Journalists
Reveal Their True Colors
12 April, 2003
On April 9, a US tank recovery
vehicle tightened a metal rope and a statue of Saddam Hussein came crashing
down in central Baghdad. The event was celebrated by "dozens"
of Iraqi people at the scene, according to BBC online, but by hundreds
of mainstream journalists in Britain and America. A rare, long
shot photograph of the event shows a small crowd of people around
the statue surrounded by empty space, then tanks, and then more empty
space.
The BBC's News At Six described this propaganda coup outside the journalists'
hotel as a "momentous event", with the media "a witness
to history", with US forces watching "amazed" on a "day
of extraordinary drama and historic images", with Bush declaring
"a historic moment" in reference to what were "extraordinary
events" (April 9). This was all in the first 90 seconds of the
programme.
Compare and contrast the above with the BBC's response to the march,
not of dozens, but of 2 million British people in London on February
15:
"The people have spoken, or have they? What about the millions
who didn't march? Was going to the DIY store or watching the football
on Saturday a demonstration of support for the government?" (David
Grossman, Newsnight, February 17, 2003)
As the "momentous events" of April 9 were described, the war
raged on. US soldiers and many Iraqi civilians were killed in fighting
that same night. The next day a suicide bomber killed several US marines
and wounded four more close to where the statue had been toppled. Civilians
were shot and killed: Channel 4 filmed as a six-year-old girl was shot
in the head by US troops, and as a civilian man was shot dead on his
balcony as he came out to see what was happening. Two children were
shot dead at a checkpoint, with 9 family members injured. A Shia Muslim
cleric favoured by Downing Street was assassinated in Najaf.
The Red Cross suspended its operations in the capital after a Canadian
employee was killed: "It's not possible to distribute medical and
surgical supplies or drinking water to the hospitals as we had wanted
to. The situation is chaotic and very insecure", said one Red Cross
spokeswoman (The Guardian, April 11). The 650-bed Medical City hospital
complex in Baghdad was reported to have neither water nor power, with
only 6 out of 27 operating theatres still in use. The looting of government
buildings, embassies, hospitals and private businesses was described
as "wild" and "completely out of control" in the
capital and elsewhere - the UN and aid officials warned that "violent
anarchy" would rapidly trigger "a humanitarian disaster".
But the media had already decided that the war had come to a happy conclusion.
The BBC's Nicholas Witchell declared of the US drive into central Baghdad:
"It is absolutely, without a doubt, a vindication of the strategy."
(BBC News at Six, April 9)
The BBC's breakfast news presenter, Natasha Kaplinsky, beamed as she
described how Blair "has become, again, Teflon Tony". The
BBC's Mark Mardell agreed: "It +has+ been a vindication for him."
(BBC1, Breakfast News, April 10) "This war has been a major success",
ITN's Tom Bradby said (ITN, Evening News, April 10). ITN's John Irvine
also saw vindication in the arrival of the marines:
"A war of three weeks has brought an end to decades of Iraqi misery."
(ITN Evening News, April 9)
At time of writing, the war is not yet over and Iraqi misery is entering
a new phase.
On Channel 4, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told Jon Snow that
he had met with the French foreign minister that day: "Did he look
chastened?" asked Snow, wryly. (Channel 4, April 9) On the same
programme, Channel 4's David Smith pointedly ended his report with a
quote from "a leading Republican senator":
"I'm just glad we had a commander-in-chief who didn't listen to
Hollywood, or the New York Times, or the French."
Rageh Omaar, understandably relieved after three weeks in fear of his
life, all but swooned at the feet of the invading army:
"In my mind's eye, I often asked myself: what would it be like
when I saw the first British or American soldiers, after six years of
reporting Iraq? And nothing, nothing, came close to the actual, staggering
reaction to seeing American soldiers - young men from Nevada and California
- just rolling down in tanks. And they're here with us now in the hotel,
in the lifts and the lobbies. It was a moment I'd never, ever prepared
myself for." (BBC News At Six, April 9)
Goodness knows what we were supposed to read into this statement, but
it was not within a million miles of the dispassionate, careful reporting
the public has a right to expect from the media - this was the US army
presented as adored, conquering heroes. Does the BBC not recognise that
millions of viewers never wanted the young men of Nevada and California
to roll their tanks into a Third World country that had never threatened
them, or us?
On the BBC's News At Ten (April 9), Matt Frei pushed the accepted media
interpretation of events: "For some, these images have legitimised
the war", he suggested.
The Incredible Expanding Prime Minister - Marr Loses It
And then, as if finally released from the bonds of public doubt and
scepticism, the BBC's political editor, Andrew Marr, rose up to deliver
his speech to the nation from outside Downing Street:
"Frankly, the main mood [in Downing Street] is of unbridled relief.
I've been watching ministers wander around with smiles like split watermelons."
(BBC News At Ten, April 9)
The fact that Marr delivered this with his own happy smile suggested
not merely that he felt the same, but that we should all feel the same.
But if we should indeed rejoice at this wondrous triumph, what does
the triumph signify? Marr continued, revealing everything about his
true feelings:
"Well, I think this does one thing - it draws a line under what,
before the war, had been a period of... well, a faint air of pointlessness,
almost, was hanging over Downing Street. There were all these slightly
tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr Blair is well
aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren't
going to thank him - because they're only human - for being right when
they've been wrong. And he knows that there might be trouble ahead,
as I said. But I think this is very, very important for him. It gives
him a new freedom and a new self-confidence. He confronted many critics.
"I don't think anybody after this is going to be able to say of
Tony Blair that he's somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion,
or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said
that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that
in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points
he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious,
even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a
larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result." (Marr, BBC
1, News At Ten, April 9, 2003)
A "larger man and a stronger prime minister"! Is this objective
reporting? Even Labour ministers would shy away from uttering such extraordinarily
overblown hyperbole in praise of their leader.
Marr tells us: "There were all these slightly tawdry arguments
and scandals. That is now history."
We all know what he is referring to. Blair told us that Iraq had never
cooperated with arms inspectors and had to be threatened with war -
inspectors tell us they achieved "fundamental disarmament"
without the threat of war by December 1998. Blair told us that Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction were "a threat and a danger that we
have to confront" - UNSCOM inspectors and many others insisted
that any retained Iraqi WMD was likely to have long since become harmless
"sludge"; UNMOVIC inspectors under Hans Blix found nothing,
the US army has so far found nothing. Blair said that his first WMD
arms dossier presented concrete proof of hidden Iraqi WMD - UNMOVIC
investigators searched and found nothing at all. Blair claimed that
the Iraqis had responded to his dossier by moving the WMD before inspectors
arrived - Hans Blix said there was no evidence of the Iraqis moving
WMD.
Blair claimed his last WMD
dossier showed that Iraq was in cahoots with international terrorists
- the dossier was found to be based on a student thesis written ten
years ago. Blair claimed that the Iraqis had bought special aluminium
tubes as part of its attempt to build a nuclear bomb - inspectors said
they were not intended for any such purpose. Blair said documents showed
that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from the Niger to build a nuclear
bomb - inspectors exposed the documents as blatant forgeries. Blair
told us the Iraqi regime was responsible for the abject poverty in Iraq,
including the deaths of 500,000 children under five - high-level United
Nations officials and aid agencies have blamed US/UK sanctions for these
deaths. Blair declared endless terrorist threats, all of them bogus;
he ringed Heathrow with tanks - the alleged missile threat suddenly
vanished from sight without explanation.
The government arrested dozens
of individuals on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities -
most were quietly released without charge weeks later. On and on, the
government has lied and distorted and deceived until it got the war
Bush wanted. It is this totalitarian-style abuse of our democracy, that
the BBC's Andrew Marr describes as "slightly tawdry arguments and
scandals", that are now "history".
Marr continued:
"Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party
and beyond aren't going to thank him - because they're only human -
for being right when they've been wrong."
A statue has fallen in front of the media's hotel in central Baghdad,
and suddenly Blair is proved simply "right". No weapons of
mass destruction have been found, none have been used. Basra and Baghdad
have descended into chaos, looting and killing amid lethal water and
food shortages. In the city and around the country the war is still
being conducted as a criminal act outside international law. The Arab
world is seething with rage. But, for Marr, Blair is likely to go unthanked
for "being right" because his critics are only human. As one
of our readers wrote to Marr:
"From many of your previous reports I suspect you have been looking
forward to this unrestrained public adulation of the mighty Caesar Blair
for some time but had to keep it in check until what you perceived was
an opportune moment. Tonight I feel you finally had your wish come true."
(Media Lens, message board, April 10)
Marr continued of Blair:
"He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath,
and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of
those points he has been proved conclusively right." (Marr, BBC
1, News At Ten, April 9, 2003)
What would constitute a bloodbath for Marr? We know what the word means
for Dr. Faruq Salaam of Baghdad National Hospital:
"You have seen the bombs landing in market places and residences
where there is no military. I see daily, dozens of men, women and children,
horribly wounded, maimed, mutilated and scarred for life. So many people
have lost their senses from constant bombing. The electricity is gone,
and food and water are running out. We are short of medicine and bandages
for treating the wounded.
"Why has this war been
imposed on us? We did not harm anyone. There were no Iraqi terrorists
in those who attacked the World Trade Centre. Was it not America itself
who built up Saddam Hussein?" (Human Rights Foundation, April 9)
As the US prepared to attack Baghdad, Pentagon spokesmen reported that
the six divisions of the 80,000-strong Iraqi Republican Guard outside
the city had been "degraded" or rendered "ineffective"
by aerial and ground bombardment. Dan Goure, an analyst for the Lexington
Institute, told the Associated Press on April 8:
"It may never be known how many Iraqis were killed.... It would
have to be over 10,000 uniformed Iraqis and more if you include irregulars."
Did the 3,000 casualties on September 11 constitute a bloodbath? If
so, we must surely conclude that the thousands of dead and many more
thousands of wounded in the taking of Baghdad also constitute a bloodbath.
And as for the celebrating - some have celebrated while some have fought,
while others have actually returned to the country to die fighting,
against impossible odds, a super high-tech army. Of course Blair was
right that people would cheer, but cheering crowds were never a serious
justification for attacking Iraq. How many people would cheer if the
additional £3 billion to be spent on this war were sent to the
hundreds of millions of people subsisting on a pittance earned from
Western corporations in the Third World?
The New Crisis Of Democracy
Make no mistake, the establishment, including the media, has been deeply
shaken by the Iraqi crisis and war. They have surely felt under siege
by the turn of events: the 2 million people who marched, the truly vast
global dissent, the refusal of the French, German and Russian governments
to toe the line, the endless exposures of government lying. And, finally,
a far bloodier and more difficult war than most had predicted. The aftermath
is already hideous to behold. The establishment has seen Blair and his
government rocked - Blair, himself, seems on the verge of collapse and
has been described as having "gone round the bend" by Matthew
Parris in the Times, hinting at insider information.
It seems clear to us that the establishment media were waiting for their
chance to repair some of this damage by legitimising the war. They needed
a 'Berlin wall moment' that could enter the public's imagination as
a simple, powerful, vindication of everything that has happened. A US
news team joked that if the Iraqi information minister were still around
he would probably try to deny that the felling of the statue ever took
place. But in a sense the Iraqi minister would have had a point: the
event did +not+ happen in the sense that it is said to have happened
- it did not have the significance or meaning ascribed to it, and it
certainly did not justify the war.
When Marr said of government lying: "That is now history",
this was mere establishment wishful thinking. The powerful want us to
forget the exposed government lies, the endless manipulation. Above
all they want the public to forget its new-found interest in politics
and foreign policy: teenagers should forget their street protests and
get back to buying hamburgers and trainers, and being 'cool' by wearing
corporate logos. The 2 million people who marched should get off the
streets and back to their Do It Yourself programmes, their gardening,
their soap operas, their interior decorating. Sex or shopping - which
makes you happier?
During the Vietnam War a similar explosion of public involvement in
politics was described, without irony, as a "crisis of democracy"
by shaken US politicians. The Trilateral Commission, a liberal think
tank, described how "previously passive or unorganised groups in
the population", such as "blacks, Chicanos, white ethnic groups,
students and women... became mobilised and organised" in new forms
of political protest in the 1960s. The Trilateralists argued that "a
greater degree of moderation in democracy" was required to overcome
this "excess of democracy". (Quoted, Milan Rai, Chomsky's
Politics, Verso, 1995, p.152)
Democracy, you see, in the West is intended to be a system were the
powerful make the decisions and the powerless meekly accept them. Possible
symbols for this version of 'liberty' are doubtless many and varied,
but one might be a giant, metal statue of an authoritarian figure with
its arm raised outstretched defiantly, arrogantly, over the milling
mass of people beneath.
SUGGESTED ACTION:
The goal of Media Lens is
to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing
letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite,
non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to the media expressing
your views:
Nicholas Witchell:
Email: [email protected]
Andrew Marr:
Email: [email protected]
Rageh Omaar
Email:[email protected]
Matt Frei:
Email: [email protected]
Natasha Kaplinsky:
Email: [email protected]
Mark Mardell:
Email: [email protected]
John Irvine:
Email:[email protected]
Tom Bradby:
Email:[email protected]
Richard Sambrook, BBC director
of news.
Email: [email protected]
Roger Mosey, Head of BBC
Television News:
[email protected]
Jonathan Munro, Head of ITN
news gathering:
Email:[email protected]
This article originally appeared
on Information
Clearing House