Gaza: Humanitarian situation worst since 19675 Mar 2008The humanitarian situation in Gaza is worse now than it’s been at any time since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967, according to a new report published today (6 March) by a coalition of leading humanitarian and human rights organisations. The weekend’s upsurge in violence and human misery underlines the urgency of this report. In their new joint report, the coalition – comprising Amnesty International, CARE International UK, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Mdecins du Monde UK, Oxfam, Save The Children UK and Trcaire – warns that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is a collective punishment of the entire Gazan civilian population of 1.5 million. The report concludes that the Israeli government’s policy of blockade is unacceptable, illegal and fails to deliver security for Palestinians and Israelis alike. Geoffrey Dennis, Chief Executive of CARE International UK said: ‘The recent escalation in violence, both from rocket attacks and military strikes, will make life even more unbearable in Gaza. Unemployment has soared and 80% of people in Gaza are now dependent on food aid compared to 63% in 2006. Water and sewage infrastructure is on the point of total collapse. Unless the blockade ends now, it will be impossible to pull Gaza back from the brink of this disaster and any hopes for peace in the region will be dashed.’ According to the report, the blockade of Gaza has dramatically worsened levels of poverty and unemployment and has led to deterioration in education and health services. Over 1.1 million people are now dependent on food aid and of 110,000 workers previously employed in the private sector, 75,000 workers have now lost their jobs. Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said: ‘Israel has the right and obligation to protect its citizens, but as the occupying power in Gaza it also has a legal duty to ensure that Gazans have access to food, clean water, electricity and medical care. Punishing the entire Gazan population by denying them these basic human rights is utterly indefensible. The current situation is man-made and must be reversed.’ The coalition’s 16 page report, ‘The Gaza Strip: A humanitarian implosion’, urges the UK government and EU to press for a new strategy for Gaza. In particular, the report calls on the UK government to: Exert greater pressure on the Israeli government to open the crossings into Gaza and stop fuel and electricity cuts in order to stem the worsening humanitarian crisis. Help facilitate a process of Palestinian reconciliation that can lead to a credible and effective peace process with Israel. Abandon the failed policy of non-engagement and begin negotiations with all Palestinian parties, including Hamas. The report calls on the Israeli Government and Palestinian armed groups to immediately cease all attacks against civilians. All unlawful attacks must stop: the Government of Israel should put an immediate end to disproportionate attacks in Gaza and Palestinian armed groups should immediately stop indiscriminate rocket attacks into southern Israel. Christian Aid’s Director, Daleep Mukarji, said: ‘The UK government should acknowledge that a new strategy is needed for Gaza. The current policy does not secure vital security for Israeli citizens, and even if it did the blockade policy would still be unacceptable and illegal. Humanitarian aid can help stave off total collapse but it will not provide a long-term solution. Gaza cannot become a partner for peace unless Israel, Fatah and the Quartet engage with Hamas and give the people of Gaza a future.’ Read the full report here (.pdf).
Britain?s Media Fashions its ?Warrior Prince?5 Mar 2008Rarely has the servility of the British media been given such free and full expression. The dispatch of Prince Harry?third in line to the British throne after his father, Charles, and elder brother, William?to Afghanistan?s Helmand province was as naked a piece of political propaganda as could be imagined. Orchestrated by the Ministry of Defence (MOD), it was carried out with the compliance of every single newspaper and TV channel in the UK. All the major news outlets throughout the world were also part of the conspiracy to deceive the public, with both CNN and Reuters publicly admitting their complicity. When the story finally broke, it did so only as a result of an article published in an Australian magazine, New Idea, whose editors said they were unaware of the worldwide media embargo. It was then the subject of a short article in the German daily tabloid Berliner Kurier and finally made known to a wider audience when it was picked up by the right-wing Internet news-aggregator site, the Drudge Report, on February 28. The agreement to conceal Harry?s posting was brokered during three meetings of 30 to 40 media representatives and top brass in the army between September and December. The media accepted a collective blackout until after Prince Harry?s tour of duty was due to end in April, in return for access to a pre-deployment interview and several ?embeds? being placed with the Blues and Royals Household Cavalry regiment, who would pool interviews, video footage and photographs. The prince would even be brought home on a Friday for the convenience of daily and Sunday newspapers. When the story broke, newspapers across the political spectrum published?without seeming embarrassment?a statement by Gen. Richard Dannatt, head of the British Army, praising the British media for their ?highly responsible attitude.? Only some news sources felt obliged to justify their actions in lying to their readers and viewers. Jon Williams, world news editor of Britain?s state broadcaster, the BBC, said that as ?journalism is about telling people things they don?t know,? not doing so ?was something we thought long and hard about.? The BBC?s explanation for doing so was that ?A news black-out is unusual, but not unique? and was carried out to ?minimise the danger? to Harry and other troops fighting alongside of him and in return for being allowed to film ?up close and personal with him? in Helmand. The same line was repeated by Britain?s two nominally liberal broadsheets. Feigning Olympian detachment, the Independent did not feature the story on its front page. Its deputy editor-in-chief, Ian Birre, told Reuters that ?We don?t share our rivals? incredible fascination with every aspect of the royal family?s lives,? adding that he did not see ?a problem at all? with the news blackout. The Guardian did not publish its own comment on February 29, running instead an opinion by Bob Satchwell, the executive director of the Society of Editors, who played a key role in arranging the deal alongside Neil Wallis of Rupert Murdoch?s ?sex and sleaze? scandal sheet, the News of the World, and the right-wing Mail on Sunday editor, Peter Wright. This piece added to the justification for censoring the news, the claim that it merely facilitated the wishes of a prince ?desperate to join his army colleagues in the front line,? army chiefs who ?wanted him to go to war like any other young officer? and a family that ?wanted him to fulfil his ambitions too.? Only on March 1, amidst much criticism from its readers, did the Guardian explain that the danger to Prince Harry and ?the luckless soldiers around him? had determined its actions, especially when there was ?no overriding public interest? in reporting his posting. ?If exposing his posting would have brought peace in Afghanistan even infinitesimally closer, the judgment would have been different,? it continued. All such efforts to rationalise the media?s actions are hollow. If the issue was Harry?s safety and that of his fellow soldiers, how was this facilitated by having reporters and cameramen follow him around Helmand, supposedly only hundreds of metres away from the front line? And can anyone seriously believe that a royal heir is simply another young soldier who should be allowed to do his duty, just like ?one of us?? Everyone who participated in the effort to send Harry to Afghanistan was well aware that they were offering their publications up as a direct propaganda tool of the MOD. In the first instance, there was the agreement to conceal what was happening. Contrary to the claim by Jon Williams that ?there are no other ?voluntary agreements? in place at the moment, there?s nothing else we?re not telling you,? cover-ups happen all the time. The elaborate arrangements over Harry were only made necessary because it was considered impossible to issue a Defence Advisory (DA) notice barring reporting, given that no serious claim could be made of a threat to national security. DA Notices, more popularly known as D Notices, have been repeatedly issued to conceal Britain?s dirty war secrets?most recently against ex-SAS officer Ben Griffin who has alleged direct British collusion with rendition and who was silenced amidst the reporting of Harry?s exploits in Afghanistan. It should be noted that, while DA Notices are not legally enforceable, the media almost universally complies. It is the exposure of how fully the media is at the beck and call of the armed forces, the government and the Royal Family that prompted one of the few genuine expressions of outrage from a major mainstream journalist, Jon Snow. The presenter of Channel 4 news wrote in his blog praising the Drudge Report for ending the ?British media?s conspiracy of silence.? ?One wonders whether viewers, readers and listeners will ever want to trust media bosses again,? he continued, a statement for which he was savaged by sections of the press. Secondly there is the willing participation in the actual propaganda campaign mounted by the MOD, in support of a war that most people in Britain do not believe should be fought and utilising the newly dubbed ?warrior prince? to do so. The efforts to get Harry to Afghanistan followed the decision in May last year not to send him to Iraq for fear of his being targeted for assassination. This was viewed by the military as a major setback. An insight into the reaction was provided by military historian Peter Caddick-Adams in a contemporary article for the BBC on ?the long history of royal service in wars.? ?In some eyes this will be seen as caving-in to insurgent threats to kidnap or target the prince,? he wrote. ?In a wider context this may be seen as a break with a long tradition of British royals serving in the military in war zones. Both Harry?s uncle, Prince Andrew, who served in the Falklands as a helicopter pilot, and his grandfather, Prince Philip, who was decorated during World War II for his service with the Royal Navy, faced very real danger in different combat zones. ?Prince Harry?s great uncle, King George VI?s brother, the Duke of Kent, joined the RAF and was killed while flying in 1942. A more distant ancestor, Prince Maurice of Battenberg, a grandson of Queen Victoria, was killed near Mons in 1914 as an officer in the King?s Royal Rifle Corps. ?Some scholars argue that it is the very proximity of the royal family to danger?sharing the suffering of their subjects and soldiers?that has won great respect for the institution of monarchy…. It is indeed a shame that politics has got in the way of this young man?s aspirations to serve his country and follow the tradition of military service that almost every generation of British royals has followed.? The Army, the Brown government and House of Windsor were determined that, this time, politics would not ?get in the way? of efforts to popularise and legitimise the Afghan war?using Prince Harry as a royal ?Action Man.? One can only give a sense of the torrent of bloodthirsty jingoism and patriotic drivel that has been heaped upon the British people by the media in the days since the Harry story broke: page after page of photos of Harry on patrol, in a tank, firing a machine gun, washing his socks in a camp sink and eating curry with the Ghurkhas. The Daily Mirror?s coverage was fairly typical. ?Prince Harry has been battling the Taliban on the front line by calling in air strikes using a surveillance system known as Kill TV…. [O]n New Year?s Eve Harry used it to oversee his first bomb strike.? Under the headline, ?Prince Harry in Afghanistan: Fearless Harry?s frontline battlecry,? another Mirror article read: ?His hands expertly grip the machine gun, his face a mask of steely determination as he homes in on his target.? ?Prince Harry, 23, looks like a battle-hardened veteran as he sits surrounded by sandbags and with a box of ammo at his feet to fire on Taliban fighters 650 yards away. And with nerves of steel he declared: ?It?s just no-man?s-land. They poke their heads up and that?s it.? ? Finally,? the Mirror opines, ?we have a prince with a purpose. His mother would have been hugely proud of him?and so should we…. Not many members of the royal family can claim to be ?one of us.? Harry can.? Taped interviews reveal a very limited man, someone previously known for a propensity for alcohol and cannabis and dressing in Nazi regalia, who is being used by others far savvier. ?All my wishes have come true,? he says. ?I haven?t really had a shower for four days. I haven?t washed my clothes for a week. It?s very nice to be sort of a normal person for once, I think it?s about as normal as I?m going to get.? Speaking of the Queen, who made clear how anxious she was for Harry to see active service, he adds, ?I have told my grandmother?she actually told me. She told me I?m off to Afghanistan so that was the way it was supposed to be.? Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the paper?s former editor and biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore, had no compunction about admitting what was really at stake in sending Harry to Helmand. In his unabashed support for the operation, he provides a damning indictment of the role played by the British media in the sordid affair. Noting that George Galloway MP ?has accused the BBC of being part of the ?war effort,? ? he stated, ?Would that this were more often so!... Leave it to the Taliban Broadcasting Corporation (if their fundamentalism permits such a thing to exist) to put their case.? ?Something important was at stake here. It was not the fulfilment of Prince Harry?s personal desire to fight…. [O]ne young man?s longing to be a good soldier is not a big enough reason for so much upheaval. What matters much more is the symbolism.? That ?symbolism? is regarding the Royal Family as the embodiment of Britain?s imperial ambitions and a mechanism for suppressing dissent through the whipping up of patriotism. ?The Royal Family should try to be with the nation for the difficult bits,? Moore continued. ?The Queen understood this so strongly 25 years ago that she made sure her own son risked his life. By Prince Harry?s account this week, she did the same with her grandson…. Some may argue that this is a very controversial war, and therefore it is dangerous for the Royal Family to be associated with it…. But it is all the more important to stand by the Army when the politics are rough.? The Guardian has tried to minimise the impact of its complicity in the media blackout, blandly stating, ?The army may try to use Harry?s tour of duty to win popularity for the Afghan mission,? while ?the royals may hope the war will lend legitimacy to the prince.? It then asserts, ?While the prince was serving in Afghanistan, his role could not be safely debated. Now he is returning, it must be.? By their actions, the Guardian?s editors and those of their counterparts stand hopelessly compromised. They have forfeited any right to posture as leaders of such a debate.
Spanish Practices5 Mar 2008The decision by the Spanish magistrate that judge, Balthazar Garzon, cannot bring the case for extradition of the two UK residents, Jamil el-Banna and Omar Deghayes, should end the weeks of uncertainty the two men and their families have endured since proceedings started when they returned to Britain in December, after more than five years of illegal detention and torture by the US in Guantánamo. It is excellent that the case has been dropped, but the true reason behind the collapse of the case should be known. In a substantive court hearing in the UK for extradition, which was to have been heard in May before Judge Timothy Workman, the conduct of the Spanish government would have appeared extremely poor. Lawyers for the two men had indicated that they would bring up in court the involvement of spanish intelligence agents in interrogations of them in Guantánamo Bay, overflights of Spain in renditions, and other matters. The judge is leaning on the documents reporting the men’s fragile health as the reason for his decision, thus saving face for Spain, and for himself. In Guantánamo Bay prison, Spanish security services interrogated these two men, and several others. One of these other men willingly left Guantánamo for Spain to face a court hearing. He was freed by a Spanish court, which found no evidence against him. El-Banna and Deghayes, who had also, in desperation, signed papers in Guantánamo agreeing to be transferred to Spain, were then forgotten again in the US prison. Their Washington lawyer met repeatedly with the Spanish ambassador and asked him to extradite them to Spain – where they would at least have a trial. But Spain did nothing, for years – until Judge Garzon produced his extradition warrant while the men were in the air. But why should the valuable time and resources of British police and judiciary be spent on satisfying the whim of a Spanish judge over people who had already examined exhaustively by the US and British security services and found to pose no security threat to us or to our allies, including Spain? The innocence of the men will probably not be acknowledged publicly. It should be, if they are to rebuild their lives after the years of horror. The men and their families have suffered unbearably in this long saga, and Britain has plenty to be ashamed of. British complicity in the rendition of el-Banna from the Gambia to Afghanistan, and then to Guantánamo Bay, is in the public domain and shames us all. The British government is well aware that lawyers for these men were pressing successive home secretaries to seek their release and return to the UK for the last five years. Only in August last year did the government of Gordon Brown make this request to the Americans. It is time for the British government to make the smallest of amends to these men by giving them, and their wives, the security of British passports. That’s probably as close to an apology, and to acknowledging the men’s innocence, as we will see.
The Rising Women’s Liberation Movement in the Radical 1960s5 Mar 2008It is hard to imagine just how different the world was for women before the 1960s. When my mum got married she had to leave her job in a bank. It was assumed that her husband would keep her and she would look after the home. This was not unusual ? in many jobs, including the entire civil service, married women were not employed. It was difficult for a woman to get a mortgage or even buy something on hire purchase without a man?s guarantee. These were the days before the pill. Sex before marriage was seen as shameful and if a single woman got pregnant it was devastating. Abortion was illegal and many women risked their lives going to the backstreet, or were forced to give their baby up for adoption. The radical political movements of the 1960s blew apart this repressive and stifled world. The gains women made then ? legal abortion, easier divorce, freedom to express our sexuality and the principle of equal pay ? changed the lives of millions. The Women?s Liberation Movement (WLM) was born in the US among students radicalised by the mass black civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. In Britain the WLM developed from the struggles of women workers for equal pay. The two movements had different characteristics but both were rooted in the effect of the long post war economic boom. This had pulled increasing numbers of women into the workforce and into further education. For example between 1960 and 1965 there was a 57 percent increase in women being awarded degrees in the US (the same figure for men rose by 25 percent). Suddenly a whole generation of women had new expectations. The universities of the US became centres of struggle and debate. By 1967 thousands of women had been on marches and protests. They had fought for black civil rights, opposed the war in Vietnam and challenged the state. Yet they faced sexism in their own political organisations and felt sidelined and trivialised by the mainly male leadership. It seems shocking that such brilliant radical movements did not take women?s rights seriously. But when the movements exploded in the 1960s they did so in a vacuum. The socialist tradition had been decimated by the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. There was no Labour type party or revolutionary left to speak of. The shadow cast by the experience of Stalinism made many feel that socialism had nothing to do with liberation. Women activists began to organise their own workshops, write papers and talk about their oppression. The movement in the US was dominated by the idea that women had to organise separately. Meetings often involved women talking about their personal lives ? a process described as ?consciousness raising?. Groups, dominated by college educated middle class women, spread to cities all over the US. But although it was never a truly mass movement in terms of numbers and activity it did articulate the dashed hopes and frustration of millions of women. In Britain the experience of the women?s movement was shaped by the greater influence of the left and class politics here. The presence of a Labour Party, the higher density of trade union membership, and an organised revolutionary left made a difference. It meant that there was an understanding of the socialist tradition of fighting for women?s rights. These influences ensured the demands of the British WLM reflected the needs of working class women ? free abortion and contraception, equal educational and job opportunities, free 24 hour nurseries and equal pay. Strikes of women workers like the London office cleaners were seen as very much part of the movement. But there were problems. Ideas about women needing to organise separately divided the movement. In fact bitter experience showed there was nothing inevitably ?sisterly? or democratic about women-only organisations. By the mid 1970s the high point of the WLM on both sides of the Atlantic had passed. Groups fragmented over questions of sexuality, race and issues such as national liberation and imperialism. Yet the world had changed. For the first time women could control their fertility. Millions of women were gaining a level of economic independence that gave them new choices. The struggle for women?s liberation and equality had made massive strides but the movement disintegrated. Next week I will look at why.
Flat Earth News – the Inside View (Part Two)5 Mar 2008Churnalism And The Propaganda Model To be clear, there is much of merit in Flat Earth News – the book is well worth reading. Davies describes, for example, how all was not well in the Observer newsroom in the autumn of 2002. The newspaper?s correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, had been talking with Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA analyst. Despite leaving the agency, Goodman retained his high security clearance and remained in communication with senior former colleagues. Goodman told Vulliamy that, in contradiction to everything the British and American governments were claiming, the CIA were reporting that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, Goodman was willing to go on the record as a named source. It was an incredibly important scoop but the Observer refused to publish it. Over the next four months, Vulliamy submitted seven versions of the story for publication – his editors rejected every one of them. (pp.329-331) In January 2003, the Observer?s then editor, Roger Alton, told his staff: ?We?ve got to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans.? (p.350) In support of this stance, the Observer‘s David Rose echoed government propaganda on Iraq?s alleged connections with al-Qaeda – a performance that ended with a humbling apology from Rose in 2004. He described how his trust in official sources had been “misplaced and nave… I look back with shame and disbelief?. (p.334) Other people paid the price. Eleven days after Vulliamy?s story was rejected for the seventh time in March 2003, the first bombs fell on Baghdad. In September 2006, the Evening Standard reported that Alton had been on ?something of a lads? holiday? in the Alps. Alton?s companions included Jonathan Powell, ?Tony Blair’s most trusted aide?, and staunch Blairite MP and propagandist Denis MacShane. (Gideon Spanier, ?In the air,? Evening Standard, September 6, 2006) Most recently, we learned that Alton ?is understood to be in talks to replace Simon Kelner as editor of the Independent?. (Stephen Brook, ?Alton in talks about Independent role,? The Guardian, March 4, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/04/theindependent.independentne…) It should come as no surprise: ?Kelner and Alton are known to be friends; in December Kelner gave a speech at Alton’s birthday party, attended by many Fleet Street editors, a few weeks before he left the Observer.? One wonders how even the compliant souls of the liberal press can bear it. We know, indeed, that some of them cannot. But occasional nuggets should be set apart from Davies?s analysis of the media system as a whole. What, then, is his ?no-holds-barred? critique of the press? In the Guardian, he described how he commissioned research which surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. 80% of the stories were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. They also found that facts had been thoroughly checked in only 12% of the stories. Davies commented: ?The implication of those two findings is truly alarming. Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda.? (Davies, ?Our media have become mass producers of distortion,? The Guardian, February 4, 2008) The researchers found that the average Fleet Street journalist is now filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985: ?Generally, they don’t find their own stories, or check their content, because they simply don’t have the time.? In his book, Davies emphasises that journalists ?are no longer out gathering news but… are reduced instead to passive processors of whatever material comes their way, churning out stories, whether real event or PR artifice, important or trivial, true or false?. (p.59) This is what Davies calls ?churnalism? – this is his central focus. Writing in the Guardian, Peter Wilby indicated the basic sound bite used to summarise the Flat Earth News thesis: ?The main reason why you read so little decent journalism, he argues, is simple: hacks don’t have time to do it.? (Wilby, op., cit) Tim Luckhurst wrote in the Independent: ?At the root of the problem lies commercial pressure, but not the ideological pressure blamed by Marxist academics anxious to portray the press as an establishment conspiracy. Davies blames the more insidious influence of media conglomerates that prefer profit to political influence and pare editorial staff to the bone to achieve it.? (Luckhurst, ?Hard truths for the trade in ?Flat Earth News?,? The Independent, February 10, 2008) By contrast, Edward Herman – an ?outsider? and surely one of Luckhurst?s ?Marxist academics? – here reflects on the origins of the propaganda model, which is primarily his work: ?We had long been impressed with the regularity with which the media operate within restricted assumptions, depend heavily and uncritically on elite information sources, and participate in propaganda campaigns helpful to elite interests. In trying to explain why they do this we looked for structural factors as the only possible root of systematic behaviour and performance patterns.? (Herman, ?The propaganda model revisited,? Monthly Review, July 1996) It is in this analysis of ?structural factors? that Herman and Chomsky depart from Davies?s analysis. Herman explains: ?The crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment. The media are also dependent on government and major business firms as information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations, and frequently overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other corporate businesses. ?Government and large non-media business firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack. The media are also constrained by the dominant ideology, which heavily featured anticommunism before and during the Cold War era, and was mobilized often to prevent the media from criticizing attacks on small states labelled communist. ?These factors are linked together, reflecting the multi-levelled capability of powerful business and government entities and collectives (e.g., the Business Roundtable; U.S. Chamber of Commerce; industry lobbies and front groups) to exert power over the flow of information.? (Herman, Ibid) There is much more in Herman and Chomsky?s book, as there is in Davies?s, but we are here in a different world of insight and rationality. And yet, unlike Flat Earth News, Herman and Chomsky?s Manufacturing Consent does not exist for the mainstream media. Lexis-Nexis records a single review of the book over the last 20 years – a two-paragraph review totalling 147 words that appeared in the Guardian in December 1989, a year after publication. The Rules Of Production – 1-5 In Chapter 4, The Rules of Production, Davies provides a list of ten ?rules? that superficially appear to resemble the list of five filters offered by Herman and Chomsky. Davies?s rules are divided under two sections: 1-5 ?Cutting the costs? and 6-10 ?Increasing the Revenue?. The emphasis is on the selection of low cost, ?safe? facts and ideas that avoid ?electric fences?, and yet literally no mention is made of the advertisers who provide 75% of a ?quality? newspaper?s revenue. As we have seen, earlier in the book Davies discusses the influence of advertising in the context of an implausible conspiracy theory. Davies also comments on interference from owners and advertisers: ?Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference.? (p.22) Advertiser responsibility for Flat Earth News, he claims, is ?not only negligible but a distraction from what is really going wrong?. (p.15) Davies explains the basis for his low figure, apparently plucked from the air: ?there certainly are examples of corporations pulling their advertising in order to try to have an impact on the political or general editorial line of a media outlet – but there is a real shortage of examples of their succeeding?. (p.14) Again, this is a red herring. It is clear that newspapers are not primarily in the business of selling a product to readers – they are in the business of selling wealthy audiences to advertisers. It is not just ?that stories should increase readership or audience? – they should sell the right readership to the right advertisers. This is not an apolitical stance. This marketplace naturally favours facts, ideas, values and aspirations that are popular with elite audiences, elite advertisers and elite journalists. What Davies describes as ?safe? stories are stories which interest wealthy audiences without alienating advertisers. The problem is not just that advertisers might directly pressure a newspaper – for example, by pulling its advertising – but that newspapers have no choice but to provide a supportive environment in order to attract these sponsors. In 2004, we wrote to Nick Taylor, editor of the Guardian?s Spark magazine. We asked: ?was not Spark itself originally conceived as a vehicle for major advertising? Surely the needs and preferences of advertisers were central considerations in deciding the format and focus of the magazine?. Taylor replied: “Your point is valid. But certainly not unique to my product. ?Ever worked on a magazine launch? The first and only real questions are: who will advertise with in product / Will it be read by people whom advertisers want to reach? ?Readers/viewers/listeners are the most important thing to any publisher or broadcaster. But, from an economic point of view, primarily because high numbers of readers means high ad revenue. And media survive only through ads.? (Taylor, email to Media Lens, April 6, 2004) These pressures have shaped, not just the layout and structure of individual titles, but the whole structure of the British press. Media analysts James Curran and Jean Seaton describe how the industrialisation of the press brought ?a progressive transfer of power from the working class to wealthy businessmen, while dependence on advertising encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press and stunted its subsequent development before the First World War?. (Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility – The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Routledge, 1991, p.47) The effect on national radical papers that ?failed to meet the requirements of advertisers? was dramatic: ?They either closed down; accommodated to advertising pressure by moving up-market; stayed in a small audience ghetto with manageable losses; or accepted an alternative source of institutional patronage.? (Ibid, p.43) Davies also downplays the significance of owner interference, which he describes, curiously, as ?the other widespread conspiracy theory? (p.15): ?Almost all of the old patriarchs who personally owned and abused newspapers have sold out to corporations, whose primary purpose is not propaganda. Their primary purpose simply and uncontroversially is to make money.? (p.16) This last comment is breathtaking. Anyone who knows anything about the political history of the last century in Britain and the United States knows that the primary purpose of much propaganda is precisely ?to make money?. Davies does discuss the cynical relationship between the public relations industry and the media, but this is only one small component of state-corporate manipulation of society. Historian Elizabeth Fones-Wolf notes that the growth in workers’ power during the 1940s and 1950s was a major factor in shaping elite US policy, leading to a fierce business backlash intended to contain US public opinion. The campaign was immense in scale, involving all the leading business organisations, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Committee for Economic Development, the National Association of Manufacturers and many industry-specific bodies. Fones-Wolf commented: “Manufacturers orchestrated multimillion dollar public relations campaigns that relied on newspapers, magazines, radio, and later television, to re-educate the public in the principles and benefits of the American economic system… employers sought to undermine unionism and address shop-floor conflict by building a separate company identity or company consciousness among their employees. This involved convincing workers to identify their social, economic, and political well-being with that of their specific employer and more broadly with the free enterprise system.” (Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise – The Business Assault on Labour and Liberalism, 1945-60, University of Illinois Press, 1994, p.6) The press has never been an ideologically neutral, solely profit-oriented system in this “everlasting battle for the minds of men? – it has always been a key propaganda weapon for corporate power. And we should not imagine that this struggle is at an end. Elite interests remain determined to shape public opinion, to limit the perceived range of conceivable options in their interests, and the media system is still a prime means for achieving these goals. In other words, the result of hundreds of years of political struggle for corporate control against popular interference has resulted in a situation where it is simply understood that certain facts, ideas, values and aspirations are acceptable while others are not. Wealthy individual owners and parent corporations have selected senior managers and editors who understand this, and who select journalists – company men like Davies – who perceive the architecture of the media as ideologically neutral rather than the product of political struggle. Davies?s analysis is so flawed, such a symptom of the problem he has failed to perceive, because he is able to ask in all seriousness: ?Why would a profession lose touch with its primary function? Why would truth-telling disintegrate into the mass production of ignorance?? (p.45) Truth-telling has never been the primary function of Davies?s profession. Even the idea of ?professional journalism? is a fraud. As media analyst Robert McChesney notes it is no coincidence that the notion of professionalism appeared just as corporations achieved an unprecedented stranglehold at the beginning of the 20th century: “Savvy publishers understood that they needed to have their journalism appear neutral and unbiased, notions entirely foreign to the journalism of the era of the Founding Fathers, or their businesses would be far less profitable.” (McChesney, in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw – Leading Journalists Expose The Myth Of A Free Press, Prometheus Books, 2002, p.367) Wealthy owners could thereby claim that editors and reporters were freed from external influence by trained, professional judgement. This allowed the corporate media monopoly to be presented as a ?neutral? service to democracy. The claim, McChesney notes, was “entirely bogus”. By contrast, Davies endlessly reiterates his faith in the essential neutrality of his profession: ?If the primary purpose of journalism is to tell the truth, then it follows that the primary function of journalists must be to check and to reject whatever is not true.? (p.51) We can perhaps imagine a critical military officer observing: ?If the primary purpose of an army is national defence, then…? This is the view of a professional divorced from the political reality out of which he and his army has emerged. Imagine, after all, if the military officer were speaking of the German Wehrmacht in 1939, or of the Soviet Red Army. Imagine if Davies were a Soviet journalist. Davies reassures us that there is more than just ?churnalism?: ?it is possible that as much as 20% of Fleet Street?s work is still being produced entirely by independent journalists?. (p.95) But how is a corporate employee in any sense ?independent?? Davies writes: ?the evidence I found in researching my new book, Flat Earth News, suggests our tendency to recycle ignorance is far worse than it was?. (Guardian, op., cit) This nave idea that the corporate media merely ?recycle ignorance? goes to the heart of Davies?s analysis. We sent Noam Chomsky a link to Davies?s Guardian article. Chomsky responded: ?Judging by the article, which is all I’ve seen, his inquiry into the media is complementary to ours. He’s writing about how local stories about children’s squabbles are insufficiently sourced. We are investigating systematic bias in selecting and framing news and opinion, and tracing it to
its institutional source. For the story about the children, insiders’ reports are appropriate. For inquiry into any of the topics that Ed [Herman] and I discussed in MC [Manufacturing Consent], or elsewhere jointly or separately, it’s at most worth some footnotes. On the WMD, there’s no disagreement about what happened, and essentially nothing to unearth. The media uncritically accepted government propaganda, with some scattered exceptions. Furthermore, as we’ve shown, that’s routine. It’s not a matter of a ?tendency to recycle ignorance,? transparently. If that were so, we’d expect reliance on the state to be randomly interspersed among cases of reliance on its enemies and independent sources. I don’t think anyone with a gray cell functioning would claim that. And if they did, it would be very quickly refuted. ?So I don’t really see any conflict. Just different topics. And it is not in the least surprising that this is the kind of critique that the media and intellectuals would be happy to discuss, praise, or denounce, because it leaves untouched their systematic behavior and the institutional reasons for it. I’d have expected the same in the old Soviet Union. Noam? (Email to Media Lens, February 17, 2008) Give Them What They Want? 6-10 Davies?s focus on the relative innocence of corporate profit-making leads him to even greater extremes in his second five ?Rules of production?. We are asked to believe that newspapers are motivated to maximise profits by succeeding in a competition to give readers what they want. Again, there is no mention here of the direct and indirect influence of advertising. Davies?s summary of how his rules ?fit neatly into the new structure of corporate news organisations? again presents the media as an ideologically neutral bystander just trying to make a buck: ?Journalists who are denied the time to work effectively can survive by taking the easy, sexy stories which everybody else is running; reducing them to simplified events; framing them with safe ideas and safe facts; neutralising them with balance; and churning them out fast.? (p.147) Nevertheless, there is hope: ?There are still reporters who have the time to do their work effectively, and it is still possible to break the rules of production.? (p.149) But it is almost impossible to break the rules of production because the entire system is the result of an ongoing struggle to organise society in a way that favours powerful interests. It is not enough for reporters to have the time. These are reporters like Davies who have succeeded precisely because they do not fundamentally challenge the system. And this is why Davies?s book has been so eagerly embraced by the corporate media it claims to expose. He is willing to expose failings in the media system – including the rotten apples at the Observer – but he is not willing to expose the fundamental corruption of a corporate media system operating within corporate capitalist society. As an answer to the question of ?What is to be done?? Davies has nothing serious to offer: an ?imaginary world? in which a parallel news organisation would monitor global press honesty; Annual Flat Earth News awards; and an initiative to ?force media owners to provide decent levels of staffing; resurrect the network of front-line reporters which once covered the country and indeed the globe…?. (p.393) Davies notes that, according to a recently retired officer, MI6 runs an intelligence section which has particularly close links to the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and the Financial Times. (p.231) The former UN arms inspector, Scott Ritter, reports MI6 propaganda specialists declaring that they could spread their material through ?editors and writers who work with us from time to time?. (p.231) If the media, and Davies, were serious about putting an end to Flat Earth News, they would surely begin with suggestions for identifying and stamping out this kind of crude corruption. Conclusion Davies?s underlying message is an old one and it all but guarantees a sense of hopelessness. It is, to borrow the words of PR guru Walter Lippmmann, that the important work of media analysis and reform is the domain of the “responsible men,” who must “live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd”. This is the general public, the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” whose “function” is to be “spectators,” not ?participants?. (http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16522) Flat Earth News invites us to focus on staffing levels, on a lack of journalistic time and resources. It invites us to tinker at the edges of a system which in fact is rotten to the core. Or rather it invites ?insiders? to address these issues. But authentic reform of hierarchical, exploitative social systems – of which the corporate mass media is a classic example – has only ever been achieved by democratic pressure from outside. Perhaps in years to come, Flat Earth News will be seen as part of the corporate media?s response to the growing clamour from internet-based ?meddlesome outsiders?. With increasing effectiveness, these are demanding that anyone with compassion for suffering, anyone required to witness the appalling impact of corporate media bias, is, in fact, an ?insider?. 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Flat Earth News: The Inside View (Part 1?)4 Mar 2008Swallowing The Kennel Nick Davies?s latest book, Flat Earth News, is a ?no-holds-barred assault on the British media,? according to Michael Savage writing in the Independent. (Savage, ?Kamal Ahmed: ?Nick is a coward?. Ahmed bites back,? The Independent, February 11, 2008) In the same newspaper, Stephen Glover declared: ?There can be no more serious allegations against journalists than those made by Mr Davies.? The book, he added, ?is gold dust?. (Glover, ?Damning allegations that, if true, bring disgrace upon ‘The Observer’,? The Independent, February 4, 2008) In the Observer, Mary Riddell commented: ?Dog does not eat dog. This, as Nick Davies says, is an old Fleet Street convention. His latest book is ‘a brazen attempt to break that rule’. It is a task that Davies more than fulfils, swallowing the leash and kennel for good measure.? (Riddell, ‘Failures of the Fourth Estate,’ The Observer, February 3, 2008) These ought to be shocking comments. If Davies?s book really does swallow the kennel, then he has succeeded in bucking a trend that has lasted more than 100 years. For the fact is that, over this time, genuine no-holds-barred assaults on the media have been ignored by those media. And Flat Earth News has certainly not been ignored. Sometimes several mentions, commentaries, reviews and extracts have appeared in the same papers and magazines, including: the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Independent on Sunday, the Times, the Telegraph, the New Statesman, the Spectator, and across the BBC. To be sure, there has been severe criticism – mostly that the book goes too far and is tainted by personal animosity. Riddell, for example, urged caution: ?Many of Davies’s arguments are powerful and timely, if unduly pessimistic. British papers, for all their faults, have much left to commend them.? Peter Preston, former editor of the Guardian, was discomfited by the tone: ?rather too quickly, the tone grows shrill and devoid of humour?. (Preston, ?Journalism: Damaged limitations: Hold the front page: the news machine is in a mess,? The Guardian, February 9, 2008) We have not found one suggestion in any review or commentary that Davies did not go nearly far enough. Inside/Outside – The ?Guardian Man? Before we take a look at Davies?s media critique, it?s worth considering the premises that underlie his work. In one refreshing passage in the book, he dismisses the media?s groundless claim to objectivity: ?The great blockbuster myth of modern journalism is objectivity, the idea that a good newspaper or broadcaster simply collects and reproduces the objective truth. It is a classic Flat Earth tale, widely believed and devoid of reality. It has never happened and never will happen because it cannot happen. Reality exists objectively, but any attempt to record the truth about it always and everywhere necessarily involves selection…? (p.111) As Davies says, judgements are not optional; they are inevitable: to use ?this headline, this intro, this language, while rejecting others? reflects a judgement. And yet Flat Earth News is based on its own ?blockbuster myth?: namely, that honest media criticism is best restricted to arguments and testimony provided by media ?insiders?. Davies is himself an ?insider?, of course, as he proudly tells us in the prologue: ?I?m a Guardian man. I?ve read the paper since I was fourteen. I?ve worked for it for years and, when I came up with this project, the editor, Alan Rusbridger, agreed to support me while I pursued it.? (p.4) Imagine the author of an expose on the arms industry declaring: ?I?m a BAE Systems man. I?ve worked for it for years and, when I came up with the idea for this project, the chief executive, Mike Turner, agreed to support me while I pursue it.? Davies makes the obvious point: ?It needs to be said that never at any stage has anybody from the Guardian tried to impose any kind of restriction or requirement on what I have written…? (p.4) But even Davies?s own editor exposed the extreme naivety of that assurance back in 2000: ?If you ask anybody who works in newspapers, they will quite rightly say, ?Rupert Murdoch,? or whoever, ?never tells me what to write,? which is beside the point: they don’t have to be told what to write.? (Alan Rusbridger, interview with David Edwards, December 22, 2000; http://www.medialens.org/articles/the_articles/articles_2001/de_Rusbridg…) The focus on overt interference is a liberal herring. The real issue is the extent to which corporate values are simply internalised by executives selected to work for major corporations. What kind of internalisation of values do we have in mind? The kind that would lead someone to feel comfortable declaring themselves a ?Guardian man? in the prologue of a book intended as a ?no-holds-barred assault on the British media?. Noam who? The “Outsiders” If ?outsiders? have reservations about the merit of reliance on corporate ?insiders?, Davies has none. After all, he tells us, ?a lot of media critics are outsiders who recycle evidence from other outsiders and often develop theories which simply don?t catch the reality of what goes on inside newsrooms?. (p.13) Davies makes the claim repeatedly but is unwilling to put a single name to a single one of these recycled theories. We asked Davies why he failed to mention two notable media critics: ?Why didn’t you mention Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model? I would think this is the key argument you’d want to accept or challenge in discussing media propaganda. It’s an awesome piece of work, surely the starting point for any serious analysis of the kind you’ve presented. Have you read Manufacturing Consent?? (Email to Davies, February 16, 2008) Davies replied: ?If there’s any strength in the book, it’s because it’s written by an insider with the off-the-record assistance of a mass of other insiders, all using our own first-hand experience of what really goes on inside newsrooms to try to explain how it is that we produce so much falsehood, distortion and propaganda. I used outside/ academic sources for some factual material (the research which I commissioned from Cardiff being the biggest example) but I didn’t look to outsiders for analytical material, because I felt the insider’s analysis was what was valuable here. I’ve read some Chomsky and been to see him speak live, and I think he’s the bravest intellectual on the planet, but, for the reasons I’ve explained, I wouldn’t look to him on a project of this kind. I hope that makes sense.? (February 16) And so Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky?s deeply insightful analysis – produced over decades in books like Manufacturing Consent, Necessary Illusions, The Political Economy of Human Rights, and so on – is just blanked. By the same logic, a historian could presume to analyse the Vietnam War only if he or she had fought in the war and/or served in the upper echelons of the US and Vietnamese governments. We must assume, for example, that it would not be possible for a historian to gain meaningful insights from other involved sources. But in reality, Davies does not just ignore ?outsiders?; he also ignores ?insiders?. John Pilger, for example, who praised the book highly, is mentioned only in passing in a couple of sentences. Despite being one of the most astute and experienced journalists and film-makers, the only reference to Pilger?s media criticism is his praise for the book itself! Likewise Robert Fisk, mentioned once. So, too, any number of radical US media ?insiders?. Pilger has declared Herman and Chomsky?s Manufacturing Consent nothing less than the ?Greatest book of the twentieth century?. But this ?insider? support for ?outsider? analysis is not allowed to count. The far less well-known award-winning US journalist Gary Webb is mentioned. As we have described elsewhere, Webb exposed serious CIA and US government corruption. By way of a reward, his reputation and career were terminated by elite media and government smears (Webb subsequently committed suicide). Davies is happy to quote Webb, an ?insider?, but not on his media analysis. And yet in the same chapter from the book cited by Davies, Into The Buzzsaw, Webb wrote: “In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking under rocks. I didn’t get any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn’t work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as I could tell. It encouraged enterprise. It rewarded muckracking.” And then: ?... I wrote some stories that made me realise how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.” (Webb, ?The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On,? in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw – Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Prometheus, 2002, pp.296-7) Why is the support of ?insiders? like Pilger, Fisk and Webb for the views of ?outsiders? like Chomsky ignored by Davies? Davies?s explanation for his approach, after all, is that he preferred to depend on the ?insider? view. But it seems he simply chose to exclude some of the most powerful media criticism from the discussion. Davies does refer to ?outsider? media analysis, which he describes as ?conspiracy theories which are attractive but heavily overstated?. (p.14) He explains: ?So, for example, there is a popular theory that mass-media coverage is orchestrated or at least fundamentally restricted in order to win the favour of corporate advertisers. To an outsider?s eye, this is very tempting: these advertisers have money, the media outlets need the money, so they must be vulnerable to some kind of pressure from the advertisers to describe the world in a way which suits their interests. It?s a fine theory, particularly favoured by left-wing radicals, but its truth is very limited?. (p.14) But it is not a ?fine theory?; it is a straw man of Davies?s invention. Moreover, we cannot think of a single serious media analyst who would subscribe to it. What rational person, after all, would accept that media performance – which must include consistent media support for the US-UK governments’ lies on Iraq, Kosovo, Iran and so on – is explained by a conspiracy to satisfy advertisers? Are we to believe this nonsensical notion is ?tempting? to ?an outsider?s eye? because they lack experience of a newsroom? We asked Davies to clarify: ?Which ?popular theory? do you have in mind? Who are the authors, please?? Davies replied: ?It?s ?a popular theory?, ie one that is believed by many people. I would think it is one that must have been investigated or promoted by quite a few authors, but I?m not trying to make a link to that kind of written origin, so I can?t really help you on that. Good luck, Nick? (February 16) The clarification on ?popular? was helpful. But why is Davies ?not trying to make a link to that kind of written origin?? If the ?outsiders?, as well as the ?insiders? agreeing with them, are excluded from the analysis, why would Davies not at least identify the ?popular theory? proposed by ?left-wing radicals?? In reality, of course, the world is not awash with popular theories on media control – we can think of only one that is widely discussed (outside the mainstream, at least), and that is not exactly common currency. Are we to believe that Davies does not in fact have in mind ?the propaganda model of media control? co-authored by the man he views as ?the bravest intellectual on the planet?? Could it be that Davies is really so ignorant of Herman and Chomsky?s work? Whatever the explanation, this remarkable omission is a classic example of exactly the kind of Flat Earth coverage Davies is supposed to be exposing: the leading radical media analysis is declared ?flat? (conspiracy-based) when in fact it is ?round? (based on a rational analysis of market forces). Perhaps this should be called a Cheese Moon Omission. For clarification, we turned to former New Statesman editor Peter Wilby, who had written in Media Guardian: ?As an explanation of why most news outlets reflect the worldview of the rich and powerful, fewer journalists producing more copy, plus more PRs offering more instant ?stories?, sounds banal. But it is more significant than the conspiratorial pressures from owners and advertisers that most outsiders claim to detect. PR, far more than journalism, shapes the news agenda.? (Wilby, ?Campbell’s media critique is only half the story,? The Guardian, February 4, 2008) It certainly sounds banal but this really is Davies?s focus. Davies even invented a buzzword, ?churnalism?, to help the churnalists churn out his message. We wrote to Wilby (February 5): ?Can you identify the ?outsiders? who are suggesting that conspiratorial pressures from owners and advertisers account for media servility to powerful interests? Specifically, can you point to examples where have they proposed a conspiracy?? Wilby replied: ?Herman and Chomsky get pretty close to conspiratorial pressures.? (February 5) We responded: ?They truly and honestly don’t; it’s much more sophisticated than that. This is a key quote: “?We do not use any kind of ‘conspiracy’ hypothesis to explain mass media performance. Our treatment is much closer to a ‘free market’ analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces.?? Wilby replied: ?OK, I take your strictures on Herman/Chomsky, though they do refer to ?withdrawal of advertising?.? We have a lot of respect for Wilby – he is a rare glimmer of light in the otherwise all-consuming darkness that is Media Guardian – so it is all the more surprising that he should be so ill-informed about such an important media critique. Playing Fair – The Two Rules With ?outsiders? excluded, their powerful theories misrepresented to the point of absurdity, Davies states the ?rules? by which he intends to proceed. In doing so, he unwittingly reveals the fundamental problem with ?insider? media analysis. The first rule: ?I know a fair bit about sex and drugs and hypocrisy in Fleet Street: executives whose papers support the war against drugs while shoving cocaine up their nostrils in the office toilets.? (p.3) Most of Fleet Street knows of one very senior executive in particular that Davies doubtless has in mind (so do we, and so do the editors of Private Eye who published a cryptic reference), but the public isn?t allowed to know. Why? ?I think we shouldn?t be writing about anybody?s private life at all unless there is some really powerful public need to known about it; and second, because I don?t want to be beaten up by former colleagues who might reasonably complain that I were betraying their confidence.? (p.3) There is a “powerful public need to know” that a senior executive was caught shoving cocaine up his nostrils by office cleaners, obviously, but the people in a position to expose him have somehow managed to perceive no such need. Why? The fact is that professionals are trusted to serve the interests of the organisation, and indeed the industry, employing them. When a journalist indicates that he or she is willing to cause serious harm and embarrassment, the unspoken bond of ?professional? trust is broken and he or she is no longer welcome. It is the same in every industry – one does not need to be an ?insider? to understand how it works. An even more serious admission is made in Davies?s second ?rule?: ?It wouldn?t have been fair to target the media outlets for whom I?ve worked just because I had an inside track on the way they behave. Equally, it certainly wouldn?t have been right to ignore them or favour them. So, I set out to research the media in exactly the same way that I would research any subject. That applies, in particular, to the Guardian.? (pp.3-4) In the very next line, as noted above, Davies comments, ?I am a Guardian man,? noting that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger ?agreed to support? him while he wrote the book. Imagine if Davies had been writing for Pravda during the 1979-1989 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – an assault which may have cost the lives of a million Afghan civilians. As we know, Pravda was deeply complicit in facilitating the criminality of that invasion. Imagine if, with the Soviet occupation ongoing, Davies had commented that it ?wouldn?t have been fair to target the media outlets for whom I?ve worked just because I had an inside track on the way they behave?. How much moral weight would Davies?s principle of employee ?fairness? carry alongside the moral obligation to expose complicity in crimes that have cost hundreds of thousands of lives? Ahead of the Iraq invasion, the British liberal media, the Guardian very much included, really did play a role comparable to that performed by Pravda. (See our Media Alert co-authored with Nikolai Lanine: ?Invasion – A Comparison of Soviet and Western Media Performance,?; http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/071120_invasion_a_comparison.php) But in our society it is deemed almost unthinkable that a journalist would sacrifice that most sacred idol – The Career – to some higher ethical cause. As physicist and science journal editor Jeff Schmidt has pointed out, this ethical alienation is built into the very idea of ?professionalism?: ?Professionalism ? in particular the notion that experts should confine themselves to their ?legitimate professional concerns? and not ?politicise? their work ? helps keep individual professionals in line by encouraging them to view their narrow technical orientation as a virtue, a sign of objectivity rather than of subordination. This doesn?t mean that experts are forbidden to let independent political thoughts cross their minds. They can do so as citizens, of course, and they can even do so as experts, but then only in the ?proper? places and in the ?proper? way.? (Schmidt, Disciplined Minds, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, p.204) UN diplomats like Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck may choose the path of career oblivion for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by sanctions. But journalists persuade themselves that the ?Gentleman?s agreements? of Fleet Street are sacrosanct. Davies, after all, opens his book with the words: ?Dog doesn?t eat dog. That?s always been the rule in Fleet Street.? (p.1) That indeed is the rule. Davies, of course, insists that he does eat media meat in his book, but as his own ?rules? suggest, there is much for which he does not have the stomach – he is, after all, an ?insider? and is proud to be a ?Guardian man?. And this is why it is so wrong to try to persuade us that ?insiders? working as part of deeply immoral economic systems are best placed to offer honest criticism of those systems. When those ?insiders? then publish their criticism within the system – while clearly intending to maintain their high status – then scepticism is demanded of the reader. Which is not to say the scepticism is necessarily justified – the proof of the pudding remains in the eating. Part 2 will follow shortly… ——————————————- The Media Lens book ?Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media? by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in 2006. John Pilger described it as: ?The most important book about journalism I can remember.? For further details, including reviews, interviews and extracts, please click here:
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To blame the victims for this killing spree defies both morality and sense4 Mar 2008The attempt by western politicians and media to present this week’s carnage in the Gaza Strip as a legitimate act of Israeli self-defence – or at best the latest phase of a wearisome conflict between two somehow equivalent sides – has reached Alice-in-Wonderland proportions. Since Israel’s deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, issued his chilling warning last week that Palestinians faced a “holocaust” if they continued to fire home-made rockets into Israel, the balance sheet of suffering has become ever clearer. More than 120 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces in the past week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. During the same period, three Israelis were killed, two of whom were soldiers taking part in the attacks. So what was the response of the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, to this horrific killing spree? It was to blame the “numerous civilian casualties” on the week’s “significant rise” in Palestinian rocket attacks “and the Israeli response”, condemn the firing of rockets as “terrorist acts” and defend Israel’s right to self-defence “in accordance with international law”. But of course it has been nothing of the kind – any more than has been Israel’s 40-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, its continued expansion of settlements or its refusal to allow the return of expelled refugees. Nor is the past week’s one-sided burden of casualties and misery anything new, but the gap is certainly getting wider. After the election of Hamas two years ago, Israel – backed by the US and the European Union – imposed a punitive economic blockade, which has hardened over the past months into a full-scale siege of the Gaza Strip, including fuel, electricity and essential supplies. Since January’s mass breakout across the Egyptian border signalled that collective punishment wouldn’t work, Israel has opted for military escalation. What that means on the ground can be seen from the fact that at the height of the intifada, from 2000 to 2005, four Palestinians were killed for every Israeli; in 2006 it was 30; last year the ratio was 40 to one. In the three months since the US-sponsored Middle East peace conference at Annapolis, 323 Palestinians have been killed compared with seven Israelis, two of whom were civilians. But the US and Europe’s response is to blame the principal victims for a crisis it has underwritten at every stage. In interviews with Palestinian leaders over the past few days, BBC presenters have insisted that Palestinian rockets have been the “starting point” of the violence, as if the occupation itself did not exist. In the West Bank, from which no rockets are currently fired and where the US-backed administration of Mahmoud Abbas maintains a ceasefire, there have been 480 Israeli military attacks over the past three months and 26 Palestinians killed. By contrast, the rockets from Gaza which are supposed to be the justification for the latest Israeli onslaught have killed a total of 14 people over seven years. Like any other people, the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation – or to self-defence – whether they choose to exercise it or not. In spite of Israel’s disengagement in 2005, Gaza remains occupied territory, both legally and in reality. It is the world’s largest open-air prison, with land, sea and air access controlled by Israel, which carries out military operations at will. Palestinians may differ about the tactics of resistance, but the dominant view (if not that of Abbas) has long been that without some armed pressure, their negotiating hand will inevitably be weaker. And while it might be objected that the rockets are indiscriminate, that is not an easy argument for Israel to make, given its appalling record of civilian casualties in both the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. The truth is that Hamas’s control of Gaza is the direct result of the US refusal to accept the Palestinians’ democratic choice in 2006 and its covert attempt to overthrow the elected administration by force through its Fatah placeman Muhammad Dahlan. As confirmed by secret documents leaked to the US magazine Vanity Fair – and also passed to the Guardian – George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Elliott Abrams, the US deputy national security adviser (of Iran-Contra fame), funnelled cash, weapons and instructions to Dahlan, partly through Arab intermediaries such as Jordan and Egypt, in an effort to provoke a Palestinian civil war. As evidence of the military buildup emerged, Hamas moved to forestall the US plan with its own takeover of Gaza last June. David Wurmser, who resigned as Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser the following month, argues: “What happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.” Yesterday, Rice attempted to defend the failed US attempt to reverse the results of the Palestinian elections by pointing to Iran’s support for Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel’s attacks on Gaza are expected to resume once she has left the region, even if no one believes they will stop the rockets. Some in the Israeli government hope that they can nevertheless weaken Hamas as a prelude to pushing Gaza into Egypt’s unwilling arms; others hope to bring Abbas and his entourage back to Gaza after they have crushed Hamas, perhaps with a transitional international force to save the Palestinian president’s face. Neither looks a serious option, not least because Hamas cannot be crushed by force, even with the bloodbath that some envisage. The third, commonsense option, backed by 64% of Israelis, is to take up Hamas’s offer – repeated by its leader Khalid Mish’al at the weekend – and negotiate a truce. It’s a move that now attracts not only left-leaning Israeli politicians such as Yossi Beilin, but also a growing number of rightwing establishment figures, including Ariel Sharon’s former security adviser Giora Eiland, the former Mossad boss Efraim Halevy, and the ex-defence minister Shaul Mofaz. The US, however, is resolutely opposed to negotiating with what it has long branded a terrorist organisation – or allowing anyone else to do so, including other Palestinians. As the leaked American papers confirm, Rice effectively instructed Abbas to “collapse” the joint Hamas-Fatah national unity government agreed in Mecca early last year, a decision carried out after Hamas’s pre-emptive takeover. But for the Palestinians, national unity is an absolute necessity if they are to have any chance of escaping a world of walled cantons, checkpoints, ethnically segregated roads, dispossession and humiliation. What else can Israel do to stop the rockets, its supporters ask. The answer could not be more obvious: end the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and negotiate a just settlement for the Palestinian refugees, ethnically cleansed 60 years ago – who, with their families, make up the majority of Gaza’s 1.5 million people. All the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, accept that as the basis for a permanent settlement or indefinite end of armed conflict. In the meantime, agree a truce, exchange prisoners and lift the blockade. Israelis increasingly seem to get it – but the grim reality appears to be that a lot more blood is going to have to flow before it’s accepted in Washington.
Labour Government Gags ?Extraordinary Renditions? Whistleblower3 Mar 2008Last Friday, the Labour government took out a high court injunction to prevent a former member of the British Special Air Services, Ben Griffin, from revealing further details about the government?s involvement in ?extraordinary rendition? The US administration coined the term to cover the practice of sending arrested terrorist suspects to dozens of detention facilities where torture is often carried out. Ever since reports of rendition and torture began to surface after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001, the British government has adamantly denied any knowledge or collaboration with these activities. In his last public address before the gagging order came into force, Griffin told an antiwar rally, ?I will be continuing to collect evidence and opinion on British involvement in extraordinary rendition, torture, secret detentions, extra-judicial detention, use of evidence gained through torture, breaches of the Geneva Conventions, breaches of International Law and failure to abide by our obligations as per UN Convention Against Torture. I am carrying on regardless.? He called for former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his successor Gordon Brown to face trial for breaking international law. Griffin served in the army for eight years, including a three-month tour in Baghdad working on secret joint operations with US Special Forces. He quit in 2005 because he believed the war was illegal and aimed at seizing control of the natural resources in the region. He is strongly opposed to the tactics being employed by US occupation forces, including indiscriminate detention of people, a trigger-happy mentality among soldiers and routine torture of prisoners that is advocated through the chain of command. Although he had not witnessed torture first-hand, Griffin said, ?I have no doubt in my mind that non-combatants I personally detained were handed over to the Americans and subsequently tortured.? The secret joint US-UK task force within which he was posted was ?responsible for the detention of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals in Afghanistan and Iraq.? He added: ?British soldiers are intimately involved in the actions of this task force. Jack Straw, Margaret Beckett, David Miliband, Geoff Hoon, Des Browne, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown?in their respective positions over the last five years they must know that British soldiers have been operating within this joint US/UK task force. They must have been briefed on the actions of this unit.? The gagging order was placed under the Official Secrets Act, which has been used repeatedly since the war began to silence critics of the occupations within the civil service and armed forces on grounds of ?national security.? If he makes further disclosures relating to renditions that implicate government ministers in war crimes, he could face a jail sentence. The Foreign Office refused to comment on the allegations on the grounds that statements are never released on the activities of Special Forces soldiers. When allegations about the government?s involvement in extraordinary rendition first surfaced in December 2005, Blair told the press, ?I have absolutely no evidence to suggest that anything illegal has been happening here at all, and I am not going to start ordering inquiries into this, that and the next thing, when I have got no evidence to show whether this is right or not. And I honestly, it is like all this stuff about camps in Europe or something, I don?t know, I have never heard of such a thing, I can?t tell you whether such a thing exists.? And again, in March 2007, Blair assured an intelligence and security committee that ?he was satisfied that the US had at no time since 9/11 rendered an individual through the UK or through our Overseas Territories.? This position became increasingly untenable as leaks from individuals within the armed forces, such as those from Griffin and former United States Army General Barry McCaffrey, as well as numerous civil servants, conflicted with official government denials. Responding to allegations that Britain was co-operating with renditions to the UK protectorate of Diego Garcia, an Indian ocean island that is leased to the US as an air base for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, then-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said in September 2003, ?The United States Government have explicitly assured us that there have never been any prisoners in detention on any US vessels moored in Diego Garcia waters. The British Government are satisfied that this is correct.? In December 2006, McCaffrey revealed that he knew of renditions to the base. He said of suspected terrorists, ?They?re behind bars, they?re dead, they?re apprehended. We?ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram Airfield, in Guantanamo.? According to a report from the civil rights group Statewatch, ?Diego Garcia has been the subject of repeated, credible and concurrent claims that the island has played a major role in the US system of renditions and secret detention.? The mounting evidence culminated in the government being forced to make limited admissions, whilst attempting to distance itself as far as possible from the US practice of renditions and torture. A carefully worded statement to parliament on February 21 by Foreign Secretary David Miliband said that Britain had recently been made aware of two US extraordinary rendition flights, which had stopped at Diego Garcia in 2002 to refuel. Miliband said, ?Contrary to earlier explicit assurances that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights, recent US investigations have now revealed two occasions, both in 2002, when this had in fact occurred. An error in the earlier US records search meant that these cases did not come to light.? He went on to spell out that the US and UK policy on counter-terrorism will continue as before: ?Our counter-terrorism relationship with the United States is vital to UK security. I am absolutely clear that there must and will continue to be the strongest possible intelligence and counter-terrorism relationship with the US, consistent with UK law and our international obligations.? It was Miliband?s evasions and denials about UK involvement in rendition that prompted Griffin to issue a statement a few days later. He pointed out that the government always talks about rendition as purely the process of flying detainees to a foreign country in the hope of deflecting attention away from the British Army?s vital role in the first stages of the process in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said the Diego Garcia admission ?pales into insignificance in light of the fact that it has been British soldiers detaining the victims of extraordinary rendition in the first place.? ?Since the invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001 UKSF [United Kingdom Special Forces] has operated within a joint US/UK Task Force. This Task Force has been responsible for the detention of hundreds if not thousands of individuals in Afghanistan and Iraq. Individuals detained by British soldiers within this Task Force have ended up in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, Bagram Theatre Internment Facility, Balad Special Forces Base, Camp Nama BIAP and Abu Ghraib Prison.? ?Whilst the government has stated its desire that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp be closed, it has remained silent over these other secretive prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. These secretive prisons are part of a global network in which individuals face torture and are held indefinitely without charge. All of this is in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions, International Law and the UN Convention Against Torture.? Griffin detailed human rights abuses at Camp Nama at Baghdad International Airport in 2004, where individuals captured by the US/UK Task Force were detained and torture was carried out that was ?systematic and sanctioned through the chain of command.? He also relates a story he was told by two soldiers that torture was carried out using partial asphyxiation and cattle prods. Numerous human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, which has obtained damning firsthand evidence about abuses in secret detention facilities, have corroborated Griffin?s statements on abuse of detainees. Witnesses relate that the use of torture, including prolonged sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, beatings and humiliating treatment were widespread and sanctioned by commanding officers. Soldiers who objected to the treatment of prisoners were lectured on the exceptional circumstances of the ?war on terror.? The latest gagging order follows a series of similar cases where the government has forcibly silenced critics of its ?war on terror? policy. Civil servant David Keogh and political researcher Leo O?Connor were jailed last year?for six months and three months, respectively?after being convicted of leaking a secret government memo from 2003, alleged to contain minutes of a meeting between then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush in which the latter reportedly advocated bombing Al Jazeera?s headquarters in Qatar. The growing body of evidence exposing the crimes of detention without trial and a global network of prison camps has also implicated countries other than the UK and US. Statewatch obtained a document in 2005 that confirmed the European Union (EU) had agreed to rendition flights in CIA planes as part of a wider programme of joint security operations with the Bush administration in 2003. In a recent report from the European Parliament on the alleged use of European countries for the illegal transport and detention of prisoners by the CIA, the EU Rapporteur Claudio Fava said, ?Many governments co-operated passively or actively (with the CIA). They knew.? According to the report, more than 1,000 CIA-operated flights used European airspace between 2001 and 2005. It also states that detention facilities may be located at US military bases in Europe and that some EU members turned a blind eye to flights operated by the CIA being used for extraordinary rendition or the illegal transportation of detainees. The report mentions 21 well-documented cases of extraordinary rendition in which rendition victims were transferred through a European country or were residents in a European state at the time of their kidnapping. The national governments specifically criticised for their unwillingness to co-operate with investigations were those of Austria, Italy, Poland, Portugal and the UK. Amnesty International has previously reported on more than 1,000 flights linked to the CIA, many of which used European airspace. President George W. Bush stated in September 2006 that ?alternative procedures? were necessary to deal with the new threat of global terrorism. Thanks to the courage and conviction of those like Ben Griffin, we now know more of the substance that lies behind those ominous words. The global network of CIA ?black sites? that have been established under the pretext of the ?war on terror? are being used to suppress growing opposition to the imperialist aims of the United States to control the natural resources of the Middle East and Central Asia. According to the US Congress, up to 14,000 people may have been victims of rendition and secret detention since 2001.
Twenty Years at the Margins3 Mar 2008The Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model, 1988-2008 2008 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. This comment briefly assesses how the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model (PM) has been received within the field of media and communication studies in the United Kingdom. Britain has a proud record of media and communication scholars adopting a critical/structuralist approach to media analysis, addressing key issues such as bias, ideology, ownership, power, etc. Such a framework infused two readers, Mass Communication and Society and Culture, Society and the Media, published in 1976 and 1982 respectively, and the Media, Culture and Society journal, launched in 1979. It also underpinned the work of the Glasgow University Media Group, which put out a number of publications in the 1980s. Therefore, it seems reasonable to surmise that the PM would have found a natural home within this political economy tradition. However, this has not been the case. Herman and Chomsky sought to explain the behaviour and performance of the mass media in the United States (US) by advancing and empirically testing a number of hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that the propaganda system only works effectively where there is consensus amongst the elite, specifically the government, plus the leaders of the corporate and media sectors. Herman argued that where the elite are united in their concern about an issue, and where the general public is apathetic or ignorant, the media would effectively serve elite interests. A similar thesis was advanced by Ferguson, who argued that where the major investors in political parties agree on an issue, the parties will not compete on that issue, no matter how strongly the public might want an alternative. Conversely, Herman and Chomsky conceded that the propaganda system doesn’t work as efficiently when there is dissensus; where the elite disagree over a particular issue, such division will be reflected in the media coverage of that issue in a way that opens up space for dissent. In this situation, the media, and critical voices within and without it, can influence the policy process rather than just reflect elite interests. Indeed, the political contest model put forward by Wolfsfeld (The Media and Political Conflict, 1997) and the policy-media interaction model advanced by Robinson (‘Theorising the Influence of Media on World Politics: Models of Media Influence on Foreign Policy’, European Journal of Communication, 2001) suggest that the media may play an active rather than merely passive role in elite policy formation. The second hypothesis is that in capitalist, liberal-democratic regimes, such as the US, where the mass media is under corporate rather than state control, media coverage is shaped by what is, in effect, a ‘guided market system’ underpinned by five filters – the operative principles of the PM. In their own words: ‘Money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalise dissent and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their message across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news “filters”, fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by governments, business and “experts” funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) “flak” as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) “anti-communism” as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premise of discourse and interpretation, and the definitions of what is newsworthy in the first place (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 2). The third hypothesis relates to the way in which the PM will be received within academia and wider society. As Chomsky explained in Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies: ‘The model also makes second-order predictions about how media performance will be discussed and evaluated. And it makes third-order predictions about the reactions to studies of media performance. The general prediction, at each level, is that what enters the mainstream will support the needs of established power’ (1989:153). Since its publication in 1988, the PM has received very little attention within the field of media and communication studies, the wider social sciences or society more generally, as Herman and Chomsky predicted. Those who did engage with the PM were overwhelmingly negative, again as predicted. Such criticisms, emanating from a variety of sources on the left and right of the political spectrum, included the notion that the PM presented a conspiratorial view of the media, that it overstated the power of the propaganda system and downplayed popular opposition to elite preferences, that it was deterministic, functionalist and simplistic, that it neglected of impact of journalistic professionalism, that it was overly ambitious, projecting a ‘total’ and ‘finalising’ perspective, and that, in the post-Cold War period, given the redundancy of anti-communism, it too is obsolete. Furthermore, one scholar questioned whether the PM supported or opposed liberal principles, whether those involved in the propaganda system were conscious of its operation and effects, and whether, by deploying notions such as ‘brainwashing under freedom’ and ‘thought control’, the PM was indeed concerned with media effects rather than just media behaviour and performance. Since its publication, several scholars have presented evidence in support of the central hypotheses of the PM. However, as predicted, this work has received very little attention. Furthermore, although they did not utilise the PM, a number of other scholars in Britain and the US concurred that the mass media tended to manufacture consent for elite preferences, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy. Again, this work was marginalised. While the PM has been applied within the Canadian and US contexts, and while a number of scholars have alluded to its explanatory potential in terms of the British media, there has been no attempt to empirically test the PM within the British context. Indeed, one critic questioned whether it could be applied in countries with very different media systems and political structures. These criticisms, which were rebutted by Herman and Klaehn, are little more than obfuscation, for none of these critics, some of whom used to work within the political economy tradition, have actually addressed or engaged with the operative principles of the PM, its predications nor the vast amount of empirical, supportive data presented by Herman and Chomsky. Why is this? First, scholars neglect the PM, and the work of Herman and Chomsky more generally, because they are seen as ‘outsiders’ to the discipline; consequently they are not considered to be ‘legitimate’ analysts within the field of media and communication studies. Second, Chomsky in particular has been regularly smeared by his opponents as an apologist for totalitarian regimes and a ‘self-hating Jew’. Consequently many scholars avoid such a seemingly ‘controversial’ figure. Third, following the ‘cultural turn’ in media and communication studies in the 1980s and 1990s, with its focus on culture, discourse and identity, there has been a move away from empirical and political economy-based studies of the media, of which the PM is exemplary. Fourth, the PM challenges the mainstream consensus. That the PM should be ignored by liberals and those on the centre-left should come as no surprise; after all, the model, or more specifically its predictions and the wealth of empirical evidence that support these, effectively demolish their worldview of how the media and political systems operate. What is more surprising is how many academics on the left, who probably claim to be empirical social scientists, have also neglected the PM and its radical implications for the operation of the mass media in contemporary capitalist societies. The practical implications of such marginalisation are lamentable. Media and communication students are often not exposed to the PM as it rarely features in mainstream textbooks and seldom appears in the curricula of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Likewise, media and communication scholars do not engage in debates about the PM in their journals or at their conferences. The result has been twenty years at the margins; a devastating indictment of the state of academia given that the PM is, as Chomsky argued, one of the most tested models in the social sciences.
Balfour?s Deceit3 Mar 2008Michael Makovsky?s study of Churchill?s views on Palestine is a work of immense labour. Its documentation reveals a lot. Consistency was not Churchill?s strong point. He advocated a Jewish homeland as far back as in 1906. If in 1915 Lloyd George advocated grabbing Palestine ?owing to the prestige it would give us?, Churchill scribbled to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey ?Palestine must be given to Christian, liberal and now noble Belgium?. Makovsky?s researches fully establish Balfour?s deceit: ?The definition of ?national home? was left intentionally ambiguous. The Zionists purposely used the term ?home? in Basle in 1897, so as not to provoke the Gentiles, but had made conflicting statements since then about whether they intended a state or not. Weizmann considered development of a state a slow process, which certainly would have been necessary for the Jews to become a majority in Palestine. (At the time of the Declaration, there were estimated to be 50,000-65,000 Jews out of a total population of 700,000). Balfour told the War Cabinet on October 31, 1917, that ?national home? meant an entity under British or American protectorate which permitted the Jews to ?build up? a real centre of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter of gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution?. With ?centre?, he borrowed the vague term which Herbert Samuel employed in 1915. Balfour did not commit to a definition in public, but privately confided in 1918. ?My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state.? The British press mostly understood the Declaration as promising a Jewish state.? Curzon was right after all. But, as Balfour minuted on August 6, 1919, ?I am an ardent Zionist.? (Documents, page 330). The Documents confirm the evidence of deceit. Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, a pro-Zionist political officer in the British military administration in Palestine, warned Curzon on September 26, 1919: ?The people of Palestine are not at present in a fit state to be told openly that the establishment of Zionism in Palestine is the policy to which H.M.G., America and France are committed. They certainly do not realise this fact.? (Documents, page 472).
Balfour himself was more candid in a talk with Justice Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Felix Frankfurter, who became a judge in the court later. Both were Zionist activists. They met in Paris on June 24, 1919, when Balfour referred to the King-Crane Commission of Inquiry set up by President Woodrow Wilson in order to ascertain what ?the people [of the region] really wanted?. Frankfurter pressed the view that ?Palestine should be the Jewish homeland and not merely that there be a Jewish homeland? there. Balfour replied that he had tried unsuccessfully to exclude Palestine from the Commission?s remit, ?because the powers had committed themselves to the Zionist programme, which inevitably excluded numerical self-determination. Palestine presented a unique situation. We are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously seeking to re-constitute a new community and definitely building for a numerical majority in the future.? (Emphasis added, throughout.) That was not what he said in public.
Frankfurter remarked: ?No statesman could have been more sympathetic than Mr. Balfour was with the underlying philosophy and aims of Zionism? nor more eager that they should be realised.? (Documents, pages 1277-1278). Short shrift to Zionists The King-Crane Commission?s Report gave short shrift to Zionist aims after a thorough probe into the people?s view: ?We recommend, in the fifth place, serious modification of the extreme Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish state. The Commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favour, but the actual facts in Palestine, coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians have driven them to the recommendation here made. ?The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission?s conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase [of land].? It cited Wilson?s emphasis on the democratic principle and said: ?If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine?s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine ? nearly nine-tenths of the whole ? are emphatically against the entire Zionist programme? there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the people?s rights, though it kept within the forms of law? the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a ?right? to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.? But Henry King, President of the Oberlin College, and Charles Crane, an industrialist from Chicago, could not weaken the British Cabinet?s resolve despite the fact that they were appointed on the Commission by President Wilson. President Wilson?s fortunes were already in decline. Significantly, an ardent Zionist, Herbert Samuel, was appointed as the first British High Commissioner for Palestine. When they fell out later, Lloyd George taunted him: ?I made him the first Procurator of Judea since Pontius Pilate.? Tom Segev rightly holds that ?there is no basis for the frequent assertion that the State [of Israel] was established as a result of the Holocaust? That sympathy helped the Zionists advance their diplomatic campaign and their propaganda?. Prof. Peter Clarke agrees. ?The escalating crisis for European Jewry under the Nazis had not created the case for Zionist immigration. It simply reinforced it.? (The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, page 86). He recalls Churchill?s evidence to the Peel Commission in 1937 ? the British government had all along envisaged ?a great Jewish state there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country?. Labour was as pro-Zionist. ?Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews come in,? Hugh Dalton wrote. Imperial concerns were not absent. The Jewish state, alien to its environment, would be the West?s outpost in West Asia. A reader of the Documents on British Policy is struck by the Arabs? ardour for unity. The barter of Palestine was of a piece with the disruption of Arab unity. The General Syrian Congress declared on July 2, 1919: ?We reject the claims of the Zionists for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in that part of Southern Syria which is known as Palestine, and we are opposed to Jewish immigration into any part of the country? We desire that there should be no dismemberment of Syria, and no separation of Palestine or the coastal regions in the West or the Lebanon from the mother country; and we ask that the unity of the country be maintained under any circumstances.? If Nasser moved ?the Arab street?, it was because he spoke as an Arab, rather than an Egyptian, nationalist. Dismemberment created separate and vested interests. The sell-out However, the tragic truth is that not only were Arab leaders of the times inept, but they were also corrupt. Sherif Hussein?s sons, Abdullah and Feisal, were foremost among them. Abdullah took 5,000 to accept the deal by which he was given Transjordan. Among those who sold lands to the Jews were ?leaders of the Arab national movement ? patriots on the outside, traitors on the inside?, Tom Segev records. Zionist officials prepared a list of their names. Musa Kazim al-Husseini, former mayor of Jerusalem and a recognised leader of the movement, was on the list as were eight other Arab mayors. ?The Arab leaders? willingness to sell land to the Jews heightened the contempt Zionist figures felt for the Arab national movement. After a meeting with Arab dignitaries, Chaim Weizmann concluded, ?They are ready to sell their souls to the highest bidder.? The compact Weizmann reached with Prince Faisal in 1918 had also been based on the assumption that the prince would make money off his peace with the Zionists. One of Faisal?s aides had received a down payment of 1,000 and then demanded more. This experience contributed to the Jews? conclusion that the national consciousness of the Palestinian Arabs could be bought. Indeed, politicians and petty thieves, dignitaries as well as hoodlums ? all offered the Zionists their services in espionage and sabotage, in rumour-mongering, defamation, extortion, and all kinds of intimidation; the supply often outstripped the demand.? The British kept company with the Jewish agency in paying bribes. President Roosevelt told Chaim Weizmann that, in his opinion, the Arabs could be bought. The word ?baksheesh? (tip) appears in the minutes of their talks. Land transfers alone could not have achieved Jewish aims. Recourse to terror was inescapable to drive out the Arabs from their homes. This should not have caused any surprise. The Central Intelligence Agency prepared a paper, ?The consequences of the Partition of Palestine?, dated November 28, 1947 (?The View from 1947? by Thomas W. Lippman; Middle East Journal; Vol. 61, No. 1; Winter 2007). It predicted the outbreak of war if a Jewish state was created. In 1943, Roosevelt?s special envoy Col. Harold Hoskins reported that ?only by military force can a Zionist State be imposed upon the Arabs?. The CIA?s paper noted the Zionists? capacity as well as their ambitions. Their fighting forces would consist of 70,000 to 90,000 members of Hagana, the ?Zionist army?; the 6,000 to 8,000 members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, an underground organisation that ?employs sabotage and terrorism? as its preferred tactics in its campaign for independence; and the ?extreme fanatics? known as the Stern Gang or Lehi, about 500 men who, the CIA said, ?do not hesitate to assassinate government officials and police officers or to obtain funds by acts of violence against Jews as well as others?. Its prediction of the Arabs? victory was proved wrong. The only army worth the name was the Arab Legion of Transjordan led by Sir John Glubb. But King Abdullah, true to form, had secretly agreed with the Jews that he would not go beyond capturing the West Bank. According to the CIA, Arab fears of Jewish expansionism was justified: ?In the long run no Zionists in Palestine will be satisfied with the territorial arrangements of the partition settlement,? though it allocated about 50% of Palestine to the Jews and called for Jerusalem to be a neutral, international city.? Prof. Ilan Pappe has rendered high service by documenting the Jews? ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Israel was established on May 14, 1948. Plan Dalet was formulated by ?the Consultancy? on March 10, 1948. ?That same evening military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued with its own list of villages and neighbourhoods as the targets of this master plan. Codenamed Plan D [Dalet in Hebrew], this was the fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population. The previous three schemes had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own. This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go.? He bases his summary on the records of the caucus? meetings. Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon were its members. Ethnic cleansing is recognised in international law as ?a crime against humanity?. The International Criminal Court has been created to punish its perpetrators, not to forget the special ICCs for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Plan D of 1948 was a revised version of previous ones, Plan A, B and C. A was drafted in 1937; B in 1946. They were meshed into C in 1948 which spelt out the actions to be taken. ?Killing the Palestinian political leadership. Killing Palestinian inciters and their financial supporters. Killing Palestinians who acted against Jews. Killing senior Palestinian officers and officials (in the Mandatory system). Damaging Palestinian transportation. Damaging the sources of Palestinian livelihoods; water wells, mills, etc. Attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks. Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc. Plan C added that all data required for the performance of these actions could be found in the village files; lists of leaders, activists, ?potential human targets?, the precise layout of villages, and so on.? A passage from Plan D read: ?These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.? Pappe notes that ?the ideology that enabled the depopulation of half of Palestine?s native people in 1948 is still alive, and continues to drive the inexorable, sometimes discernable, cleansing of those Palestinians who live there today?. It is to this Israel that, on January 11, 2008, President George W. Bush asked the Arab States to ?reach out?. He has done nothing to prevent Israel from building new settlements or from violating basic human rights. Israel?s policies are inspired by the ideology that led to its creation. ?Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is not correctly identified. The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness ? Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is the ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for the Palestinians. They can never be part of the Zionist state and space, and will continue to fight ? and hopefully their struggle will be peaceful and successful. If not, it will be desperate and vengeful and, like a whirlwind, will suck all up in a huge perpetual sandstorm that will rage not only through the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also within Britain and the United States, the powers which, each in their turn, feed the tempest that threatens to ruin us all.? Can a state established by deceit and forcible ouster of the people of the land expect them to accept its legitimacy by mere efflux of time? What are 60 years to an ancient people, the Arabs? International recognition of Israel as a state cannot wipe out the facts of history or erase from the memories of the people it has wronged the brutalities it has perpetrated. International law is based on the states quo. For long it legitimised colonial rule. In law the colony was part of the territory of its overlord. It has nothing to do with morality. Israel simply lacks moral legitimacy. Itself a product of terror, it cannot complain if the people under occupation take to arms. But will that be of any avail to them? Human blood, whether Jewish or Arab, is priceless. Violence has not accomplished and will not accomplish anything. Fortunately, there is growing acceptance within and outside Israel of the facts of history. The Arabs in Palestine can stir the Israelis? and the world?s conscience by recourse to a non-violent campaign of revolt till justice is done to them in the light of the realities of today, however painful they are. More cannot be demanded of the Palestinians. As Thycidides said, ?It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves??
A Likely Story3 Mar 2008Something unusual is going to happen tomorrow. The Press Complaints Commission, Britain?s only arbiter of fairness and accuracy in our newspapers, is due to make a ruling. What?s so odd about that? Well, as Nick Davies shows in his book Flat Earth News, out of 28,000 complaints to the PCC submitted over ten years, it managed to make a formal adjudication on just 448, or 1.6%(1). Most of the time it finds a reason to look the other way. This isn?t too surprising: 6 of its 16 commissioners are newspaper or magazine editors(2). But tomorrow?s case is so serious, and the evidence that has accumulated over the past seven months so strong, that even the PCC can?t brush it under the carpet. It concerns the Evening Standard?s reporting of the climate camp established close to Heathrow last August. Soon after it opened, the paper accused the campers of putting the lives of millions at risk by planning to invade the airport and plant hoax bombs. The story was repeated by the Sun, the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the BBC. I have now seen the correspondence about this case. It makes astonishing reading. The front page article, written by the paper?s chief reporter and headlined ?Militants will hit Heathrow?, claimed that ?climate change activists plan to use illegal tactics such as hoax suspicious packages to cause maximum disruption at one of the busiest times of the year. They have also discussed simultaneous assaults on the airport?s security fence to stretch police resources to the limit.?(3) Inside the paper a journalist called Rashid Razaq, who spent a night undercover in the camp, reported that one man was ?urging us to ?get them panicked with different things at the same time like bags left around the airport and people climbing the fence.? Late that night, I saw two protesters checking out the security fences.?(4) As the organisers of the camp began to probe, the story started to fall apart. They also discovered that this is not the only occasion on which Rashid Razaq has been accused of taking liberties with the truth. How did Mr Razaq see protesters ?checking out the security fences?? The camp was over a kilometre from the airport fence: he could not have seen anyone from there. When challenged by the campers, the Evening Standard claimed that ?Mr Razaq had left the camp to go to a nearby petrol station to buy food when he was returning to the camp with a colleague, Sebastian Meyer. Their route back took them close to the perimeter fence of the airport, where he saw two men whom he recognised from the camp. One was trying to climb the fence while another kept watch.?(5) The Standard contends that ?It was a sufficiently light night to recognise faces?.(6) There are several problems with this story. As photos and maps produced by the campers show, neither the petrol station nor any part of the route to the camp is close enough to the fence to recognise faces(7,8). Sebastian Meyer is a professional photographer. If, somehow, they had seen people at the fence, and managed to recognise them as protesters, why did they not take photographs? I put this question to the Evening Standard?s managing editor, Doug Wills. ?He didn?t take any photos of it because it was pitch black.?(9) But the Standard had already claimed that ?it was a sufficiently light night to recognise faces?. I asked Mr Wills for a map reference for the section of fence. He has not been able to provide one. And why, if one of the protesters was trying to climb the fence ? a more serious matter than merely ?checking it out? – did Mr Razaq not report this? What about the claim that the protesters were planning to plant hoax bombs? The Standard explains that the man who raised the plan was ?white and in his late 20s?. ?He used words to the effect: ?we need to make people sit up and take notice. Leave some packages around Heathrow. That?ll make them take notice.?(10) This is a completely different statement to the one quoted in Razaq?s article. In the published version someone else – ?a woman in her thirties? – says ?we have to make people sit up and take notice?(11). None of the alleged statements amounts to a ?plan? by the camp. But the real problems arise when you see Mr Razaq?s notes, which were obtained by the PCC after several requests from the campers. At first Mr Razaq claimed that ?I made an accurate note of what was said as soon as the meetings finished.?(12) But when the notes were released, they turned out to be dated ?13/8?, the day after the events Mr Razaq describes(13). They contain none of the damning quotes or descriptions the Evening Standard published. The only quoted speech was an intention to make ?a big impact and make people around the world sit-up and take notice, to know we mean business?, this time attributed not to a man in his 20s or a woman in her 30s, but to a ?group of three campaigners.? Why did Mr Razaq record this and not the far more serious instigation to plant hoax packages, supposedly made by the same man, in the same breath, at the same meeting? Mr Razaq has also been accused of misreporting by the Freud Museum in London. In January 2007 he claimed it was showing a film containing footage from Al Qaeda recruitment videos, ?outlawed in most Western countries?(14). It wasn?t. The curator told me ?He made up details. He put in facts that were completely wrong. I think he is one of those journalists who is prepared to just go and make up a story.?(15) Doug Wills, the Standard?s managing editor, told me that the curator himself had informed Razaq that the Qaeda film was in the exhibition. Mr Wills forwarded an email from him, which mentions the film but not its inclusion in the show(16). Ironically, the title of the exhibition was ?Paranoia?. In January 2008, Razaq wrote that he had gone undercover as a cleaner in Barnet Hospital, and found that staff were flouting basic safety rules(17). The hospital tells me that he was in fact employed as a porter, and that he misunderstood or misreported the rules(18). The Standard insists Razaq was a cleaner. When I spoke to Mr Razaq, he referred me to statements by the managing editor. Is the Evening Standard worried about his reporting? Not a bit of it. Of the Heathrow coverage it says ?we are 100 percent satisfied that our published reports were fair and accurate on a matter of public interest.?(19) They were not just Razaq?s work, but the product of ?an extensive operation organised by an extremely experienced team of executives and senior reporters?(20). When the Freud Museum sent a letter of complaint, the paper neither published the letter nor replied to it(21). The problem seems to be a systemic one. I don?t know how the Press Complaints Commission will rule. But the evidence I have seen suggests that if the Evening Standard is not required to publish a correction we need a bolder arbiter. www.monbiot.com References: 1. Nick Davies, 2008. Flat Earth News, p364. Chatto and Windus. 2. http://www.pcc.org.uk/about/whoswho/members.html 3. Robert Mendick, 13th August 2007. Militants Will Hit Heathrow. Evening Standard ? West End Final. 4. Rashid Razaq, 13th August 2007. In the shambolic climate camp, protesters plot campaign on panic. Standard ? West End Final. 5. Susan Ryan, acting managing editor, the Evening Standard, 8th October 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission. 6. ibid. 7. Alex Harvey, the Camp for Climate Action. 26th September 2007. Map included in letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission. 8. Alex Harvey, the Camp for Climate Action. 18th January 2007. Pictures included in letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission. 9. Doug Wills, by phone, 3rd March 2008. 10. Susan Ryan, acting managing editor, the Evening Standard, 8th October 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission. 11. Rashid Razaq, 13th August 2007. In the shambolic climate camp, protesters plot campaign on panic. Standard ? West End Final. 12. Quoted by Doug Wills, 17th September 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission. 13. A photocopy of the notes was included with a letter from Doug Wills, 22nd November 2007 to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission. 14. Rashid Razaq, 10th January 2007. Film of 9/11 terrorists celebrating is displayed at art show. Evening Standard. 15. Predrag Pajdic, by phone, 29th February 2008. 16. Email from Predrag Pajdic to Khaled Ramadan, 9th January 2007. 17. Rashid Razaq, 7th January 2008. Standard reveals hospital workers flouting basic rules on hygiene. Evening Standard. 18. Press Office, Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS trust, by phone, 29th February 2008. 19. Doug Wills, 11th December 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission. 20. Doug Wills, 12th February 2008. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission. 21. Predrag Pajdic, by phone, 29th February 2008
What Part of ?No? Don?t They Understand?3 Mar 2008Some of the 27 member states of the European Union may soon find themselves subject to institutions their people have rejected: 1 January 2009 is the final date for ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, signed by the heads of state and government in December 2007 and already ratified by Hungary, Malta, Slovenia, Romania and France. Nicolas Sarkozy once said that no true European and responsible politician could carry on as if nothing had happened after the French said no to the European constitution, that it was a message from the French people and must be heeded. But that was back in June 2006. Once he was president, he felt entitled to disregard this expression of the people?s will. He has just persuaded more than 75% of French MPs to adopt a treaty that is almost identical to the Constitutional Treaty that 54.68% of French voters rejected on 29 May 2005. The Socialist Party could have demanded another referendum; it had undertaken to do so, but abandoned the idea. In an attempt to outmanoeuvre the many British eurosceptics before the 2004 European elections, Tony Blair also promised that the people would have an opportunity to vote directly on the new basic law for the EU. But his successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, preferred to leave it to parliament to ratify the Lisbon Treaty (1) . The Constitutional Treaty was rejected by 62% of the Netherlands electorate in June 2005. Here too the task of ratifying the treaty approved by the European Council in December is to be entrusted to parliament, to avoid the danger of consulting voters who may not come up with the right answer. In Portugal, the Socialist Party announced during the parliamentary elections in February 2005 that the people would have a chance to vote on the draft Constitutional Treaty. But the prime minister, Jos Socrates, has now changed tack, on the pretext that circumstances have changed. This is a different treaty. A simplified one (2). This casual brush-off is surprising when, in France, Valry Giscard d?Estaing admits that the Lisbon Treaty is based entirely on the draft Constitutional Treaty rejected in 2005: ?The tools are largely the same. Only the order in which they are arranged in the tool-box has been changed? (3). A view confirmed in Britain where the Labour-dominated Foreign Affairs Committee noted that ?there is no material difference between the two texts?. Only the Irish will be allowed a referendum, in May or June. Franois Mitterrand said in 1983 that he had two ambitions, the construction of Europe and social justice. Is democracy preventing us from achieving the first ambition? The members of parliament who voted against the decision taken by universal suffrage are drawn more and more from privileged social classes, but the message from ordinary voters in France and the Netherlands was a resounding no. Is this significant? Jack Lang, former minister and expert in public law, may have the answer. In his view, there is no point in getting agitated about legal provisions that even the lawyers don?t understand. After all, he said, a treaty is only a treaty.
No Strain No Gain2 Mar 2008AS SCHNEWS GETS TO THE ROOT OF PROBLEMS WITH SEEDY BUSINESS “Seeds are the very beginning of the food chain. He, who cont
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