Peter Wilby | ukwatch.net

In Dangerous Denial

Tim Holmes — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:59:10 +0000

According to an Ipsos Mori poll, carried out for the Observer this month, most Britons believe climate change is at least partially down to natural causes, and not solely to human activity. A majority also believe scientists are divided on the causes and more than a fifth say the whole thing has been exaggerated.

Now where would they have got those ideas from? One Channel 4 programme, claiming global warming is “a swindle”, has no doubt played a role, as have internet blogs arguing all the world’s scientists are party to a Marxist conspiracy bent on destroying western civilisation. But the press, though declining, still counts. It contributes to the framework within which public debate proceeds. It lends respectability to the opinions it highlights.

A study by the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University found US newspapers have improved their coverage of global warming. By 2006, only 8% of what they published failed to reflect the scientific consensus: that human activity is more than 90% likely to be responsible. The UK tabloids – the Sun, Mirror, Mail, Express and their Sundays – show no improvement, with 23% of their 2006 coverage at odds with what nearly every climate scientist believes.

Happily, the Murdoch empire has gone green, thanks to James Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation in Europe and Asia. The Sun and the Times now rarely give space to deniers of man-made global warming. The latter was once full of sceptics but then a leader graciously announced “the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt”. But neither paper gives consistent and/or prominent coverage. The Sun is currently dominated by UFOs, with an “exclusive” last Wednesday about a 13-strong army of alien craft over Shropshire, and other recent front-page stories about police helicopters chasing little green men over Cardiff.

These stories didn’t include even a final-paragraph quote expressing scepticism – a “balance” newspapers observe scrupulously when they report evidence of global warming. It’s harmless fun, I suppose. But Sun readers could be forgiven for concluding that, as a matter of public concern, global warming is on the same level as extraterrestrial visitations.

Several other papers continue to give a high profile to global warming denial. In the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn, Tom Utley and Andrew Alexander all scorn suggestions that we need to reduce carbon emissions. None has anything beyond a science O-level. Nor does the Sunday Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker, a former Private Eye editor. He gleefully reported this month that, since January 2007, global temperatures have fallen 0.77C. This figure, from satellite and balloon readings, is correct but, down here on Earth, where we happen to live, spring 2007 land temperatures were the highest on record (the figures go back to 1880) and those for spring 2008 tied with 2000 as the third highest.

Booker is the most plausible global warming denier among regular columnists because he packs his pieces with “facts” sourced to “experts”. But he is none too particular about his experts’ credentials. Take another of his campaigns, concerning white asbestos, which the World Health Organisation regards as a class one carcinogen. According to Booker, it is harmless (he admits the dangers of blue and brown asbestos) and claims to the contrary are attributable to commercial interests that make money from disposing of it.

The most quoted “expert” for this story is a Professor John Bridle who runs something called Asbestos Watchdog. In 2006, Radio 4’s You and Yours – in a 20-minute item denounced by Booker as “reckless” and “laughable” – reported Bridle had been convicted under the Trade Descriptions Act for passing himself off falsely as a qualified asbestos surveyor. He claimed connections to an impressively titled European body that couldn’t be traced. His professorship is an honorary one from Russia. As for Asbestos Watchdog – which, writes Booker, offers “honest advice” to an “ever larger number of people” – I tried to contact it last week and both its website and telephone number were inaccessible. Bridle went to Ofcom about You and Yours; this month, the regulator rejected all his complaints.

Dig deep enough and you find that, just as Bridle proved to have connections to the asbestos industry, so many of the “experts” journalists quote on global warming receive money, directly or indirectly, from the oil industry. There’s nothing wrong in newspapers challenging consensus views, and many scientists who have been proved right in the end – for example, those who warned of how lead in petrol could affect children – began as lone mavericks. But sceptics themselves merit scepticism, and journalists should give their scientific credentials and their relationship to vested interests the most careful scrutiny. Berating the EU, as Booker frequently does, or denouncing school standards, as Melanie Phillips does, won’t kill anybody. Asbestos is different. So is measles and, as Cardiff University research has shown, MMR vaccinations fell in step with press claims that they were linked to autism.

Global warming could kill millions. If Ipsos Mori is right, the deniers are gaining ground. Its polls show the proportion of Britons who are unconcerned has risen from 15% to 23% in the past year. Many politicians believe government action to arrest climate change is still a vote loser. It is likely to remain so as long as much of the press remains wilfully ignorant of science.

So Nick is now right of the Times?

Nearly three years ago in this column, I asked of my former colleague Nick Cohen, “how far right is he going?”. At that time, I detected signs that the Observer and New Statesman columnist, once the most unshakeable of leftists, might extend the change in his political allegiances beyond his support for the Iraq war.

Last Wednesday, I was surprised to find in the London Evening Standard that my old friend is wobbling even in his previously reliable defence of civil liberties and fair trials. By ruling that anonymous witnesses could make trials unfair, the law lords, Cohen wrote, would leave themselves “with blood on their hands and the rest of us with corpses on our streets”. The contrary view was put in a Times leader: “Without knowing who a hostile witness is, no defence lawyer can properly assess his or her credibility for a jury.” Anonymity, it continued, could protect those who wished to settle scores “and prejudice a jury against a defendant as evidence of fear that he or she inspires”.

If he had written it, the old Cohen would have put it more robustly.

Dirty secret exposed

Congratulations to the Lords committee on communications for exploding the myth that media ownership doesn’t matter any more because the internet allows a thousand opinions to bloom. Opinion lacks clout without the backing of information and, as the committee points out, nearly all fresh information is generated by a handful of established news organisations. Even the most sturdy critics of the mainstream media use material from the same media to demonstrate how they are fed a pack of lies. That, as one witness told the committee, is “the dirty little secret of the information revolution”.

The Making of a Tyrant

Tim Holmes — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:17:49 +0000

Latin America is a region to which the British press normally pays little attention. Unlike the European Union, China and all Muslim countries, it does not menace the British way of life. Nor does it offer imperial nostalgia. Being full of military men with silly hats and twirly moustaches, and visited only by reckless teenagers on gap years, it is not to be taken seriously.

But occasionally the press stirs itself to look at Venezuela and particularly its president, Hugo Chávez. Last week, Chávez, who has won 11 national votes in nine years, narrowly lost a referendum on a new constitution which, among other things, would have abolished restrictions on how often presidents can stand for re-election. A victory would have brought Venezuela into line with, for example, France or – if you accept we now have quasi-presidents in Downing Street – Britain. “Venezuela rejects Chávez power grab,” barked the London Evening Standard as the news broke.

Chávez makes no bones about being a socialist. Since being elected in 1998, he has embarked on a programme of nationalisation, designed to ensure the country’s wealth, based mainly on oil, is distributed more equitably. As Seumas Milne, writing from Caracas, told Guardian readers last Thursday, he has cut poverty and illiteracy, expanded free healthcare, and raised pensions. He has also tried to break US hegemony over Latin America and he opposes “free trade” agreements that would allow US corporations to control large sectors of the Venezuelan economy.

With such disreputable views, Chávez can never be allowed an outing in the British media unless he is shepherded by adjectives. President Bush is simply President Bush. But Chávez is “controversial”, “maverick”, “demagogic”, “populist” (but not “popular”), “overbearing” and “authoritarian”. As the Medialens website has meticulously documented, he is portrayed as, at best, a clown or “a left-wing firebrand”.

More often, though international monitors have verified all elections as free and fair and there are no reports of Venezuelans being tortured or detained without trial, he is branded a tyrant. His “use of anti-US sentiment to create an external threat” (which, since the US backed an anti-Chávez coup in 2002 and bankrolls opposition movements, needs little creativity) was “the classic gambit of the tyrant” and, therefore, “most sinister”, the Independent on Sunday explained last year.

If anyone points out that Venezuela still has a free press and an active opposition, we are told that Chávez’s attachment to democracy has, to quote one Independent editorial, “a temporary and improvised feel”.

So improvised apparently that the Independent captioned one picture of Chávez last year as “the Venezuelan dictator”. Even the New Statesman, in a cover story headed “From hero to tyrant”, has described Chávez as “power-crazed”. The consistently hostile Sunday Times found a “political scientist” to say that Chávez planned “to introduce a system similar to Pol Pot”. The same paper, covering Naomi Campbell’s recent visit to Venezuela, compared celebrities who support him to Lenin’s “useful idiots” who visited Moscow to support the Soviet system.

The strongest evidence adduced for Chávez’s malign intentions was his decision to deny the privately owned RCTV a renewal of its terrestrial licence. Though the station could continue on satellite and cable (admittedly unavailable to most Venezuelans), this was widely presented in the British media as an outrageous suppression of dissent. Yet in the run-up to the 2002 coup – when Chávez was briefly ousted – the station cancelled normal programmes and incited people to join a general strike, march through the streets and topple the government. During their two days in power, the coup leaders thanked RCTV for its help. As the Venezuela Information Centre points out, the Broadcasting Code in Britain forbids material likely “to lead to disorder” and it is hard to imagine that if, say, Channel Five had done something similar, a British government would have waited five years to get it off air.

Chávez, like all political leaders, has many faults. Human rights groups express concerns about Venezuela, just as they do about recent government measures in Britain and the US. Chávez is clearly a centraliser by instinct – like most recent British prime ministers – and he has lost considerable support over the past year, even among once close allies. Inflation is high, and some foods scarce. That no doubt largely explains his loss of support. Such are the ups and downs of politics.

British newspapers probably think that, at least in their reporting, they present a fair account. They don’t. From most coverage, readers wouldn’t get the faintest idea about how Chávez has improved the education, health and prosperity of the poor, about the US’s record of supporting genuine dictators in Latin America or about the region’s long history of glaring social and racial inequalities. But they are always reminded of Chávez’s cheeky irreverence towards Bush and of the less liberal side of his rule.

The Sunday Telegraph, for its only pre-referendum comment, wheeled on the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan to warn that “an entire continent is sliding unremarked into dictatorship”. Since, to make such a judgment even vaguely plausible, Hannan had to include the centre-left leaders of Brazil, Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador, we can see how widely the definition of dictatorship is being stretched. It now denotes an absence not of popular consent but of corporate consent. What the press defends, in the language and tone of its Latin American coverage, is not democracy, but unrestrained free-market capitalism.

We Need Alternative Narratives

Tim Holmes — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:33:42 +0000

The following speech was delivered by Peter Wilby at the conference “The First Casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today”, London School of Economics, November 17, 2007. Peter Wilby has a column in the Media Guardian and is a former editor of the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman.

I want to talk about the systemic failures of journalism that led to the problems of the coverage of the Iraq war, which in my view will lead to similar problems with the coverage of the Iran war – which I am sure is going to come sooner or later.

I wrote a leader in the New Statesman (Sep 30, 2002) in the week of Alastair Campbell’s notorious dossier. It came out on a Wednesday so I didn’t have very much time to read it and I didn’t at that stage know how it was going to relate to the press:

“Most people, if they are honest, will confess that the technicalities of the debate on Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities are beyond them. Tony Blair’s dossier provides little enlightenment and was never likely to, as most of the new assertions depend on intelligence that is necessarily vague. Ministers are no better equipped than the rest of us to judge whether a grainy photograph actually shows a missile site, much less whether it is a threatening one. Equally, the journalists now touring factories in Iraq wouldn’t know a phial of Sarin from a thimble of finest malt.

“A few things stand out. Saddam wants uranium (we knew that; that’s why we have sanctions), but, even if he got it, he would need a factory to make nuclear bombs. He would also need the means to deliver them and other weapons of mass destruction. The dossier’s claim that he can ‘deploy’ them within 45 minutes produces the dramatic headlines that Alastair Campbell no doubt demanded. But what does it mean? Deployed how, where, against whom? According to Scott Ritter, ex-head of the UN inspection team, the designs of ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ which the team saw up to 1998 would produce rockets ‘that would spin and cartwheel . . . go north instead of south . . . blow up’. Iraq would have to test missiles. The tests would be detectable and presumably the sites could be bombed. So where lies the argument for all-out war?”

I think that one thing I’d like to note about that, which I think stands the test of time pretty well, is that I quote Scott Ritter, and you can’t get much more authoritative than the former head of the UN inspection team. Yet Ritter was an example – there are other examples – of someone who was treated as a complete non-person by the media at the time. He was hardly ever interviewed on television or radio and was hardly ever quoted in the newspapers.

If you look back at the Daily Telegraph through the whole of 2002-2003 Scott Ritter was only ever quoted on 16 occasions. And there was nearly always an adjective in front of the name Scott Ritter – he was nearly always described as “controversial” or “irascible” and reports of his remarks were almost always followed by American claims that he was an apologist for Saddam Hussein. And many of the occasions when he was mentioned in the Daily or Sunday Telegraph it was when there were attempts to smear him as a corrupt sex maniac.

I could give a lot of examples from our own trade of journalism. John Pilger, in my view one of the most able and objective critics of the war and the media. He appears fortnightly in the New Statesman. But again he is somebody who as far as the mainstream newspapers are concerned is very much marginalised. I noticed recently that the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs gave details of the 100 most influential people on the left, including all sorts of people I’d never heard of, but at number 100 there was John Pilger, with the comment that he was still somebody who appealed to gullible young people, he had a small but visible following. This is only a man who gets hour-long documentaries on ITV that attract audiences into the millions.

As to the core of the systemic failure, the way in which what has been called the “public relations state” operates, the way in which the government tries to establish a narrative and thus control the news agenda. Of course the opposition tries to do the same. And essentially politics in this country is a competition between the government and the opposition to establish a narrative of events. Sometimes the government has the upper hand, sometimes the opposition. What is very difficult, even for a backbench MP, is for anybody outside that system to establish an alternative narrative. That’s what we saw in the case of the Iraq war. There was no serious division between government and opposition on policy.

The second problem was that there was a shortage of credible alternative sources on the facts. Intelligence is necessarily a shadowy area of nudges, winks and disinformation. Almost nothing from intelligence sources is ever said on the record, so readers can’t judge the reliability of the source. Journalists are grateful for what can be presented as secret information so they are rarely willing to treat it sceptically. Suppose you are a journalist and you are told that 1,000 terrorists are plotting to blow up railway stations. Well that’s probably going to make a splash, so the journalist isn’t going to write a second paragraph saying this is a load of hyped-up rubbish. That I think is one of the problems.

The war on terror is a perfect example of a narrative that is controlled entirely by official sources. Nobody from outside can say how it is going. Nobody can say how big the threat is or where the enemy is or anything. When Singapore fell during the Second World War, nobody could very easily deny that it had fallen. During the Cold War nobody could say that the Soviets had marched into West Germany when nobody had actually seen them do so. But when you hear of victories, defeats and threats in the war on terror they are by their nature uncheckable – except I suppose when bombs go off, but perhaps not even then. When lots of bombs were going off in Iraq we were told we were winning, because the terrorists were obviously getting very desperate!

What always gives official sources the upper hand in this war on terror is that they can tell a simple dramatic narrative: good against evil, us against them. Introducing complications into that narrative, introducing doubts, is very difficult. Maybe Saddam doesn’t have WMDs, maybe Iran just wants civil nuclear power. Maybe there are only 20 or so really serious terrorists, or maybe a thousand, and maybe they aren’t very good at what they do. But that doesn’t make good stories. “Saddam/Iran/al-Qaeda not much of a threat” – that’s not a good headline. “They might be but we’re not sure” – that’s an even worse headline.

So what can journalists do? I think there are three things.

First, instead of dismissing non-government, non-official or Iranian sources as marginal, we should be cultivating, trying to build up alternative sources of authority. Right now we should be seeking out sources who know something about how the Iranian government operates and about the relevance of nuclear technology. Almost the only detailed discussion I have read in the newspapers about how countries might go about making an operational nuclear bomb has been in the London Review of Books.

I am not appealing at all for one narrative to take priority over another. It may be true that Iran can and will become a nuclear armed power within a very short space of time and that it can credibly threaten Israel and other countries with annihilation. But I would like the alternative narrative, which does exist, to be presented and given the same airing as the official one.

Second, I would like every American or British government statement on Iraq, including the alleged Iranian arming of militias in Iraq, to be scrutinised rigorously. Where does the evidence for it come from? What is the evidence? Is it disputed and if so by whom? If somebody said that the British government was full of warmongering lunatics nobody would just accept it, people would scrutinise this statement and ask if it’s true. So why are we so willing to accept it when it’s said about another country’s government?

We’re always being told, for example, that we should read what Osama Bin Laden has written, the Iranian president’s speeches, so see what they say about destroying Israel and destroying the west and so on. Neither are ever mentioned – the Iranian president particularly – in the press without reference to their blood-curdling views. So why are we not reminded every time there is a reporting of the US administration’s stance on Iran, the preparations it is making to confront Iran, why are we not reminded of the Project for the New American Century? It sets out in black and white, in very great detail, the Neo-Cons view of their aims and how America should proceed in the future. Why are we not reminded of that every time we read about the US administration?

[Third, there is the language we use.] What does “extraordinary rendition” mean? Is it by any chance kidnapping? What are “abuses” in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo? Are they by any chance torture? Torture is nearly always used in continental newspapers, but hardly ever in British or American newspapers.

Have the British media learned anything from Iraq? I don’t think so. I’m afraid even the Guardian recently led on a story that came from unnamed US sources on the wicked things Iran was up to in Iraq. It may be true, I don’t know. But it was without a word from other sources.

If they are going to do a better job, media outlets are going to have to change the way they operate and the way they deal with sources of information.

Good News - But Not for Papers

Tim Holmes — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:10:35 +0000

A memo went round the London Evening Standard recently instructing that the paper would in future be calmer, cleverer and cheerier. Readers, it said, don’t want to be “coshed by doom and disaster stories” on the way home. The following Monday, the paper – which had undergone a few design changes – included “West End theatre dancing its way to box office hit record” and “Turner Prize greatest hits” among its page leads, as well as a story about how you could now have brain surgery and be home in time for tea.

The same spirit is abroad, I am told, at the weekly Times Educational Supplement. Management ordered editors to draw up weekly counts of “positive” and “negative” headlines, and to redress the balance in favour of the former. Perhaps bonuses will be handed out for one front-page splash last month: “Our primaries are heaven. They provide a safe and secure haven for children in a troubled world.”

These calls for a more upbeat tone are not new. About 30 years ago, Prince Charles called for more good news, and the Sunday Times responded with a satirical page of positive stories. About 10 years ago, I wrote education features for the Evening Standard; I was banned from writing on Mondays because the then editor, Max Hastings, believed readers needed to be cheered up at the beginning of the working week, and no education story could possibly do that. (It didn’t occur to me to offer “Our primaries are heaven”.) Later, when I edited the Independent on Sunday, David Montgomery, then chief executive of the Mirror Group (the paper’s joint owner at the time) and an opera nut, demanded that the opera critic, instead of droning on about mediocre productions, should highlight the glamour and excitement of the occasions.

Is it true that readers want cheerier newspapers? This view emerges from the focus groups so beloved of managements, where readers also say they want smaller, more manageable papers. It has been shown repeatedly, however, that the more pages and sections a paper can add, the more copies it will sell. Similarly, any editor knows disaster sells and the bigger the disaster, the bigger the sale. Nobody buys a paper to learn how many aircraft took off and landed safely the previous day. The Daily Mail, the most successful British daily paper of the age, is also the gloomiest, dwelling on rising crime, plunging school standards, imminently falling house prices, cancer threats and a country rapidly going to the dogs.

But whatever readers want, newspapers face relentless pressure for more good news from one particular source. Most advertisers do not like to be associated with bad news. If readers feel worried and insecure, advertisers believe, they are less likely to go out and spend. Guilt-inducing copy about poverty, disease, starvation and climate change is worst of all. Nor do advertisers care much for controversy. Opinions that make people angry, they fear, will spill over into negativity about products and services advertised alongside them.

This explains why free newspapers, with few exceptions, are so bland. They give a generally upbeat view of the world and rarely offer more than banal opinions. Being wholly dependent on advertising revenue, they have to adopt the cheery world view of your average corporate marketing executive. And as free newspapers grow and competition for advertising intensifies, paid-for newspapers face the same pressures. The challenge from two London evening frees – one also within the Associated Newspapers stable – largely explains the Standard’s nervousness about appearing downbeat.

Many critics of newspapers believe journalists are instructed to distort their reports or suppress certain stories in order to keep advertisers sweet. This is not true. In most papers, only the most senior editorial executives have any contact with advertising staff, who often don’t read the paper they work for. Advertisers will rarely comment on a particular article, still less complain. There is no conspiracy, no direct censorship. But every newspaper works to a formula, balancing light and shade, positive and negative, bland and controversial, to create an overall tone and a brand image. That image must attract both readers and advertisers. As free or cheap content grows, the latter become the more important influence.

That is the danger for the press of the future, and for the health of democracy. In the new digital world, it is said, information will flow freely, and so will comment. Even traditional and generally acceptable restrictions – on naming a victim of blackmail, for example – are becoming almost impossible to enforce. Censorship will be obsolete. But censorship in the crude sense is not the issue; it is a question of the tone and context in which news and comment are presented.

Newspapers are altering their business models in a way that will increase their dependence on advertising and other forms of corporate support. Some media analysts believe that, not many years hence, nobody will charge for news at all. Our press will no doubt then be full of relentlessly good cheer, rather like the old Soviet papers with their stories of amazingly productive factories, cheerful peasant girls and, from time to time, heaven in primary schools.

Challenge Official Narratives

Tim Holmes — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:33:14 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the best British papers have no cause for complacency, however, and unlike the New York Times and Washington Post, they haven’t apologised for misleading readers. What was going on at Abu Ghraib, for example? Most Iraqis – and they should know – would call it torture. So would most continental newspapers. But analysis by American academics shows the term was used far less frequently by the British press (including the Guardian) and hardly at all by the US press. In both countries, official sources insisted incidents at Abu Ghraib were “abuses”, committed by “rogue elements”. None of this would matter so much if the press showed signs of learning lessons. But the official narrative on Iran – that it is striving to acquire nuclear weapons while arming terrorists in Iraq – is as unchallenged now as the narrative about WMDs before the Iraq war. So is the narrative that all violence in Iraq is caused by a combination of al-Qaida, Iranian meddling, sectarian fanaticism and Saddamite fascism. The possibility that much of it involves an authentic nationalist uprising, which just wants a united Iraq with the Americans out, is ruled inadmissible. Seumas Milne’s report in the Guardian last week was a rare exception.

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

Sceptical Press?

Tim Holmes — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:35:08 +0000

Was Iran’s release of the 15 British sailors last Wednesday an occasion for relief and rejoicing? Not as far as the press was concerned. The storyline had been mapped out. There would be blindfolded captives, torture and show trials. Britain would respond with Churchillian rhetoric, gunboats, SAS raids and stiff upper lips and, if it didn’t, Tony Blair, along with Margaret Beckett’s caravan, could be given one last kicking. Instead, we had an Easter “gift” from President Ahmadinejad. The newspapers’ disappointment at the peaceful end to a story that had been boiling up nicely was palpable.

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

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

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

But the press has apparently learnt nothing from the dodgy dossiers and phantom WMDs that preceded the Iraq war. British governments may be capable of all manner of dissembling over pensions, NHS waiting lists and school exam results but, when they are laying down the law to foreigners, they are still assumed to be as honest as the day is long. So a Ministry of Defence map purporting to show the sailors were well inside Iraqi waters was accepted by most papers without question. Only Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who headed the Foreign Office’s maritime section from 1989 to 1992, pointed out that no maritime border between Iran and Iraq has ever been agreed and that the MoD’s map was, to all intents and purposes, a fake. His revelation was buried on page 59 of the Mail on Sunday and largely ignored by other papers. Since Murray was sacked by the Foreign Office and later stood for election against Jack Straw in his Blackburn constituency, it may be thought he has an axe to grind. But the press’s refusal to take him seriously recalls its similar treatment of Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector who insisted before the Iraq war that Saddam had been “fundamentally disarmed”.

The second obvious explanation was that Iran had retaliated for the seizure of its own citizens by western forces in Iraq. These include five alleged “intelligence agents” taken during a US raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the Kurdish city of Arbil. But they, as the press told it, were “detained” – just like the people in Guantanamo Bay, I suppose – while our sailors were “kidnapped” and automatically became “hostages”. Most early accounts of the sailors’ detention – sorry, illegal capture – mentioned the Arbil incident only in passing. Not until last Tuesday did the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn reveal the real targets of the US raid: two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit. Cockburn compared it to a hypothetical attempt by Iran to kidnap the heads of the CIA and MI6 during a visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan. If newspapers were so minded, they could make other interesting comparisons – for example, between the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s fairly open seizure of British sailors and the American CIA’s secret seizures of Muslims for “extraordinary rendition” to countries that use torture.

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

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

It's Equality That Saves Lives

eddie — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 13:54:02 +0000

In the mid-90s, when John Major’s traffic cones hotline was still the biggest thing in politics, I discussed with a senior New Labour adviser how a Blair government might change the country. The Thatcher governments had succeeded in doing so, we agreed, because so many policy proposals could be tested against a simple question: “How does this create a market?” Civil servants, ministers, advisers and thinktanks all came to understand that if their ideas didn’t create or enhance markets they were probably wasting their time. What, the adviser asked, was the equivalent question for New Labour? We didn’t, given the constraints imposed by four election defeats, find a sufficiently crisp formula.

But I now think the question that ought to dominate Labour policy has been staring us in the face all along. It is: “How do we create a more equal society?” By this, I don’t mean a more meritocratic society, in which everyone, regardless of birth, has an equal chance to get rich. I mean a society where the gap in income and wealth between rich and poor is very much less than it is now, as Polly Toynbee argued on these pages yesterday.
If the government could bring this about, many of the goals it attempts to achieve by other means – higher educational standards, a healthier population, a fall in violent crime, a revival of democratic participation, a reduction in racism, even protection against Islamic extremism – would be much nearer realisation.

Ministers could then expend less of their and other people’s energy on, for example, new state schools with fancy names, exhortations to eat health-giving nuts, roots and berries, and wheezes to allow us to vote without leaving home.

This may seem a large claim, and one that comes from a bygone age of egalitarian dogma. But consider for a start a paper presented in London this week at the World Congress of the Econometric Society by two American researchers. After following 6,000 children from the age of five to 14, the researchers concluded that the tax credits for poorer working families introduced by Bill Clinton in 1994 had had a dramatic effect.

With $1,000 in extra income, children’s test scores had risen on average by 2.1% in maths and 3.6% in reading. With the maximum tax credit of about $4,000, the researchers calculated, the gain in reading scores was more than 16%. The gains were even higher for black and Hispanic children. In Britain, Gordon Brown’s tax credits could well turn out similar results.

Tax credits were introduced for a host of reasons, and not just to raise school performance. But I doubt if any educational policy alone will be able to claim such significant effects for such a small outlay. More pre-schooling and drastic cuts in class sizes, perhaps, but certainly not city academies or enhanced powers for Ofsted.

Many words have been expended on what poor people are thought to need: better schools, more books in the home, more counselling, more seaside holidays and so on. What they need most of all, however, is more money. But it is important to understand that trickled-down wealth won’t do it. Inequality is the killer.

I use the word “killer” advisedly. The effect of inequality on health is extraordinary. In rich areas of the US, 16-year-old white men can expect to live to their mid-70s; a black 16-year-old in a poor area cannot expect to celebrate his 60th birthday. As the social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson puts it in his newly published book The Impact of Inequality: “We are used to feeling indignation at the human-rights abuses in countries where people are imprisoned without trial, are tortured or simply disappear, but health inequalities exact a much greater toll.”

Not all such differences in life expectancy are attributable to differences in lifestyle, such as smoking, drinking, drugs, exercise and diet. Poverty and inequality induce stress: one survey in the 90s showed that families living on less than £10,000 a year were more than twice as likely to have daily arguments as those on more than £20,000. We look admiringly at high life expectancies in Japan and Sweden and debate if raw fish or lingonberries would do the trick for us, too. It never seems to occur to us that the longevity may be connected to these being two of the most equal societies on Earth.

Wilkinson’s book quotes a wide range of evidence on how inequality affects other areas that preoccupy policy makers. More than 50 studies show a clear tendency for violence to be more common in societies where income differences are larger. About half the variation in homicide rates between different states or provinces in the United States and Canada is accounted for by differences in the amount of inequality. Racial hostility and discrimination against women is greater in the more unequal American states.

In the US and Italy, involvement in community life (including voting) is highest where income inequalities are least. There seems to be nothing on the relationship between income inequality and violent Islamic extremism. No doubt we shall soon have an inquiry. We have had such inquiries before, after the inner-city riots of the early 1980s and after those in northern towns in 2001. If we don’t now know the answers – poverty, social exclusion, employment discrimination even against those who have qualifications as good as those of their white peers – we never will.

It is easier to quote the figures for the effects of inequality than to explain precisely why it works as it does. The best guess is that high inequality leads to status anxiety, which in turn leads to stress and anger and a breakdown of trust and social cohesion. We may say that people should learn to be grateful for what they’ve got, but we all know from children’s demands how important status symbols – the right clothes and gadgets – are to the human animal.

Even harder is to know what policies would reduce inequality at a time when all economic forces work in the opposite direction. Wilkinson suggests more progressive taxation and more economic democracy, with a rise in employee share ownership and employee participation in company decisions. But there’s no getting away from it: if we are to reduce inequality, it’s not just a matter of the poor having more but also of the rich having less.

Despite Brown’s tax credits, New Labour has never accepted that. The Office for National Statistics reported this week that both the richest 10th of the population and the poorest 10th have seen their disposable incomes grow by a fifth since the mid-1990s. Unfortunately, these rises are worth £119 a week to the first group, £28 to the second. So the absolute difference between the two is widening. As long as that continues, governing Britain will be hard work and all New Labour’s clever little initiatives, from city academies to antisocial behaviour orders and voting from your BlackBerry, will come to nothing.

Our Responsibility

jo — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 11:28:31 +0000

Muslims fight us on their own soil, but why should they not carry the fight to our homelands as we carry it to theirs? They do not possess the aircraft to fly over Washington and London and carry out “precision bombing”. Muslim warriors may think, bombing western civilians gets results: the things that make it horrible to us make it more effective in their eyes (shock and awe, perhaps).

Shortly after September 11 2001, I was widely denounced for implying, in a New Statesman editorial, that by electing George Bush – who was known to be indifferent to anything but the interests of US capital – Americans had helped to bring the New York and Washington attacks on themselves. Now Omar Bakri Mohammed and other Muslim clerics blame Britons for the London bombings because they re-elected Tony Blair. Do I, as one who voted for Blair and travel regularly on the tube, agree with them?

Let me first explain what I was trying to say (perhaps clumsily) four years ago. When America goes to war – in Vietnam or the Middle East, for example – it kills many people who have had no chance to influence their rulers. Americans, however, claim their government is “of the people, by the people, for the people”. America, on its own estimation, is a superpower which wishes to spread liberal capitalism.

The large majority of Americans (including migrants) have bought into this project and benefit from it – through cheap oil, for example, or through profits of US-based multinationals, which are often derived from expropriation of other countries’ resources. Any president who fails to protect these benefits risks himself or his party losing office. So if they are serious about democracy, Americans should accept a share of responsibility for what is done in their name. And so should we, whose country is America’s closest ally and accomplice.

None of this is to deny that indiscriminate murder is wrong or to support either the gang that attacked America in 2001 or the ones that attacked London last month. It is merely to observe that we should all take responsibility for our actions or inactions. This is what we now demand of Muslims. Is there something wrong with their religion? Have they given their young people the right values? Many Muslims are asking exactly these questions. For example, Bushra Nasir, head of a comprehensive and one of the Muslim delegation that met Tony Blair after the bombings, says that “now is the time for us Muslims to put our house in order” and “to look at what is going wrong with Muslim families and education”. The least we can do is ask a few questions of ourselves.

To many of us, the attacks seem especially evil. No warnings are given. The bombs are deliberately targeted at large numbers of civilians. They kill young and old, Muslims and non-Muslims, Blair voters and Blair opponents. (Not that bombing Dresden, Hiroshima, Hanoi or Baghdad was all that discriminating either).

Suicide bombings seem worst of all. We feel unable to do anything to make ourselves safer. It’s no good being vigilant for “suspicious” packages because the bomber carries his cargo on his back and, even if you think you’ve spotted it, he can still blow everybody up. Even a police officer can only shoot for the head, and risk killing an innocent person, as happened at Stockwell tube station. That innocent, particularly if you have a darkish skin, could be you.

And a home-grown suicide bomber, dreaming of 72 virgins for himself and “a painful doom” (in the Qur’an’s words) for his victims, seems an unpleasantly self-absorbed figure. What does he hope to achieve? He issues no statement, no programme, no final words to secure his place in the history books. It seems to be pure nihilism.

Yet a bomber needs support: he needs to find like-minded fellow bombers, people to supply explosives and detonators, people to organise his operation. The bombers may be “bastards”, to use the term favoured by red-top newspaper writers, but from what does their bastardy spring? Perhaps it is just another version of the mindset that makes white thugs in Liverpool sink an axe into the head of a black 18-year-old. Or perhaps it is another internet phenomenon, whereby a man who gets his kicks out of exploding deadly bombs can find soulmates, just as a German cannibal can find someone who wants to be eaten. But I think there is more to it; the attacks are “explicable” (which is not the same as “justifiable”) in the sense that Dominic Grieve, the shadow attorney general, used the word on Wednesday.

A section of the Islamic world believes the west is waging war on it, that this war has intensified with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and that it could intensify further with an invasion of Iran. It’s no use saying the 2001 attack preceded those invasions. As far as many Muslims are concerned, it went on for most of the 20th century. Arabs were expelled from Israel in the 1940s; Israel occupied the West Bank from 1967; the first Gulf war took place in 1991 and, to Bin Laden’s rage, led to US troops polluting sacred Saudi soil. The US has propped up corrupt, secular, pro-western tyrannies throughout the Islamic world – and then blamed and even bombed Muslims for their failure to embrace democracy.

Nor is it any use saying that neither Bin Laden nor the bombers are poor and oppressed and that they don’t care about Palestinians. The leaders of the Russian revolution weren’t poor and they despised the peasants. But their ideas would have had no traction without the miseries inflicted on Russians under the tsars, and nor would Bin Laden’s without the humiliations visited on Islamic countries, and the poverty that remains endemic. A climate has been created in which a minority of Muslims, some living in the west but feeling detached from western society, believe there’s a war going on.

How do you prosecute a war against the US and Britain? Muslims fight us on their own soil, but why should they not carry the fight to our homelands as we carry it to theirs? They do not possess the aircraft to fly over Washington and London and carry out “precision bombing”. The security around US and British leaders is almost impenetrable, at least compared with that around buses and tubes. Most importantly, Muslim warriors may think, bombing western civilians gets results: the things that make it horrible to us make it more effective in their eyes (shock and awe, perhaps) and if there are enough such outrages, we will demand a retreat from Iraq. They may be wrong on this. But it is the price we pay for living in a democracy: theoretically, we are in charge so we are frontline targets.

“Responsibility” is a better word than “blame”. We demand it, rightly, of those who carry out the atrocities; we should demand it also of ourselves and our rulers. The bombers, or rather those who control and influence them, are clear they are at war. President Bush seemed to agree when he declared a “war on terror”. Is our role in this war a just one? Do we want to continue the war? If not, what will we do to stop it? Those are the questions we need to ask ourselves.

Peter Wilby is a former editor of the New Statesman. He can be contacted at peter.wilby3@ntlworld.com