Guardians of Power The Myth of the Liberal Media David Edwards and David Cromwell Pluto P Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI Edwards 00 pre iii 27/10/05 16:09:34 First published 2006 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © David Edwards and David Cromwell 2006 Foreword copyright © John Pilger 2006 The right of David Edwards and David Cromwell to be identifi ed as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. John Pilger hereby asserts his moral right as author of the Foreword British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 2483 5 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2482 7 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England Edwards 00 pre iv 27/10/05 16:09:35 Contents Acknowledgments viii Foreword by John Pilger ix 1 The Mass Media – Neutral, Honest, Psychopathic 1 Pulling The Other One – The Corporate ‘Free Press’ 1 Outlawing Social Responsibility 2 Of Big Brother and ‘Auntie Beeb’ – The Propaganda Model 4 The Convenient Rise of Professional Journalism 9 A Note About the Structure of this Book 12 2 Iraq – The Sanctions of Mass Destruction 13 Blair’s Big Bad Lie – The ‘Moral Case for War’ 13 Effectively Terminated – The US–UK Genocide in Iraq 15 Media Complicity – The ‘Pilger-Baathist Line’ 19 Burying the Effects of Sanctions 21 Observer Editor Roger Alton and the 83-year-old War Veteran 25 Three Remarkable Emails from Nick Cohen 28 3 Iraq Disarmed – Burying the 1991–98 Weapons Inspections 32 Find Me a Way to do This 32 ‘Fundamentally Disarmed’ by 1998 33 Pushed or Pulled? The Art of Truth-Reversal 37 No Particular Answer – Media Lens and BBC Newsnight Editor George Entwistle 41 Serious and Current Threat? – The Sludge of Mass Destruction 44 4 Iraq – Gunning for War and Burying the Dead 47 The Message from America 47 Falling into Execute Mode 50 A Larger Man and a Stronger Prime Minister – The Fall of Baghdad 51 Outdoing Saddam – The US–UK are ‘Absolutely Accountable’ 53 Necessary ‘Dud’ – The Lancet Report 56 Edwards 00 pre v 27/10/05 16:09:35 vi Guardians of Power Our Data Have Been Back and Forth 58 The Charnel House – A Simple Question from a Couple of Amateurs 63 All Hail Democratic Iraq! – A Tragi-Comedy 65 Democracy Born and Still-Born – A Tale of Two Elections 68 ‘He Wants Democracy’ – Media Lens and BBC Newsnight Editor Peter Barron 73 5 Afghanistan – Let Them Eat Grass 76 Normalising the Unthinkable 76 In The Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Lion Is News 80 Killing as a First Resort 82 Bombing it Better 85 Outside Looking In – Media Lens and the BBC’s Director of News, Richard Sambrook 90 6 Kosovo – Real Bombs, Fictional Genocide 94 Iraq And Kosovo – The Forbidden Parallels 94 Lights out in Belgrade – The Media Line Up 95 Pure Invention – The Kosovo ‘Genocide’ 96 Questioning Racak 100 Pernicious and Anti-Journalistic – Media Lens and the BBC’s Andrew Marr 104 7 East Timor – The Practical Limits of Crusading Humanitarianism 109 A Toothless Moral Crusade 109 No One Gave a Damn – The ‘Blessing’ of the West 111 Impoverished Territory – The Calculations of Realpolitik 114 8 Haiti – The Hidden Logic of Exploitation 117 Conquering Paradise – The Logic of Exploitation 118 Haiti’s Big Surprise – Aristide 120 Media Silence on Washington’s ‘Double Game’ 124 Aristide Toppled – The Disputed Elections 125 9 Idolatry Ink – Reagan, the ‘Cheerful Conservative’ and ‘Chubby Bubba’ Clinton 132 Will the Real Paul Wolfowitz Please Stand Up? 132 Reagan – ‘An Extraordinarily Successful Presidency’ 134 Killing is Not Enough 138 Nicaragua – The Threat of a Good Example 142 Reagan’s Legacy in Central America 145 Edwards 00 pre vi 27/10/05 16:09:35 Contents vii Clinton – The Bitter Ironies 148 Dimbleby Dumbs Down 152 10 Climate Change – The Ultimate Media Betrayal 154 Uninhabitable Planet? 154 The High Cost of Buying Time 155 Global Climate Catastrophe – Mustn’t Grumble! 157 Put a ‘Hog’ in it – Liberal Media Greenwash 158 Neither do I, Too! – The Fossil-Fuelled Guardian 161 Dead Planet’s Society – The Mystery of the Guardian’s Post Box 167 The Guardian’s Readers’ Editor Serves up a Liberal Herring 170 What is our Problem? 171 11 Disciplined Media – Professional Conformity to Power 172 How do you Shoot Babies? 172 The ‘Gushing’ Phenomenon 174 Trained for Timidity 178 Hell, the System Works Just Fine! 182 Making a Difference – Why We Can Infl uence the Media 185 12 Towards a Compassionate Media 188 West is Best – How Media Compassion Radiates ‘Outwards’ 188 So What Would you do? The Guardian Editor Bowls a Googly 190 The Netizens are Coming! 192 Towards a Compassionate Mass Media 196 Honest, Compassionate, Non-Corporate 199 The Media is not Just Another Issue 201 13 Full Human Dissent 204 The Reality Filters 204 Life, Liberty and Happiness – The Corporate Versions 208 Enlightened Self-Interest – The Curious Qualities of Kindness 210 Towards Full Human Dissent 215 Resources 218 About Media Lens 229 Index 231 Edwards 00 pre vii 27/10/05 16:09:35 Acknowledgments We would like to express our thanks to the following people for their help with this book and with the Media Lens project: Michael Albert, Gilbert Burnham, Gabriel Carlyle, Phil Chandler, Noam Chomsky, Sue Cullum, Mark Curtis, Denis Halliday, Edward Herman, Richard Keeble, Tim Llewellyn, Marianne McKiggan, Oliver Maw, Aubrey Meyer, David Miller, Milan Rai, Les Roberts, Andy Rowell, Hans von Sponeck, John Theobald and all at Pluto Press. We also gratefully acknowledge the fi nancial support of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, the Lipman Miliband Trust, the Foundation de Sauve, the Marmot Trust, the Tinsley Charitable Trust and many individual donors over the years.We would like to thank our families for their love and support. David Cromwell would like to thank Foske, Sean and Stuart. We would particularly like to thank John Pilger for his encouragement and support. viii Edwards 00 pre viii 27/10/05 16:09:35 Foreword John Pilger Two epic episodes have determined how many of us in the West see the world beyond. They are the Second World War and the Cold War. As this is being written, the British are being called upon, yet again, to celebrate the ‘good war’ against Hitler: that ‘ethical bath where the sins of centuries of conquest, slavery and exploitation were expatiated’, to quote Richard Drayton on the latest crop of imperial historians like Niall Fergusson. He might as well have been referring to many ‘mainstream’ journalists. ‘The good war’, wrote Drayton, ‘has underwritten sixty years of war-making. It has become an ethical blank cheque for British and American power. We claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism. When we fall out with such tyrant friends as Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam, we re-brand them as “Hitler”. In the “good war” against them, all bad things become forgettable’ (Drayton, ‘An Ethical Blank Cheque’, Guardian, May 10, 2005). During the Cold War, the ultimate ‘bad thing’ was the threatened use of nuclear weapons. Declassifi ed offi cial fi les now reveal the them-and-us propaganda of the Cold War as largely fi ction. British planning documents from the 1960s actually dismiss the ‘Soviet threat’ in Europe as exaggerated and non-existent in most of the world, even in the Middle East. The real Cold War was fought by ‘our’ governments, not against Russians, but expendable brown and black people, often in places of great impoverishment. This was not so much a war between East and West as between North and South, rich and poor, big and small. Indeed, the smaller the adversary, the greater the threat, because triumph by the weak might be contagious. Thus the weak, whose homelands often contained vast treasuries of oil and gas, minerals and beckoning markets, were the true goals of the West’s crusaders, and still are. Western state terrorism was used from Palestine to Nicaragua, Indochina to the Congo. And when on September 11, 2001, the weak, in effect, struck back, a new mythical war, the ‘War on Terror’, was launched. ix Edwards 00 pre ix 27/10/05 16:09:35 x Guardians of Power The latest ‘bad things’, such as America’s and Britain’s bombing of civilian targets with cluster bombs, and use of napalm and depleted uranium, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not reported as acts of rapacious conquest but as imperfect liberation, justifi ed by the myths of the ‘good war’ and the Cold War. The principal conveyer of these myths is that amorphous extension of the established order known as ‘the media’. While occasionally begging to differ on tactics and political personalities, journalists know, almost instinctively or by training, or both, the true nature of their tasks, especially when the established order appears to be threatened or goes to war. Societies are to be reported in terms of their threat or usefulness to ‘us’. Offi cial enemies are to be identifi ed and pursued.