'Churnalistic' Ethics

Speak truth to power? As if. All too often, the media act as an uncritical mouthpiece for whatever power has to say.

By Chris Ames
November 20, 2007 8:00 AM
Guardian

"Sometimes it seems like the Iraqi WMD fiasco never happened" was the very appealing pitch of the Media Workers against the War conference last Sunday. "Will we allow the media to be used to sex up the Iranian 'threat'?" was the pressing question that a host of leading journalists and others set out to answer. As Jonathan Powell admits that Iraq was about regime change all along, it's a good question.

Another good question is, should media workers be against war? Is it unrealistic to expect objectivity? Apparently, yes. But aren't we at least entitled to expect journalists to be against propaganda and suspicious of spin?

The title of the conference, The First Casualty, reflects the old truism that it's the truth that suffers first. The truth about Iraq, that it had by no means been "established beyond doubt" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, took a kicking long before the "shock and awe" rained down on Baghdad.

Propagandists for a war have two main objectives. The first is to convince people that their side is in the right, that the war is "just", if they started it. The second is to convince people that their side is winning. Between the two comes the imperative of minimising the bad press of collateral damage, as the unspeak has it, or civilian deaths. Our bombs are killing the right people.

Of course, collateral damage can itself be a weapon in the propaganda war and journalists are sometimes deliberately targeted. Don't like al-Jazeera? Bomb them. This is perhaps the most extreme example of the recurring theme of the conference: that there is a mainstream narrative, and that alternative narratives are driven to the margins.

Tony Benn opened with a vintage deconstruction of mainstream assumptions. He described lobby correspondents as "embedded", attending briefings where they are told what the government wants them to say. He has created a composite character, "Lord Button", who is always wheeled out to assert that the government bears no responsibility for anything that went wrong.

Benn also poked fun at some of the assumptions around language. The "international community" is always on our side, as is God. "Weapons of mass destruction" are things other countries have.

Peter Wilby was the editor of the New Statesman when I first noticed that the government's story about the origins of the September 2002 Iraq dossier didn't add up. His piece here is good summary of what he said: he spoke of "systemic failures" in the coverage of the Iraq war, but had himself written a sceptical leader on the week the dossier was released. As the government knew, "they might have WMD but we're not sure" is a bad headline. "Have the media learned nothing from Iraq?" Wilby asked. "I don't think so." Even the Guardian recently, he said, led with a dodgy story from unnamed US sources about Iran interfering in Iraq.

Following Wilby, acadamic Sami Ramadani argued that the media does what it does not because of a conspiracy but because its editors are from the establishment. He stuck to this when invited by a questioner to say that the media is really controlled by Zionists.

Of course, most people at the conference thought an attack on Iran would be a bad idea. But the Iraqi WMD fiasco is an acknowledged problem for those who think action should be taken to prevent Iran getting the bomb.

A retired USAF colonel recently criticised Tony Blair for letting "political storytellers" like Alastair Campbell have so much influence in presenting the case for war. "Because of disillusion with the war, policy-makers will not find the public ready to believe them even if they're telling the truth; that's the lasting damage of letting the storytellers take charge," Sam Gardiner told an audience at the University of Strathclyde.

Part of the problem, of course, is that some journalists were actually for the Iraq war, while others were happy to be fed stories. Kamal Ahmed, formerly of the pro-war Observer, was never quite hungry for the truth but knew which side his bread was buttered. Ahmed was famously not accused in Nick Davies' book, Flat Earth News, of helping Alastair Campbell with the (really) dodgy dossier.

Davies was at the closing session, "Making a difference - towards a critical media", and stole the whole show with his engaging style. He described what happened at the Observer as "a model of manipulation", including what he called a "bollocks" story from David Rose and Ed Vulliamy linking the 2001 Capitol Hill anthrax letters to Saddam. Luckily for Rose, he got his mea culpa in first with a piece in the New Statesman.

Davies' main point was that what happened over Iraq was part of a bigger problem. With each reporter now filling three times as much space as 20 years ago, they have become passive processors of "churnalism", in a context where every limb of the state now has its own spin doctors.

Andrew Gilligan was inserted in the session late to sex it up with a bit of stand-up. He added to Davies' critique a contention that journalists fail to do basic checks that could expose stories as baloney. He cited a Sunday Telegraph piece about Saddam's belly dancers of death. It's not in the writers' interest to do these checks - as in never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Another complaint from Gilligan was that official sources have become arbiters of stories. As he said on Wednesday in the Press Gazette, what journalists want is for other journalists to pick up on their stories. By denying a story, an official source can make sure it doesn't get picked up, thereby killing it stone dead.

Gilligan, too, is a good performer, as he demonstrated in a cracking interview in my film, "Who wrote the Iraq dossier?", now viewable here. In his Press Gazette piece, Gilligan pointed out that he had not been against the Iraq war.

A useful reminder that you don't have to be against something to dig a little deeper.