I have always found a quote from the iconic 1980s BBC political comedy "Yes Prime Minister" quite insightful of the psychology that pervaded the upper echelons of the British government. It was uttered when one senior civil servant was quizzing another about the failure of a supervising authority to pick up on the corruption and incompetence of a colleague. After a bit of spluttering and bluster, his colleague answered:
"Decent chaps don't check up on decent chaps to see that they're behaving like decent chaps."
The fact that the conversation occurred over drinks in an oak panelled room at a private members' club simply compounded the idea of the hierarchical nature of society, where the average "men on the street" have little or no chance of either understanding or influencing the decisions that effect their lives. This, however, was supposed to have been swept away by New Labour in the 1990s. The cold, straitjacketed years of the Tories were replaced by the easy-going, shirt-sleeved, tanned meritocracy of New Labour's Cool Britannia. Things, apparently, could only get better.
And yet, as I listened with increasing horror to John Pilger's latest documentary "The War You Don't See", the "decent chaps" quotation could easily have been uttered by a number of his interviewees.
For those who are yet to see it (and I earnestly entreat each and every one of you to do so at the earliest opportunity), Pilger's documentary is a masterful effort to hold to account, not the politicians – whose duplicity and deceitfulness has been held up for all the world to see – but rather those whose job it was to gather, collate, analyse and present the facts to us: journalists in the media.
Pilger interviewed several journalists and civil servants who all admitted to being duped into reporting everything from barefaced propaganda to down right lies. More worrying was the number of times journalists admitted their complicity in this propaganda. The sheepish looking Rageh Omar agreed with Pilger that the iconic image of the fall of Baghdad – the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue on 3 April 2003 - was completely orchestrated by a US military psy-ops unit, and that there were more journalists and US military personnel at the scene than Iraqis. When asked why this wasn't reported, Omar had to admit, "I didn't really do my job properly... I'd hold my hand up and say that one didn't press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough."
As well as the "made for television" downing of Saddam's statue, Omar also described how British military propaganda successfully manipulated coverage of the fall of Basra, which BBC News 24 reported as having fallen (when it hadn’t) 17 times. This coverage, he said, was "a giant echo chamber".
These views were reiterated by a number of journalists. The veteran US newsman Dan Rather, who retired in 2005, was also interviewed by Pilger. He spoke candidly about the interplay of various factors that occurs in the psyche of a journalist who thinks about challenging the government-sponsored rhetoric: "There was a fear in every newsroom in America," he said, "a fear of losing your job... the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise."
Instead of questioning the rhetoric that led to the Iraq invasion, Dan Rather said that journalists amplified it and the war made "stenographers out of us". He concluded that had journalists actually done their jobs, the invasion would not have happened – cold comfort to the estimated 100,000 civilians who have lost their lives since the invasion in 2003.
This acknowledgement of complicity, of being duped, of not carrying out their mandated job of questioning, delving and investigating the so-called facts fed to them by government machinery, was repeated over and over in Pilger's film, with a depressing monotony.
The excuse that there was no evidence to rebut the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction is simply untrue. There was plenty of evidence out there for a journalist who wanted to find it, but in many cases it was simply ignored. One example is that of Charles Hanley, an Associated Press reporter who in January 2003 visited all the sites named by the likes of Bush, Powell, Rice, Cheney, and Rumsfeld as being under suspicion of either storing or making WMDs. Hanley found that in every case, the sites were secure and had been so since 1991 when they were sealed by UN weapons inspectors. When he filed the report via the AP news agency – which has immense worldwide coverage – it was ignored by virtually every media outlet in the USA because, in the words of Steve Rendell from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, "it didn't fit the script... we were going to war no matter what."
The BBC is not innocent of this charge either. The chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, categorically stated in the run up to the war that any ballistic, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons capability that Iraq possessed in 1991 had been completely eliminated by 1998. He said, "If I had to quantify the risk of Iraq possessing WMDs... I would say it is zero." Despite his knowledge and understanding of the situation in Iraq, he appeared on the BBC only twice during the run-up to the war – once at 3am on the News 24 channel. When Fran Unsworth, the BBC's Head of Newsgathering, was quizzed about this she could provide no explanation. When Pilger pressed her on why so much emphasis had been given to the lies told by the government in the run-up to the war, she replied that whilst the facts were not legitimate, they were uttered by the mouths of legitimate people and so the BBC had a duty to report them. To put it another way:
"Decent chaps don't check up on decent chaps to see that they're behaving like decent chaps."
David Mannion, head of ITV News, demonstrated even less self-awareness. It seems that to his mind, the only job of the news is to report uncritically statements of the government to viewers and leave it to them to make up their own minds about what is true, a task made exponentially more difficult when the other side of the argument is not even reported.
It is true that there are a few journalists who seem to strike fear into the hearts of politicians everywhere – Jeremy Paxman at once springs to mind. It is interesting to note that Paxman described himself as "hoodwinked" by US government propaganda prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
He mentioned specifically Colin Powell's UN presentation of Saddam's alleged biological and chemical weapons capability. This was widely reported as fact, rather than allegation, and it seems that Paxman swallowed it whole:
"When I saw all of that, I thought, well, 'We know that Colin Powell is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man. If he believes all this to be the case, then, you know, he's seen the evidence, I haven’t.'"
He could, in fact, be described as a "decent chap."
Even a small amount of digging would have revealed to Paxman that Powell had a shady past as an army officer very willing to tell bare-faced lies whenever the military or government required it. As a 31 year old army officer, Powell played a central role in investigating the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war in which the US army brutalised, gang-raped and tortured over 500 Vietnamese civilians (mainly women, children and the elderly) before shooting them at point-blank range. Despite knowing about the disgusting and criminal episode, he wrote in his report:
"In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent."
No mention of My Lai occurred. In fact, it was officially reported as "U.S. infantrymen had killed 128 Communists in a bloody day-long battle."
If we change the word "communists" to "insurgents" or "Taliban" we realise that we hear at least one report a week that is essentially the same. One wonders how many My Lais are being covered up by ambitious and patriotic army officers in today's War on Terror.
How can this be allowed to happen? Isn't the whole system of democracy supposed to prevent such crimes? I always thought democracy worked something like this: the normal, average citizen who is motivated and committed to democratic ideals is reliably informed of both sides of any argument by an independent and fearless media who question, delve into and investigate the claims of the politicians. The citizen then makes his mind up and can hold his elected officials to account. In this scenario the politician is truly the servant of the people.
However, the reality of modern democracy is somewhat different. The government employs a huge public relations machine (the CIA alone spends US$1 billion annually on its public relations department) which grants access, information and overseas junkets to those journalists who tow the party line – and "freeze out" journalists who ask difficult questions. The media, acting like a subjugated prostitute working for a particularly violent pimp, becomes an extension of the official public relations department. It reports propaganda as fact and imposes "censorship by omission" by only telling one side of the story.
In this process, citizens becomes mindless drones, seemingly valued only as functionaries in a corporate machine or consumers to drive the economy. They are effectively shut out of the political process and are forced to form their opinions largely based on emotion: where a touching interview with young Afghanis yearning to cast their vote, or a heroic story of a soldier performing some courageous act, have a far greater effect on public opinion than any nitty-gritty details of death tolls or measurable changes to a corrupt regime.
This disenfranchisement with the political process seems to have come about in an age when there is a meteoric rise in popularity of the reality TV show that allows the viewer to vote off contestants. Perhaps Joe Average feels that this is the best conduit to channel any residual democratic feelings he may harbour.
The media have betrayed the public by abrogating their responsibility of holding politicians and corporate power to account. When it takes the likes of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to carry out the media's role of speaking the truth to power whatever the consequences, one realises how far away from the ideals of democracy we truly are.
Something that remained conspicuously absent from any statement of remorse by those interviewed by Pilger, or those like Jeremy Paxman who have spoken independently of being an unwitting pawn of American propaganda, was any idea of how they will ensure that, next time, they will not let us down so badly. Accepting the risk of being accused of making unfair analogies, I would note that if a doctor makes an error of judgement that leads to a patient's injury or death, then he is generally struck off the medical register. It appears that if a journalist makes an error (or, in fact, repeated and grave errors of judgement) that helps the cause of an illegal war which kills tens of thousands of innocents, all he has to do is give a couple of interviews a few years later and look a bit sheepish for all sins to be forgiven.
This revelation of the duplicity of the modern media is especially pertinent to Muslims and not only because it involved the oppression of Muslims overseas. A quick glance at the press or TV news bulletins reveals that Muslims, Islam and Islamic matters take up a huge amount of column inches and air time. Sometimes it seems that every aspect of what is promoted (both correctly and incorrectly) as our identity and lifestyle is under constant scrutiny. Do any journalists demonstrate that they have now become wiser and more sceptical when presented with "irrefutable evidence" of the tsunami of "Islamism", or the waves of intolerance demonstrated by Muslims, or the risk of terrorism? Do they preface any of their analysis with the phrase:"Please listen to this worrying analysis of 'X,Y and Z' issue involving British Muslims, but do take it with a large pinch of salt because, as seen in the run-up to the Iraq war, we the media are absolutely rubbish at finding out the truth of any matter and would rather be spoon fed propaganda from whichever interested party has the best PR department"?
Sadly, no. Instead, I read with horror that last week BBC Director-General Mark Thompson gave a speech advocating the establishment of Fox News-style polemic channels and removing current rules which "guarantee" the impartiality of the press. Thompson apparently even suggested that the Daily Mail should be allowed to set up its own news channel if it so wished.
"The BBC and Channel 4 have a history of clearly labelled polemical programmes. But why not entire polemical channels which have got stronger opinions? I find the argument persuasive."
Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of the Sun who was on the same seminar panel, said he should be able to host a debate about immigration or Britain pulling out of Europe (or perhaps deporting Muslims?) without having to present a countervailing point of view.
This idea, far from being crazy, blue sky thinking, has actually made its way into Downing Street, with MacKenzie discussing his idea of radio "free for all" talk stations allowed to say what they want, free from being regulated by Ofcom. David Cameron apparently has agreed that this was an appropriate idea for radio.
So, in an era in which the media completely failed in its duty to reliably inform the public before the most divisive war of modern times, what we get from Mark Thompson is not regret but rather a demand to circumvent existing regulation, so that the media can include even less factual content than before.
In this these troubled times, it is not enough for journalists to assume that everyone is a "decent chap behaving decently". The reality is that the truth is a commodity that will become increasingly hard to find.
Jabir ibn Samurah said: "I heard the Prophet (sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam) say, 'Just before the Hour there will be many liars.'" Jabir said, "Be on your guard against them." (Muslim)
Anas ibn Malik said, "The Prophet (sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam) said, 'The time of the Dajjal (The Anti-Christ) will be years of confusion. People will believe a liar, and disbelieve one who tells the truth. People will distrust one who is trustworthy, and trust one who is treacherous; and the Ruwaybidah will have a say.' Someone asked, 'Who are the Ruwaybidah?' He said, 'Those who rebel against Allah and will have a say in general affairs.'" (Ahmad)
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