and ideas” left trailing in its wake. Corporate energy chiefs have pushed CCS hard, a greenwashing strategy to protect business interests, profits and power.

The stakes are high for big business. Between now and 2020, the UK must replace about a third of its existing electricity generating capacity. One of those jockeying for prime position is Paul Golby, chief executive of E.ON which runs the Kingsnorth power station, scene of the summer’s Climate Camp protests. Golby has declared a breathless enthusiasm for “a new generation of nuclear reactors, more gas storage facilities and gas stations, and a limited number of new coal-fired stations, built ready to be fitted with CCS equipment, which could cut carbon emissions by 90%.” (Paul Golby, ‘Protesters at our coal plant are deluded if they think renewables alone can serve Britain’s needs’, The Guardian, July 31, 2008)

We are to believe that E.ON, as “one of the UK’s leading green generators”, is ready to serve the country by doing its bit to minimise any risk to “our security of supply” in the “face [of] greater cost burdens.” Whereas the aspirations of the climate activists for a huge expansion in renewables and energy efficiency are “simply unrealistic”, Golby believes that “if we are to achieve the low-carbon economy we want, then existing nuclear capacity needs to be replaced at least on a like-for-like basis.”

But consider the extent of the hype. A recent report from Corporate Watch warns that CCS technology is unlikely to be proven, scaled up and in widespread use until 2030 at the earliest, and possibly not until 2050 – too late to prevent climate chaos. (Claire Fauset, ‘Techno-fixes: A critical guide to climate change technologies’, Corporate Watch, 2008, p. 4; http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/ download.php?id=78)

Nick Reeves, executive director of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, comments:

“[I]t is disingenuous of the energy companies to use the promise of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology as a carrot to get the approval they need to build the power station [at Kingsnorth], when they know full well that CCS technology is unproven and costly.”

Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, states emphatically that it may well never be “prudent or politically acceptable” to adopt such risky measures; and, in any case, “they must not divert attention away from efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.” In 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dismissed geo-engineering as “largely speculative and unproven and with the risk of unknown side-effects.” (David Adam, ‘Extreme and risky action the only way to tackle global warming, say scientists’, The Guardian, September 1, 2008)

Contrary to the assertions of E.ON’s chief executive, Reeves argues that carbon emissions targets can be met without resorting to nuclear power or coal, adding:

“Investment in energy conservation instead of nuclear and coal would result in seven times the reduction in emissions. Renewables can provide the power we need, given the political will.” (Nick Reeves, ‘No to nuclear’, letter to New Statesman, August 25, 2008)

Nevertheless, huge propaganda campaigns are being launched by powerful companies, such as E.ON, to push both CCS and nuclear energy. The latter is already firmly back on the government’s agenda.

A welcome, but entirely inadequate, note of caution about corporate claims appeared in a Guardian editorial:

“The idea of stripping pollution from fossil fuels is seductive – a quick fix to an overwhelming crisis.” However, the paper added, “for countries that develop it there could also be big profits.” (Leading article, ‘Climate change: A captivating remedy’, The Guardian, June 2, 2008)

More accurately, the “big profits” would enrich corporations and investors, not the citizens of the countries concerned.

Corporate media coverage has shamefully buried the truth that CCS would be exploited to enhance oil recovery: pumping carbon dioxide into ageing oil reservoirs has the effect of forcing out oil that would otherwise stay underground. CCS and other technical “solutions” to impending climate chaos are thus being used to prop up the fossil fuel industry which remains committed to massive exploration and exploitation efforts for decades to come. David Hone, climate change adviser for Shell, concedes that fossil fuels will remain Shell’s core business “for some time.” (Terry Slavin, ‘Promise of a green industrial revolution’, The Guardian, July 16, 2008)

The push for CCS then – and, indeed, for nuclear power – is yet another outcome of pathological business greed. It is a fatal display of short-sightedness and arrogance which relies on technical fixes to tackle symptoms, rather than the systemic sickness at the heart of global capitalism. One might as well feed beta-blocking drugs to an obese person with heart disease in an effort to prevent heart attacks, rather than address fundamental issues of health, diet and lifestyle.

Tinkering At The Edges – The Independent’s Environment Editor

The public is encouraged to believe that, if anyone in the media ‘gets it’ on climate change, then it is the environment correspondents and editors of the liberal press. Michael McCarthy, the Independent’s environment editor, wrote recently that, for “the idealists of the green movement”, the threat of global warming meant:

“People would be obliged to live in respectful harmony with the earth. They would be obliged to alter their ways: swap their cars for bikes and public transport; substitute renewable energy systems for coal-fired electricity; and consume less of everything. The alternative was catastrophe. It was go green, or die.

“It has gradually become clear that this dream is not going to be realised, which is a sad recognition for anyone who sympathises with the environment movement to have to make.”

Instead, claimed McCarthy, the best hopes of tackling climate change now lie “most of all with technological fixes.” He even went so far as to claim that CCS is “now the only realistic response to climate change.” (McCarthy, ‘A simple plan to save the world’, The Independent, August 22, 2008)

And yet, just two years earlier, McCarthy had described “how hard it is to cut carbon emissions by tinkering at the edges of a capitalist economy in full growth mode. It is now clear that the pursuit of economic business-as-usual is simply not an option.” (McCarthy, ‘Blow for Britain’s fight against climate change as emissions target is missed,’ The Independent, March 29, 2006)

McCarthy was responding to the rational analysis of Labour MP Colin Challen, who had argued “the pursuit of economic growth makes controlling CO2 an impossibility… a different path must be sought.” (McCarthy, ibid)

How can the Independent’s environment editor possibly justify the dodgy CCS technofix – which may not even be in place before 2050 – as anything other than “tinkering at the edges” of capitalism in full growth mode? And why has he had so little to say about critical challenges to the political orthodoxy of unsustainable economic growth? McCarthy’s failures and omissions are symptomatic of everything that is wrong with even the best news media.

Fatal Taboo – Endless Growth

We cannot rely on environment editors, far less other journalists, to challenge the elite consensus on the need for relentless economic ‘growth’, a cancerous process that is killing the planet. The issue is rarely addressed seriously in the corporate media, or discussed by politicians, academia, think tanks – or even by the major green pressure groups. George Monbiot calls it “the last of the universal taboos.” (Monbiot, ‘In this age of diamond saucepans, only a recession makes sense’, The Guardian, October 9, 2007)

Colin Challen courageously challenged this fatal conceit in 2006:

“We are imprisoned by our political Hippocratic oath: we will deliver unto the electorate more goodies than anybody else. Such an oath was only ever achievable by increasing our despoliation of the world’s resources. Our economic model is not so different in the cold light of day to that of the Third Reich – which knew it could only expand by grabbing what it needed from its neighbours.

“Genocide followed. Now there is a case to answer that genocide is once again an apt description of how we are pursuing business as usual, wilfully ignoring the consequences for the poorest people in the world.” (Challen, ‘We must think the unthinkable, and take voters with us,’ The Independent, March 28, 2006)

The media’s obsequious compliance with “the last of the universal taboos” make it complicit in this genocide, in this crime against humanity and against the Earth.

Rather than “slouching towards disaster”, as the Independent’s environment editor once put it (Michael McCarthy, ‘Slouching towards disaster’, The Tablet, 12 February, 2005), we could take a wise, compassionate and optimistic approach. The fact is that sudden, unexpected radical social changes do occur. As the media critic John Theobald noted, the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe give one example:

“It may be remembered that even weeks before the dramatic events and the short timescale in which they took place, they seemed impossible. Apparently robust social systems, power structures and ideologies… [can] submit to counter-hegemonic pressures for radical change in which popular action plays a significant role.” (Theobald, ‘The media and the making of history’, Ashgate, 2004, p. 139)

US historian Howard Zinn also reminds us that governments rely on our tacit acceptance of their policies, and on our obedience. Withdraw that obedience, and we truly do have a “power [that] governments cannot suppress.” (Howard Zinn, ‘A Power Governments Cannot Suppress’, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2007)

If we can loosen, even a little, the crushing chains of corporate power and thought control, then we still have a chance of averting disaster.

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.

Michael McCarthy, environment editor of the Independent
Email: m.mccarthy@independent.co.uk

Roger Alton, editor of the Independent
Email: r.alton@independent.co.uk

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk

Helen Boaden, director of BBC News
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.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:
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‘Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle To Avert Global Catastrophe’, edited by David Cromwell and Mark Levene was published by Pluto Books in 2007:
http://www.plutobooks.com/cgi-local/nplutobrows.pl?chkisbn=9780745325675…

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When News is Noise: the Media and South Ossetia

eddie — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:12:04 +0000

The Strain Behind The Smile

A Los Angeles Times editorial observed last month that China had persuaded world leaders to attend the Olympic Games "despite their misgivings about Beijing’s horrific human rights record both domestically and abroad". The horror, the editors noted, could not be entirely suppressed:

"What planners in Beijing miscalculated is that no matter how well you teach performers to smile, the strain behind the lips is still detectable." (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-olympics26-2008aug26,0,5033807.story)

Needless to say, no mainstream British or American journalist referred to the host nation’s "horrific human rights record" at the time of the US Games in Atlanta in 1996, or of the Los Angeles Games in 1984. And of course no media outlet has discussed "misgivings" about the awarding of the 2012 Games to Britain. But why on earth would they? Historian Mark Curtis explains:

"Since 1945, rather than occasionally deviating from the promotion of peace, democracy, human rights and economic development in the Third World, British (and US) foreign policy has been systematically opposed to them, whether the Conservatives or Labour (or Republicans or Democrats) have been in power. This has had grave consequences for those on the receiving end of Western policies abroad." (Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p.3)

A Guardian leader in July described how "western leaders rightly remain uneasy about giving their imprimatur to a [Chinese] regime which jails dissidents, persecutes religious groups, backs Burma and bankrolls Darfur." (Leader, ‘Beijing Olympics: Faster, higher – but freer?,’ The Guardian, July 12, 2008)

On the other hand, the Guardian leader writers might have felt uneasy about giving their imprimatur to "western leaders" who are the destroyers of Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul, and who have promoted chaos and terror in Afghanistan, Haiti, Serbia and Somalia, among many other places.

An Independent leader naturally shared the Guardian’s view:

"The outside world will have a crucial role to play in the coming years. Engagement will produce much better results than isolation. But at the same time, the developed world must guard against soft-pedalling sensitive issues such as the treatment of Tibet, or Beijing’s sponsorship of vile regimes in Africa." (Leader, ‘China must not let its brief democratic light go out,’ The Independent, August 2, 2008)

It is taken for granted that "the developed world" is the great hope for human rights. Again, comparable Independent editorials did not appear ahead of the Atlanta and Los Angeles Games condemning Washington’s "sponsorship of vile regimes".

Everything in the media starts from the assumption that ‘We mean well,’ and from the unspoken, indeed unthought, assumption that this claim need never be questioned. This isn’t just a matter of choice – career success depends on it. Senior journalists like the BBC’s Huw Edwards have to be willing to make the Soviet-style claim that British troops are in Afghanistan "to try to help in the country’s rebuilding programme". (Edwards, BBC 1, News at Ten, July 28, 2008)

Respecting Sovereignty

One tragicomic consequence of this self-imposed simple-mindedness is the inability of the mainstream media to make sense of last month’s war in Georgia. Journalists kept a straight face as they communicated George Bush’s demand that "Russia’s government must respect Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty." (http://afp.google.com/article/ ALeqM5i2LdnLHTyJgB2Ng8VSQyMQ3eMVrw) Few felt inclined to mention the small matter of Bush’s own invasion of sovereign Iraq, or the US-driven separation of Kosovo from sovereign Serbia.

Gordon Brown, proud ‘liberator’ of Iraq, or what remains of it, somehow avoided choking on his own hypocrisy as he insisted: "when Russia has a grievance over an issue such as South Ossetia, it should act multilaterally by consent rather than unilaterally by force."
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/aug/31/russia.georgia)

Occasional mentions have been made of the fact that the largest pipeline between the Black Sea and the Caspian oil fields and Europe is the 1.2 million barrels a day BP Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) line that passes through Georgia and parts of Abkhazia, and which happens to be the only pipeline not under Russian control. The Christian Science Monitor recently described the politics of the pipeline:

"The $4 billion BTC pipeline, managed by and 30 percent owned by British Petroleum, was routed through Georgia to avoid sending Caspian oil through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, or Russia. A 10-mile pipeline could have connected Caspian oil to the well-developed Iranian pipeline system." (http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0816/p14s01-cogn.html)

In 2000, Bill Clinton described the pipeline as "the most important achievement at the end of the twentieth century." (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/geor-m02.shtml)

Securing this "achievement" has involved intense US efforts to manipulate Georgian political and military elites. The US and France are the main suppliers of Georgia’s military, but the prime US ally, Israel, has also supplied some $200 million worth of equipment since 2000. This has included remotely piloted drones, rockets, night-vision equipment, electronic systems, and training by former senior Israeli officers.

To be sure, media hints that oil might help explain American and Israeli involvement have far exceeded mentions of the even more embarrassing reasons behind the British and American attack on Iraq in 2003, when the subject of oil was completely off the news agenda. Patrick Collinson wrote in the Guardian of the Georgian crisis:

"It’s a superpower confrontation in a region criss-crossed with oil pipelines vital to the west." (Collinson, ‘Money: Sell oil, buy banks?: Crude prices are falling and commodities are plummeting,’ The Guardian, August 16, 2008)

An article in the Observer last month was titled: "Europe’s energy source lies in the shadow of Russia’s anger: Behind the tanks in Ossetia are key oil and gas pipelines." (Alex Brett, The Observer, August 17, 2008)

In the Times, Richard Beeston wrote a piece headed: "Oil supplies and Kremlin’s relations with the West at stake." (Beeston, The Times, August 9, 2008)

The media have presented the West as innocently seeking to protect its energy supplies from an erratic Russian predator – we just want to keep our economies running. Perhaps the insatiably greedy Western interests that have wrecked havoc across the world in the post-1945 period are busy elsewhere.

In the Guardian, Jeremy Leggett wrote:

"The Kremlin has a strategy to control a vast slab of the world economy via oil and gas. Dmitry Medvedev, lest we forget, used to run Gazprom. The Georgia crisis, if not a planned piece in the strategy, certainly fits." (Leggett ‘Beware the bear trap: Britain, like most of Europe, is at risk of being the target of Russia’s energy export weaponry,’ The Guardian, August 30, 2008)

Recall, by contrast, the almost complete media taboo on identifying oil as a factor in the US-UK invasion of Iraq. We can imagine a companion piece by Leggett from, say, 2002:

"The White House has a strategy to control a vast slab of the world economy via oil and gas. George W. Bush, lest we forget, was the founder of Arbusto Oil, and chairman and CEO of energy company Spectrum 7. The Iraq crisis, if not a planned piece in the strategy, certainly fits."

In the real world, Johann Hari wrote of Iraq in the Independent in 2003:

"Blair went into this with the best of intentions. It is just silly to claim that Blair cooked up all these arguments to justify a grab for oil, or a straight-forward imperialist project." (Hari, ‘What Monica Lewinsky Was For Clinton The Hutton Inquiry Is For Tony Blair,’ The Independent, August 27, 2003)

A year earlier, David Aaronovitch manufactured the required sneer:

"Over in the New Statesman, John Pilger cranks out, as though Xeroxing on an old machine, piece after repetitive piece telling us that it’s all about oil and money and greed and imperialism." (Aaronovitch, ‘You couldn’t be sure what anyone would end up saying,’ The Independent, September 10, 2002)

“The UK, meanwhile” Leggett added sagely in his actual article, “has no energy strategy”. Certainly not in Iraq, where, in late June, Iraqi oil minister Mohamad Sharastani announced that contracts had been drawn up between the Maliki government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq. Edward Herman takes up the wretched tale:

"No competitive bidding was allowed, and the terms announced were very poor by existing international contract standards. The contracts were written with the help of ‘a group of American advisers led by a small State department team.’ This was all in conformity with the Declaration of Principles of November 26, 2007, whereby the ‘sovereign country’ of Iraq would use ‘especially American investments’ in its attempt to recover from the effects of the American aggression. The contracts have not yet been signed, and the internal protests are loud, but clearly the fig leaf of WMD and democracy has been stripped away as an ‘enduring’ occupation and a systematic looting of Iraq’s oil are arranged under a non-democratic tool of the occupation." (Herman, ‘Further Nuggets From the Nuthouse: The Law of Conservation of the Level of Violence,’ Z Magazine, September 2008)

The BBC’s World Affairs Correspondent, Paul Reynolds, found no difficulty this week in recognising the realpolitik in Russian policy:

"In some ways, we are going back to the century before last, with a nationalistic Russia very much looking out for its own interests, but open to co-operation with the outside world on issues where it is willing to be flexible." (Reynolds, ‘New Russian world order: the five principles,’ September 1, 2008; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7591610.stm)

By contrast, Reynolds wrote in 2006:

"The third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq prompts some melancholy thoughts about how it was supposed to be – and how it has turned out.

"By now, according to the plan, Iraq should have emerged into a peaceful, stable representative democracy, an example to dictatorships and authoritarian regimes across the Middle East." (Reynolds, ‘Iraq three years on: A bleak tale,’ March 17, 2006; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ world/middle_east/4812460.stm)

Russia’s plan is to look out for ‘number one’; the US-UK plan was to spread peace, love and understanding to Iraq and the region. Not a trace of recognition was allowed that the Iraq invasion was fundamentally about American profit and power, and certainly not the welfare of the Iraqi people, about whom, traditionally, US policymakers have not given a damn.

Mostly the level of analysis of last month’s conflict has been pitifully thin, as in this comment from Bronwen Maddox in the Times:

"Why now? The main reason is Georgia’s desire to throw in its lot with Nato, the US’s enthusiastic support for that, and Russia’s passionate opposition." (Maddox, ‘Simmering dispute could turn Russia against the West,’ The Times, August 6, 2008)

It simply isn’t done for corporate journalism to expose the true goals of Western corporate titans and their militant state allies. The preferred realm of discourse is restricted to nonsense about "security", "democracy" and other "humanitarian" goals.

Favouring Georgia

Britain isn’t afflicted with a state-controlled media system, although one would hardly know it from press performance. Typically, a country identified as ‘nice’ by the British government is also ‘nice’ for our ‘free press’. The same is true of governments labelled ‘nasty’. The media have therefore presented the Georgia/South Ossetia conflict as the result of irrational Russian bullying. Max Hastings emphasised in the Guardian that, "The Russians yearn for respect, in the same fashion as any inner-city street kid with a knife." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/aug/18/russia.georgia)

In a rare example of independent thought in the Guardian, Peter Wilby noted the consistent bias:

"Russia’s behaviour, newspapers implied, was in a quite different category from Georgia’s. In the Sunday Times, Russian tanks went ‘rampaging’ in South Ossetia, while Georgian tanks merely ‘moved’. If Georgian forces had bombarded civilians, it was ‘reprehensible’, the Telegraph allowed. Russia, however, was ‘offending every canon of international behaviour’." (Wilby, ‘Georgia has won the PR war,’ The Guardian, August 18, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/18/ pressandpublishing.georgia)

Wilby added:

"Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia went largely unexamined, and it was hard to find, from press accounts, what refugees from the province were fleeing from."

Indeed, an August 19 ITV News report explained the tragic results of the fighting for the people of Georgia. But as in so much reporting, no mention was made of the initial Georgian attack or the consequences for the people of South Ossetia. In fact Georgian forces had bombed the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, for 72 hours. An August 20 article in the Times reported how a "makeshift operating table lay under a weak lightbulb in the corridor of a dank basement that smelt strongly of excrement." Dina Zhakarova, a doctor in South Ossetia, commented:

"This is where we had to try to save people’s lives. The whole place was a sea of blood while the Georgians were bombing our hospital." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ news/world/europe/article4568945.ece)

Dr Zhakarova described how staff had treated more than 250 people underground after the Georgian Army’s assault, adding:

"All the staff gave blood for the patients because there were so many wounded. The Georgians knew very well that this was a hospital, so how could they say that we are their fellow citizens when they were firing rockets at us? It’s nonsense."

Such commentary has been vanishingly rare.

The bias is clear, but the deeper point is far more interesting – the entrenched propaganda function of the mainstream media renders it incapable of making sense of events in Georgia and South Ossetia. References to Russian self-interest are allowed, and to Western concerns about energy security. But on the real reasons why people were killing and dying, on how Western state violence consistently supports Western corporate greed, journalists have had next to nothing to say. In a world where rational understanding conflicts with the ‘ideals’ of propaganda, "news" is often little more than noise.

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Extra Zero

Ellie Keen — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:36:29 +0000

MEDIA ALERT

An Exchange With The Independent’s John Rentoul

In the wake of the July 7, 2005 London bombings, the Independent’s John Rentoul commented:

“A Muslim friend of mine in the East End of London says that the sense of victimisation and injustice goes so deep among his fellow religionists that he sometimes despairs. ‘This all goes back to the burning of The Satanic Verses,’ he says. It was in 1988 that we should have realised that we were up against a culture – he doesn’t like the term ‘Muslim community’ – that tended to irrationalism and self-pity. Salman Rushdie did not create that culture, but he provided a focus for it and fed its sense of grievance.

“The Iraq issue serves much the same purpose today.” (Rentoul, ‘Islam, blood and grievance,’ The Independent, July 24, 2005)

According to Rentoul, then, the invasion of Iraq and the mass slaughter that followed was feeding irrational self-pity in Muslims. He added:

“The worst succour that the anti-war left in Britain can give to the terrorists, however, is to entertain the idea that there is a moral equivalence between the deliberate killing of civilians and the casualties of military action in Iraq. Of course, people who think the war was unjustified feel passionately about civilian deaths. But let us get two things straight. First, even Iraq Body Count, an anti-war campaign, puts the total attributable to coalition forces at under 10,000, rather than the figure with an extra zero that is the common misconception of anti-war propaganda. And second, the purpose of the invasion of Iraq, whatever you think of George Bush’s motives, was not to kill civilians.”

Noam Chomsky commented on the recurring theme of “moral equivalence” in a rare BBC interview:

“The term moral equivalence is an interesting one. It was invented, I think, by Jeane Kirkpatrick [former US ambassador to the United Nations] as a method of trying to prevent criticism of foreign policy and state decisions. It is a meaningless notion, there is no moral equivalence whatsoever.” (BBC Newsnight interview with Chomsky, May 21, 2004; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/3732345.stm)

Rentoul’s “extra zero that is the common misconception of anti-war propaganda” had of course been provided by the 2004 Lancet study of mortality in Iraq, which estimated that 100,000 more Iraqis had died since the March 2003 invasion than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred. We were to believe that the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School, Columbia University, Baghdad’s Al-Mustansiriya University, and The Lancet (and its peer-reviewers) – the organisations behind the 2004 study – were all anti-war propagandists.

It is easy to understand why Rentoul would be so perturbed, now, by the suggestion that an additional “extra zero” should be added to the 100,000 figure – because it is now likely that one million Iraqis have died as a result of the war.

On April 4, we wrote to Rentoul in response to his piece, ’Truth and myth on the death toll in Iraq.’ (Independent blog, April 2; http://blogs.independent.co.uk/openhouse/2008/04/truth-and-myth.html)

Hi John

Hope you’re well. You wrote on April 2:

“It is surprising, to put it gently, that the question of whether or not the 1 million figure is right arouses such little interest.”

You added:

“If a million people have died in violence in Iraq since the invasion, you might have thought this shocking enough for The Independent, or any other national newspaper, to report it when the survey was published in January. But there was nothing in the British press at all.”

In fact it’s not at all surprising. Typically, very little attention is paid in the Western media to the victims of Western violence. A study by the University of Maryland last year found that most Americans believed that less than 10,000 Iraqis had died because of the invasion. That’s a reflection of media indifference. After all, a poll last year found that about half the American public were able to correctly identify the number of US soldiers killed. And how many people know that senior UN diplomats described US-UK sanctions on Iraq from 1990-2003 as “genocidal”? In 2006, Hans von Sponeck, the former UN humanitarian coordinator in Baghdad who ran the oil-for-food programme, wrote a book called A Different Kind Of War – The UN Sanctions Regime In Iraq (Bergahn Books, 2006). The book describes in meticulous detail the complete US-UK indifference to the mass death caused by sanctions. The book has never been reviewed in the UK press. Again, that’s very standard.

You wrote

“One group that is certainly not interested is the absolutist opponents of the invasion, whose representatives will no doubt soon appear in the Comments below. For them, 1 million is a fact – indeed, it is an under-estimate – regardless of the evidence. Just as the invasion was a ‘crime’ based on ‘lies’, so the minimum death toll is the highest number that any remotely authoritative source has ever come up with. For some time that was The Lancet’s 655,000, and never mind that 54,000 of that was heart attacks, strokes and other illnesses, or that the survey methods had been challenged.”

Most legal experts are clear on the criminality of the invasion, and you’d have to have been living on Mars not to have noticed the lies. But who has asserted the 1 million figure as “a fact”? Certainly we at Media Lens haven’t. We have simply reported the most credible scientific advice on the most credible numbers. And as you know, science is not about offering certainty – it’s about offering the most reasonable view in light of the currently available facts.

Your link to the ‘challenge’ is to ’Data Bomb,’ by Neil Munro and Carl Cannon (http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/index.htm). It’s inappropriate to suggest that serious, peer-reviewed science by some of the world’s leading epidemiologists and published in the world’s premier science journal, has been “challenged” by a couple of hacks writing in a right-wing American magazine. The most serious charge involved Professor John Tirman, Executive Director and Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies (MIT). Munro and Cannon wrote:

“Tirman commissioned the Lancet II survey with $46,000 from George Soros’s Open Society Institute and additional support from other funders.” (Munro and Cannon, ‘Data Bomb,’ National Journal, January 4, 2008; http://news.nationaljournal.com/ articles/databomb/index.htm)

Tirman told us:

“Open Society Institute funded a public education effort to promote discussion of the mortality issue. The grant was approved more than six months after I commissioned the survey, and the researchers never knew the sources of funds. As a result, OSI, much less George Soros himself, had absolutely no influence over the conduct or outcome of the survey. This was told to the authors of the National Journal article at least twice. One must conclude that their misrepresentation of this—-among many other issues—-was intended to sensationalize their version of the story and color the readers’ opinion about ‘ppolitical bias.’ This is contemptible malpractice on their part. It is also a grotesque injustice to Mr. Soros, whose philanthropy has braced and enlivened whole regions of the world.” (Email to Media Lens, January 15, 2008)

Tirman commented elsewhere:

“I told this to Munro on the telephone and in an email. He nonetheless implied that Soros money had funded the survey from the start, possibly at Soros’ behest. That is a disgraceful lie, and Munro knows it.” (‘John Tirman on Munro and Soros,’ January 11, 2008; http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/01/john_tirman_on_munro_and_soros.p…)

You can see Tirman’s demolition of ‘Data Bomb’ (a truly awful article) here:

http://www.johntirman.com/Bombs%20Away%20-%20a%20dull%20hatchet%20job.pd…

We offered an analysis here:

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080122_all_smoke_no.php

By the way, I wouldn’t make too much of the fact that Les Roberts and co are “anti-war”. Most sane people are “anti-war”. Many scientists are also anti-malaria and anti-famine – it doesn’t stop them doing good science.

Best wishes

David Edwards

Rentoul replied the same day:

Mr Edwards
Grateful for the confirmation that you are not interested in the methodological basis of the Opinion Business Research survey either.
Yours
John Rentoul

We also responded on the same day:

Hi John

Thanks, that’s also an important subject. The Lancet authors seem to find corroboration in the ORB results. See here: http://www.medialens.org/downloads/pdfs/les_roberts_germany_briefing.pdf

My understanding is that ORB is a respected polling organisation used by the BBC and so on (of course we can argue about how respectable the BBC is).

I think we “generalists” need to be very careful before pronouncing on issues of epidemiological methodology – we have a habit of ending up in ditches in the way of Munro and Cannon. Curious that you would focus on finding confirmation of what I think on something I didn’t discuss in a fairly long email about what I do think on a variety of important issues.

I recommend you have a careful read of Tirman’s demolition of ‘Data Bomb’. Settle in with some tea and biscuits and really give it some thought – it might change your view on this issue. It’s vital that we examine the suffering we’ve brought to the Iraqi people as honestly and carefully as we can – it’s that suffering that really matters.

Best wishes

David

We have received no further response from Rentoul. John Tirman had previously posted a comment on Rentoul’s blog on April 2:

“Rendel [sic – Rentoul] misses a point all journalists do: the five surveys of mortality in Iraq show significant congruence. The Iraq Ministry of Health survey he cites (as a WHO survey) did estimate 151,000 violent deaths, but their data also shows more than 400,000 ‘excess’ deaths overall. Many experts see in the data tables evidence of ambiguous categories where those fearful of the Sadrist MoH interviewers would attribute deaths to ‘non-violent’ causes. In any case, the 400,000+ as of June 2006 would translate into 600-700,000 today. The MoH also could not survey 11% of its sample, because those places were too dangerous. It demonstrates not inconsistencies between the surveys, but, more important, just how difficult it is to do such surveys in Iraq, precisely because it is so violent.

“As for plausibility of the high mortality figures, consider this: five murders per day in the 80 ‘urban centers’ of Iraq (pop.>20k) would equal 730,000. The high deaths also track with what we know from many other conflicts regarding the ratio of displaced to death—-that ratio is rarely more than 6-1, and there are 4.5 million Iraqis displaced from their homes. See analysis at http://mitt.edu/humancostiraq “

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 John Rentoul
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All Smoke, No Fire

Ellie Keen — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:32:36 +0000

Last year, we described how mainstream climate sceptics had queued up to praise film-maker Martin Durkin’s now infamous documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. The Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, and their counterparts in the United States, used the film to heap scorn on the scientific consensus that climate change is a grave and rapidly evolving threat. In the event, the film itself turned out to be a swindle, one denounced by climate scientists far and wide – its media supporters quietly moved on.

A similar propaganda wave has been generated by a January 4 article in the US-based National Journal smearing the 2004 and 2006 Lancet studies on mortality in Iraq, which estimated 98,000 and 655,000 war-related deaths, respectively. Once again, distortions have been boosted through high-profile media, and through the blogosphere, to create the impression of a rational consensus. Once again, the targets are leading scientists working for some of the world’s most respected research organisations.

The National Journal’s 6,900-word report, ’Data Bomb,’ by Neil Munro and Carl Cannon used speculation, innuendo and numerous references to mostly unnamed “critics”, to smear the Lancet studies, focusing particularly on the 2006 study known as Lancet II.

The most serious charge involved Professor John Tirman, Executive Director and Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies (MIT). Munro and Cannon wrote:

“Tirman commissioned the Lancet II survey with $46,000 from George Soros’s Open Society Institute and additional support from other funders.” (Munro and Cannon, ‘Data Bomb,’ National Journal, January 4, 2008; http://news.nationaljournal.com/ articles/databomb/index.htm)

The significance?

“That means that nearly half of the study’s funding came from an outspoken billionaire who has repeatedly criticized the Iraq campaign and who spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004.” (ibid)

Munro and Cannon asked “whether a latent desire to feed the American public’s opposition to the war might have shaped these studies”. (ibid)

The Wall Street Journal picked up the story and ran with it. A January 9 editorial commented on Lancet II:

“We know that number was wildly exaggerated. The news is that now we know why.

“It turns out the Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers. It also turns out the timing was no accident.” (‘The Lancet’s Political Hit,’ Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2008; http://online.wsj.com/ article/SB119984087808076475.html)

The Boston Globe weighed in with an article titled, ‘A war report discredited’:

“Much of the funding for the study came from the Open Society Institute of leftist billionaire George Soros, a strident critic of the Iraq war who, as Munro and Cannon point out, ‘spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004.’” (Jeff Jacoby, ‘A war report discredited,’ Boston Globe, January 13, 2008)

The Globe described the National Journal article as a devastating “debunking” of the Lancet‘s work: “the truth, it turns out, is that the report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should have inspired anything but confidence”.

Across the Atlantic, the Sunday Times followed up with an article titled, ‘Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study.’ (Brendan Montague, Sunday Times, January 13, 2008)

Melanie Phillips wrote in the Spectator on January 10:

“A story in the Wall Street Journal highlights a remarkable article in the National Journal, which reveals startling information about the infamous 2006 Lancet ‘study’ which purported to show that Iraqi casualties had totalled more than 650,000 in the three years since the fall of Saddam in 2003. The figure was clearly absurd. The NJ authors say they have now learned that this ‘research’ was funded by George Soros, the financier who has spent millions of dollars trying to destroy George W Bush.” (Phillips, ‘That study,’ The Spectator, January 10, 2008; http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/441491/that-lancet-study.thtm…)

Phillips asked:

“Whatever happened to peer review? Who can take the Lancet seriously ever again?”

Phillips has form. Last year, she wrote:

“Channel Four’s devastating documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle has blown an enormous hole in every fundamental claim made to support the climate change obsession…” (Phillips, ‘The emperor’s green new clothes,’ March 9, 2007; http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1467)

A large number of right-wing blogs have also used the National Journal article to discredit the Lancet studies. If there is no smoke without fire, the right-wing media have done their level best to generate plenty of smoke. The story is now ‘in the air’ and will doubtless be referenced in future media coverage.

“A Disgraceful Lie”

But now consider these allegations in light of comments sent to us by John Tirman:

"Open Society Institute funded a public education effort to promote discussion of the mortality issue. The grant was approved more than six months after I commissioned the survey, and the researchers never knew the sources of funds. As a result, OSI, much less George Soros himself, had absolutely no influence over the conduct or outcome of the survey. This was told to the authors of the National Journal article at least twice. One must conclude that their misrepresentation of this—-among many other issues—-was intended to sensationalize their version of the story and color the readers’ opinion about ‘political bias.’ This is contemptible malpractice on their part. It is also a grotesque injustice to Mr. Soros, whose philanthropy has braced and enlivened whole regions of the world." (Email to Media Lens, January 15, 2008)

In other words, the fact that the study was “funded by antiBush partisans” was completely irrelevant. There was literally no story, no fire, here – the smoke was an illusion.

Lancet II co-author Gilbert Burnham responded to the Wall Street Journal editorial:

“The fact that some of MIT’s financial support in 2006 came from the Open Society Institute had no effect on these reports; the researchers knew nothing of funding origins. MIT played no role in the study design, implementation, analysis or writing of the Lancet report.” (Burnham, ‘Researchers Respond to National Journal Article,’ letter submitted to the editors of the National Journal, January 7, 2008; http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/ research/iraq/national_journal.html)

Even more disturbing is the fact that these issues were carefully explained to the National Journal authors several times as they were preparing their article. Tirman forwarded to us the following email sent by Lancet II co-author Les Roberts to Carl Cannon on November 20, 2007:

“After our interview on Friday afternoon I e-mailed the main people at Hopkins and MIT associated with sorting out the funding for the 2006 study to ask about the various funding sources (of which there were several)... Some of the MIT funding did come from the Open Society Institute, but this funding was a minority portion and found after the project was underway.” (Email forwarded to Media Lens, January 14, 2008)

John Tirman told us (January 14, 2008):

“I spoke to Munro on the phone and emailed him some other data, which he essentially ignored… Upshot: the authors were told twice that OSI [Open Society] money came well after the study was commissioned.”

Lancet II was commissioned in Oct 2005, with internal funds from the Center for International Studies at MIT. Tirman points out:

“I have checked my correspondence with OSI to make sure. I first approached them with an email on January 25, 2006. They made a grant to us of $46,000 on May 4, 2006.” (ibid)

He has added elsewhere:

“The funds for public education (not the survey itself) came from the Open Society Institute in the following spring, long after things had started. Burnham did not know this (Roberts was not much involved at this point.) MIT was providing funds, that’s all he knew or needed to know. There were other small donors involved too. I told this to Munro on the telephone and in an email. He nonetheless implied that Soros money had funded the survey from the start, possibly at Soros’ behest. That is a disgraceful lie, and Munro knows it.” (‘John Tirman on Munro and Soros,’ January 11, 2008; http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/01/john_tirman_on_munro_and_soros.php)

Munro and Cannon also suggested that Soros had knowledge of the report and was keen for it to appear before the 2006 US mid-term elections. Under the sub-heading “Partisan considerations,” they wrote:

“Soros is not the only person associated with the Lancet studies who had one eye on the data and the other on the U.S. political calendar.” (op. cit)

Did Soros in fact have an “eye on the data”? Tirman again:

“It is extremely doubtful that Soros ever knew anything about this survey. The grant was approved by his large foundation staff. For OSI, it’s a small grant.” (Tirman, ’Bombs Away – The Anatomy Of A Hatchet Job,’ note t48; http://www.johntirman.com/Bombs%20Aw ay%20-%20a%20dull%20hatchet%20job.pdf)

Did Munro and Cannon check with Soros? Certainly they provided no evidence at all that he knew of the report or was in some way following its progress.

The point links to the claim that the Lancet II authors were seeking to influence the US 2004 presidential and 2006 mid-term elections, the implication being that they were anti-Bush and so were “partisan” in their science. Munro and Cannon commented:

“Roberts was hardly the only American to lose confidence in Bush. The question is whether he and his team lost their objectivity as scientists as well.” (op. cit)

They also wrote that, in a “much more troubling admission”, Roberts “said that he had e-mailed the first study to The Lancet on September 30, 2004, ‘under the condition that it come out before the election.’ Burnham admitted that he set the same condition for Lancet II. ‘We wanted to get the survey out before the election, if at all possible,’ he said.” (op. cit)

The reference to a “much more troubling admission” suggested there was something new here. But in fact the same criticism was made in 2005. A June 23, 2005 editorial in the Washington Times derided the 2004 Lancet study as an “egregious politicization of what is supposed to be an objective and scientific journal”. The editors explained:

“We’re referring to the Lancet’s role in trying to influence the U.S. presidential election with a cynical ‘study’ of deaths in the Iraq war in October.” (Leader, ‘The Lancet’s Politics,’ Washington Times, June 23, 2005)

We cited Les Roberts’ response in our September 12, 2005, media alert:

“We finished the survey on the 20 Sept [2004]. If this had not come out until mid-Nov. or later, in the politicized lens of Baghdad (where the chief of police does not allow his name to be made public and where all the newly trained Iraqi soldiers I saw had bandanas to hide their faces to avoid their families being murdered…) this would have been seen as the researchers covering up for the Bush White House until after the election and I am convinced my Iraqi co-investigators would have been killed. Given that Kerry and Bush had the same attitude about invading and similar plans for how to proceed, I never thought it would influence the election and the investigators never discussed it with each other or briefed any political player.” (www.medialens.org/alerts/05/ 050906_burying_the_lancet_update.php)

The point is a simple one – the Lancet authors were keen for their studies to appear before US elections, but for ethical rather than political reasons. This is a million miles from aspiring to publish in order to unseat Bush. And it is further still from the possibility that such an aspiration generated biased science that went undetected by the Lancet’s rigorous peer-review system. As Gilbert Burnham told us:

“I doubt any Lancet paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent years as this one has!" (Burnham, email to Media Lens, October 30, 2004)

Again, the National Journal claim was based on nothing – a nothingness that has been eagerly embraced and boosted by media in both the US and Britain.

Refutations of the rest of the National Journal’s criticisms can be viewed here: http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee /research/iraq/lancet_mortality_response.html

John Tirman has provided a user-friendly demolition here:
http://www.johntirman.com /Bombs%20Away%20-%20a%20dull%20hatchet%20job.pdf

Grim Reading – The National Journal’s Track Record

The US media activist, David Peterson, has kindly provided us with details of the National Journal’s past performance in covering the Lancet studies. The January 4 Lancet smear aside, Peterson’s search for National Journal articles containing the words ‘Iraq’ and ‘Lancet’ delivered three results:

1. Alexis Simendinger, ‘Grim Science of Body Counts,’ October 14, 2006 (198 words)
2. Neil Munro, ‘Counting Corpses,’ January 5, 2008 (782 words. A remarkable piece. See here: http://news. nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/sidebar.htm)
3. ‘Vital Statistics,’ January 12, 2008 (47 words)

It appears that the National Journal had nothing all to say about the 2004 Lancet report in the year it was published and almost nothing to say about the 2006 study until this month. Peterson comments:

“Until the January 5, 2008 cover stories… these topics had never really entered the NJ’s purview.” (Email to Media Lens, January 16, 2008)

In a bizarre article last December that did not even mention the Lancet studies, Munro produced a similar smear of the September 2007 ORB poll which estimated 1.2 million deaths in Iraq. Munro wrote:

“The poll isn’t credible, said critic Michael Spagat, an economics professor at the Royal Holloway University of London, who specializes in civil conflicts, because its numbers are too high and because it doesn’t offer any evidence that the survey was conducted properly.” (Munro, ‘Iraq’s Slippery Polls,’ National Journal, December 1, 2007)

If this sounds just plain childish, consider the comment that follows:

“For example, the poll says that 264,126 Iraqis have been killed by car bombs, but the Iraq Body Count website says the Iraqi media has reported only 11,700 car-bomb deaths.”

This is intended as serious analysis. In fact there is no longer any excuse for this innocent reliance on Iraq Body Count (IBC). A review of Iraq deaths reported by four major US newspapers found that IBC missed more than one of every ten deaths reported by the news media. A separate study soon to be published by Columbia University found that the majority of violent deaths in a phone sample from Baghdad were not recorded by IBC. (‘Answers to Questions About Iraq Mortality Surveys,’ http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/ research/iraq/lancet_mortality_response.html)

One of the ironies of the January 4 National Journal piece was its concern that anti-war bias might have distorted the Lancet reports. Munro and Cannon wrote:

“Virtually everyone connected with the study has been an outspoken opponent of U.S. actions in Iraq.”

Tirman, on the other hand, describes Munro as “a militant right-winger… whose professional misconduct is demonstrable”.

In November 2001, Munro advocated “the destruction of Iraq” in a National Journal piece titled, ‘The Iraqi Opportunity – Berlin ’45. Tokyo ’45. Baghdad ’02.’

So how was Iraq an “opportunity”?

“He [Saddam Hussein] has little popular support, his country is a flat-desert ideal for U.S. Army’s mechanized warfare and the U.S. Air Force’s bombers, and his army is weakened by years of sanctions and defeat. The response suggests itself; destroy Saddam first, and the rest of the anti-American structure will collapse, regardless of bin Laden’s whereabouts or Saudi politics.” (Munro, National Review, November 6, 2001; http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-munro110601.shtml)

Munro added:

“Even the Palestinians might learn something from the destruction of Iraq. They’re still refusing to make peace — albeit a bitter peace of the defeated — -because they’re still hoping to push Israel into the sea. This forlorn hope has survived repeated debacles, disasters, and defeats, so there can only be a modest prospect that the destruction of their terrorist and Iraqi allies will reconcile them to peace. Maybe all those construction jobs in Iraq will serve as compensation.”

Dealing with Osama bin Laden, “stuck in a rat-infested cave” as he was, posed less of a problem, although “when we do kill him, and metaphorically stick his head on a pike in downtown New York, he will still live on as a martyr, albeit a failed martyr”.

Only metaphorically? Beneath its veneer of disinterested rationality, this is the malignant bias that underlies the January 4 National Journal report.

Genuine questions do of course remain about how many people have died in Iraq. On January 9, an Iraqi Ministry of Health study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) estimated the death toll from the time of the invasion in March 2003 until June 2006. (Iraq Family Health Survey Study Group, ‘Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006,’ January 9, 2008; http://content.nejm.org/ cgi/content/full/NEJMsa0707782)

Journalists have focused on NEJM’s estimate of 151,000 dead by violence, noting that it is lower than that offered by the 2006 Lancet study, which estimated 655,000 excess deaths from all causes. Les Roberts observes that the two articles have more in common than appears at first glance.

"The NEJM article found a doubling of mortality after the invasion, we found a tripling. The big difference is that we found almost all the increase from violence; they found half the increase from violence.” (Stephen Fidler and Steve Negus, ‘Post-invasion death toll in Iraq put at over 150,000,’ Financial Times, January 10, 2008)

The deaths-by-violence in the latest survey remained the same from year-to-year, which is highly unlikely – all observers agree that violent deaths rose sharply in 2005 and 2006. It is possible that respondents attributed deaths to nonviolent causes in order to avoid attracting the attention of the Iraqi government and security forces. The excess mortality implied by the new study is close to 400,000. Given that the survey period ended 19 months ago, a continuation of the same death rates would give a toll, today, of more than 600,000.

The new study is identical to both Lancet studies in one key respect – it suggests that an appalling humanitarian catastrophe has taken place in Iraq under US-UK occupation. This, in the end, is the point that matters.

SUGGESTED ACTION

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

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Email: nmunro@nationaljournal.com

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