Comment

When Mainstream Journalists Glimpse the Radical Perspective

John Theobald

Mainstream journalists are, with few exceptions, dismissive of the views of radical media critics. It has always been so. Reaction, when it is not simply disdainful silence, usually ranges from the patronising to the abusive. They are not surprisingly in denial about the 'tidal mendacity' (George Steiner's phrase) of modern journalism. A glance at mainstream journalists' responses to the critique of Media Lens (www.medialens.org) demonstrates this. But that is just today's example of an arrogance which stretches back more than a hundred years.

Such journalists will habitually maintain that they are doing a proper fourth estate job, defending citizens against the abuses of power, and even though some may be cynical, this is mostly not to the extent that they are wilfully doing a job and supporting a system with which they are in fundamental disagreement. They want to believe that a positive job can be done within the system, as it exists. They can cite examples where this is the case. Some may have reservations and be critical of specific abuses while still asserting their own integrity and faith that overall, journalism plays a valuable rather than a pernicious social role.

This is understandable. But there is still a tipping point into the unacceptable, and it is crossed on a daily basis by our mass media, since corruption of fourth estate ideals is inherent in the commercial structure and processes of media operations and normal everyday journalistic practice.

There can be no doubt, for instance, that, with the rare individual exception, mainstream war reporting, and specifically Iraq reporting today, is way beyond that tipping point. Any talk of media as watchdogs on power is here illusory. Any idea that publics are seeing images and hearing or reading reports and commentaries, which give anything like a fair and accurate view of what is actually happening there, is far wide of the mark. Iraq coverage is riddled with self-censorship, distortion, disinformation and omission, and for the most part, it is both undesired and virtually impossible for journalists to do what is commonly supposed to be their job. This may by now be a truism in critical circles, but it is worth repeating: the view we are being given of the Iraq situation is disastrously false. Reporters and editors if they are honest, know this, but in their practice continue to behave as if they don't. This is ethically inexcusable and has devastating consequences. Particularly in the USA and the UK, the countries most deeply involved in the invasion and occupation, events in which hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children have been killed, maimed, injured or bereaved on the orders of our leaders, in our name, are being seriously and knowingly misrepresented to us - citizens of supposedly democratic societies. We are not being given full information on which to base our judgements. We have been repeatedly lied to; by an inglorious coterie of politicians, spin doctors and, most significantly, journalists.

Why 'most significantly'? Because journalists are those who set themselves up as, and constantly claim to be, the watchdogs of democracy, the fourth estate whose most fundamental role is to challenge power and protect the public from the excesses of the powerful.

How do we know that journalists habitually lie and mislead? How can critics assert this with such certainty? Mostly by analysing journalistic texts and practice; partly by critical reading of alternative information that circulates on the Internet and in radical journals; partly through the work of a few trusted critical journalists and eye witnesses; partly from the by now massive evidence of previous wars and their reporting; but also, crucially, from admissions by mainstream journalists themselves. We shall return to them later.

Radical mass media critics, from Kraus and Tönnies a hundred years ago to the most recent vanguard of the last twenty years, provide a continuous, passionate and well-documented analysis of the world-changing venality of mass media practice. The case they make has been abused, rejected or simply neglected, but never satisfactorily refuted by a credible counterweight of argument or evidence.

Recently, John Pilger (New Statesman April 24th2006) has re-iterated that, in Iraq, journalism, as in all other wars in the media age, 'has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognised in the United States, Britain and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death…'.

This view has been acknowledged, albeit equivocally, in the Independent (June 21st 2006) and in the New York Times (August 24th 2005), although they admit only to passivity and a certain lack of backbone on the part of the mass media, not, as Pilger suggests, to active promotion of falsehood. The New York Times wrote retrospectively of its Iraq war reporting:

'We have found a number of instances of coverage that were not as rigorous as they should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims'.

And it added: 'If we had known what we know now, the invasion would have been stopped by a popular outcry'. As John Pilger commented:

'This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had not betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them'.

Pilger goes on to interpret this as 'journalistic servility to state power', but this does not go far enough. Global corporations, especially media corporations - the media-industrial complex - and their employees are the more powerful partner in their incestuous relationship with state power and governments. They have no reason to be servile. Bush and Blair are where they are because they are ready to tell and promote the lies and act in the interests of the real 'eminences grises' of war-making. Karl Kraus already understood this at the outbreak of war in 1914. John Dewey understood it when he described politics as 'the shadow cast by business over society'.

The Independent is as coy as the New York Times in its failure to expose who is really calling the tune. Featuring a new book by 85-year-old veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas, entitled 'Watchdogs of Democracy?' it quotes her as saying (showing her own gullibility after all those decades of professional practice): 'I ask myself every day why the media have become so complacent, complicit and gullible', completely failing to see the answer staring her in the face. Media workers are employed by organisations, which manifestly do not want them to 'follow the truth wherever it leads them', and if they do, apart from the odd token radical, they must fear for their prospects or lose their jobs. In general, honest journalists tend not to get employed by media corporations in the first place or if they do, they soon compromise and get sucked into the corporate culture. Media corporations, like all corporations, are not democratic institutions whose employees are free agents. They bear many of the hallmarks of dictatorships or oligarchies, demanding compliance and complicity, providing upward mobility for those who toe the company line, and fear of exclusion and marginalisation for those who do not. It is so much easier for mainstream journalists to conform and to become what their employers expect them to be. Only when firmly lodged in that frame do they start loudly proclaiming their freedom to say what they want.

Elsewhere in the same day's Independent is to be found the headline: 'How Ministers Dance to the Media's Tune'. It is a story picking up the statement by a senior police officer that the Home Office was pandering to media campaigns across a range of policy areas, and being dictated to by the tabloid agenda. The Independent reports angry government denials as Downing Street 'hit back' at such an outrageous suggestion, but the paper goes on to list seven recent examples of media campaigns having an impact on government policy-making. The paper here raises the fundamental issue of who is calling the tune, but then distracts from it by setting up a false conflict between 'government' and 'tabloids', in reality a minor family tiff, while ignoring the underlying dependency of government and state power on media corporations and their corporate friends - a subordination which neither governments nor media corporations wish to see exposed. In the Independent, therefore, the fairground shooting gallery replaces the real chase, and the real scandal of media corporate power is trivialised into a petty story that is here today and gone to-morrow.

Of greater interest was the recent television programme: 'Iraq, the Hidden Story' (Channel 4, May 9th 2006), fronted by Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow. Predictably consigned to a late night slot, this programme did ask some important questions about media coverage of Iraq. The hidden story of the programme's title was Iraq's reality, hidden from media audiences who were therefore gravely misled. It was also the concealed fact that 'on the spot' journalists in Iraq themselves see next to nothing of that country's reality. Not only do they not see it, but also they generally do not admit this, leaving us, the consumers, with the impression that they are doing their (self-perceived) best to provide an accurate portrayal in adverse circumstances (which may be true of some), and that what they present to us is an adequate, truly investigative and unfiltered account (which, the programme demonstrates, it manifestly is not).

Snow opens the programme with the statement that 'this remains one of the least well covered conflicts of the modern television age', asking 'why is it that we are so profoundly disconnected from the real Iraq?' In the light of what follows, his use of the word 'we' includes both Western journalists like himself, on the spot, and viewing publics back at home. It is already some admission from the front man of a major mainstream news programme, the person supposed to be connecting us with world events, but he persists a little later: 'Burnt out vehicles and bomb craters are the familiar images of television news. So why do we so rarely see the dead themselves, the torn and shattered human bodies?'

Robert Fisk of the Independent then provides one answer: 'No-one who would see what we see would ever, ever support a war again. So it's essential for governments that we shouldn't see these things', going on to say: 'I've believed for many years now that journalism, particularly television journalism, by its failure to show the real horror of war, has become a lethal weapon, supporting governments that want to go to war'. Fisk's view rightly points up the huge power and criminal failure of journalism, and its direct implication in mass death and destruction, but he nevertheless deflects the main blame onto governments who, as he sees it, use a supine journalism as a propaganda tool. What he omits, like Pilger earlier, is to indicate the power of the media-industrial complex behind government. What we have here is not so much governments and military - state power - manipulating the media, but media corporations, the journalists' employers, acting in their own interests and those of their corporate friends, who get governments and the military to do their dirty work.

Within this, actual journalists are mere glove puppets, or, as Tom Fenton, Former Foreign Correspondent of CBS News puts it in the programme:

'The news management in this war has been highly effective. Army and Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld especially realise that one of the most important aspects of this war is the public relations war. If you lose the country, if you lose your own civilian backup back home, back in America, back home in Britain, you've lost the war'.

Hence the immense frustration of any journalist with a remnant of the ideal of 'following the truth wherever it leads them'. In reality, this is just not their role. It is the opposite of what their employers actually require of them, which is to keep the truth from the people, while pretending to provide it. As Rageh Omah (formerly BBC, now Al Jazeera) tells the programme: 'When you're there, you can't do your job, or satisfy a sense in which you can believe that you're doing your job' or as Robert Fisk puts it:

'You end up by producing a false picture. You end up by supporting government versions of events. I mean, over and over again, I've read reports by journalists who've flown in armed American helicopters into the Green Zone, been given interviews and flown out again to the airport … and then fly off and say, you know, there's still hope in Iraq … '.

Or again, Jon Snow:

'The key question I'd like to be able to ask as a journalist is: "What are the underlying causes of the growing violence?" and "Is there already a state of civil war?" The answer is: "We don't know". We've got no way of getting to the grass roots… you see, that's the huge frustration. I know no more about it standing here in the middle of Baghdad than I do in London… We have a little bit of knowledge about bits and pieces. What there is very little of… is any real analysis or interpretation of events that we can relate to'.

In other words, these journalists are precisely where their employers, global corporations, governments and militaries (in that order) want them to be.

In his concluding remark, Jon Snow shows some understanding and professional self-knowledge that he is being cynically manipulated when he says:

'It's not inconvenient to the occupying forces that we see so little of it. My frustration is that, if told in full, and unsanitised, the reality of life and death in Iraq could radically effect perceptions in the outside world. Being here, it strikes me that among the most important people denied a full account of what's really going on here are those from the countries who are engaged in the occupation of Iraq. The question is whether, if they had such a full account, they would support what is being done in their name'.

This is valid comment as far as it goes, especially when you take into account the layers of real power behind the 'occupying forces' he mentions. But it is startling - no, mind-blowing - from the very person who is actually centrally responsible for the purveying of the sanitised, censored and criminally inadequate mainstream version of events in Iraq to the British public. When will the sane Dr Jekyll of one-off midnight viewing for insomniacs finally destroy the grotesque Mr Hide of the 7pm Channel 4 News?

It is a small positive sign when some mainstream journalists start to realise the depth of the corruption in which they are mired and professionally complicit, even if they originally became part of it out of noble motives. But it will take many more swallows than this to make a summer, and they will have to migrate a good way further from their nests if any real changes are to start taking place.

The central ideas in this piece are developed in more detail in the author's book 'The Media and the Making of History' (Ashgate, 2004).