[Media-watch] Stop the War leader debates BBC news chief

[David Crouch]

Here is the transcript of the speech by Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop the
War Coalition, in debate with Mark Damazer, BBC deputy director, BBC news.

It strikes me as a very good general analysis of what's wrong with BBC news
reporting of the war.

The debate was organised by Media Workers Against the War. I'm afraid I
haven't got round to typing up Damazer's reply.

Dave
Media Workers Against the War
www.mwaw.org

"Reporting Iraq: the Challenge for Public Service Broadcasting"
Speech by Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop the War Coalition, March 27, 2003

For 28 years I have been a member of the National Union of Journalists. I
speak as someone who's proud of my profession and I certainly haven't come
here to make any sweeping or blanket attacks on the work of journalists at
the BBC or anywhere else. The death of Terry Lloyd and his colleagues should
remind us that this is no time for any cheap shots. 

I am going to be critical of the BBC as an institution, but I think there
needs to be a qualification. I get a lot of emails from people in the USA
who say that they depend on the BBC for a superior quality of information
than they get from their own broadcasters. In British broadcasting generally
the rather frenzied, overheated patriotism bordering on chauvinism has not
reached as far as our media culture. And of course any formal assessment of
the BBC's coverage of the war on Iraq must wait a bit, at least until we can
judge over a longer period.

I want to address three things. First is the democratic context of this
conflict, because that is the environment in which the BBC has to operate.
Second there is the BBC's coverage of the anti-war movement in this country.
And third there is the reporting of the war itself. 

One cannot avoid the critical context to some degree, for that shapes what
we would expect of a public service broadcaster. Our expectations if this
were 1940 would be very different. Even if it was 1982 and the Falkland's
war one would acknowledge a different mood in the country than there is now.


Also there is the broader issue of this war and democracy. Andrew Marr made
a very powerful piece to camera in early February that concluded that never
at any time could he recall that there was such a division between opinion
in parliament and opinion in the country. And that does form part of the
essential background to the situation now, whatever week-by-week
fluctuations there might be in the opinion polls. It is an important truth
that we have a government that has taken this country to war in the teeth of
the biggest anti-war movement this country has ever seen. Not since public
opinion became a factor in government, and certainly not since the BBC was
chartered, has a war been attempted with popular consent withheld to such an
extent. 

I believe that this does pose special issues for the BBC right from the
outset. The BBC has obligations to political balance and normally that can
be satisfied by having one person speaking from the government, one person
speaking for the opposition, and on most issues that provides some sort of
balance that works. But how to you represent that political balance when the
two major parliamentary leaderships are united and the leader of the
official opposition is disgracing the terms of his office by officially
supporting the government? Yet the great majority of the people do oppose
this policy. And at certain stages that opposition has reached up to 80% or
more. It's never been less than substantial. 

So this raises straight away the important question of whether the BBC is a
public service broadcaster or a state broadcaster. How does the BBC
discharge its responsibilities to the wider public, and not simply to the
establishment, when the consensus in the establishment seems to be very far
from the one in the country? 

I believe -- with certain qualifications, which I shall come to -- that the
BBC has not addressed this democratic crisis. And it is not a democratic
crisis that has come out of the clear blue sky. The disengagement of large
numbers of citizens from parliament and the major parties can be tracked in
any number of ways, but it has never been expressed so sharply as on this
great issue: whether to follow the United States into a war against Iraq. 

The anti-war movement that has developed in Britain over the last 18 months
has been a social movement without precedent in its breadth and extent. Just
in the last 6 weeks it has organised the biggest ever peace-time
demonstration this country has ever seen, the biggest ever war-time
demonstration and the biggest ever day of direct action on the day war broke
out. Yet for months this movement seemed to fly largely beneath the BBC's
radar. 

Because its roots and its focus are by and large outside parliament, outside
the establishment, the movement has seemed beyond the ken of many
broadcasters. For example we now have reporters embedded here there and
everywhere -- I'll come back to that -- with the forces fighting in the
Gulf, yet the BBC has not designated a reporter to cover the anti-war
movement. Obviously we don't expect an uncritical reporter, but no one has
been given that brief to report on this vast, popular movement. 

For very many months, and even when the movement was organising larger and
larger protests, the movement had to fight long and hard to get a hearing on
the main BBC outlets. This criticism must be qualified: on those BBC outlets
that are not at a premium -- BBC online, BBC News 24, and so on -- the
anti-war movement has received good coverage throughout, and more recently
Newsnight, the Today programme somewhat belatedly, and we've had the series
of programmes by Niall Dickson coming down the country reporting on people's
opinions. So there has been some movement, but it has been very little and
very late. Still the anti-war movement has been more or less excluded from
the major television news broadcasts -- the 6 o'clock and the 10 o'clock. 

There have been a number of edicts that have given rise to this sort of
mind-set. There is a memorandum to senior BBC editorial staff from Richard
Sambrook, head of BBC news, who complains that BBC programmes have been
inundated by the more "extreme" anti-war views: "Those motivated to call in
or email are frequently from the more extreme end". 

I don't know what extreme means in this context. Today the father of the
house of commons, Tam Dayell, has called the prime minister a war criminal.
and called for him to be arraigned before the Hague tribunal. So our own
group is relatively moderate by comparison. Mr Samrook says: "We may
sometimes unwittingly be nobbled by anti-war campaigners. I heard exactly
the same question phrased the same way in 5 programmes on one day." No
resemblance to New Labour there, then. 

This is clearly a signal of how uncomfortable the BBC is with the drift of a
large proportion of public opinion in this country, and with it finding
public expression. 

I have to mention also the announcement made before the February 15
demonstration in which between 1 and 2 million people marched in London, in
which a large range of designated BBC staff should not take part in it. I
don't know whether this is a departure from previous policy, but it is
certainly a departure for this to be announced publicly in such a
high-profile way, giving away the fact that here is a movement that the BBC
is unhappy with. 

I'd also like to mention the events on the day war broke out. By our
estimates roughly 1 million people took part in some form of protest action,
whether it was school students, people at work, people in their communities
and so on, in almost every corner of the country -- a vast mosaic of small
protests, entirely unprecedented in Britain's history. No war in which this
country has actually been engaged has been greeted with such an upsurge of
opposition. And those are the people that, amongst others, the BBC is here
to serve. 

The BBC's broadcasts barely began to reflect the scale of that action.
Instead we had hour after hour of talking heads speculating whether Saddam
Hussein was alive or dead, was it really him, what did they hit. At this
point the war amounts to nothing more that a botched assassination attempt
in which a few cruise missiles were fired a buildings in Baghdad. But this
completely overwhelmed any consideration of what the British people were
doing in a quite unprecedented way on that day. 

That leads on the coverage of the war itself. A number of important issues
have already arisen. One which requires a look backwards at coverage arises
from what has been clearly the most surprising aspect of the conflict so
far: the extent of armed resistance by the Iraqi armed forced to the
invasion and the absence of the anticipated warm welcome for the invading
forced from the ordinary people of Iraq. From the reports one reads, this
clearly surprised the British and American forces on the ground, but nothing
in the BBC's broadcasts -- or in those of other broadcasters -- in any way
challenged the naive assumptions of government, propaganda assumptions, that
this would be a rapid and easy war of liberation in which the Iraqi army
would fold up almost straight away and the troops would be welcomed
throughout the country. That is the first analytical failure: the acceptance
of the government line that is going to be a one-sided, easy war, more like
a triumphal parade. 

Also there is a question of use of language. For example, there is now
speculation that whatever may happen in the main military battles, there
will be continuing guerrilla warfare against the invading armies by regular
or irregular Iraqi formations for some time. Yet on Newsnight I heard Gavin
Esler refering to this as "terrorism" -- that is Iraqi people, at war,
lawfully fighting in their own country against an invasion seen by the great
majority of international authorities as unlawful would be terrorists. This
is a complete internalisation of the language of the aggressors. 

On 5 Live I heard a discussion in which the presenters were refering to the
"liberation" of villages and towns in Iraq. Now if a government or army
source chooses to say that, it is up to them. But for the BBC to be
internalising the language of "liberation" again shows an internalisation of
the government's agenda. 

There is clear evidence that military sources are lying or at least being
misleading, and that these lies are not being adequately challenged by
journalists. First example, it was announced on Thursday evening that the
port of Um Qasr had fallen to coalition forces. But fighting continued there
for many days afterwards. The script called for an early victory, and it was
announced, whether or not it was true, and it was not challenged. 

Secondly, it was reported on Friday night that the Iraqi 51st division,
about 8,000 soldiers, had surrendered before Basra. I became a bit puzzled
over the weekend when the total number of Iraqi POW's taken from all
engagements approached 2000. What had happened to the 8,000 who had
surrendered? On the Monday I read a report from a Russian military research
centre saying this was complete nonsense -- there had been no such
surrender. Yet this was not challenged on the BBC until yesterday, which
found that the 51st division had actually withdrawn into Basra rather than
surrender. The script called for an early surrender by a major Iraqi unit
and this was announced, whether it was true or not. It was not challenged by
any journalists out there.

Third it was reported last night that 150 tanks had broken out of Basra and
were heading south-east and were being engaged by British forces. Today we
are told that the number of tanks was 3. Never has the proverbial fog of war
seemed so dense. 

Fourth there was the Basra "uprising". As general Wesley Clarke put it,
"unfortunately they had not uprisen". The BBC reported the American
military, while Al-Jazeera in Basra was saying that actually there was
little or no sign of this. It was because the script called for an early
uprising and it was announced, whether or not it was happening, and it was
not challenged by the journalists. 

Of course, the BBC bears no responsibility for the lies or misinformation
put out by the military, but it does bear responsibility for their
uncritical repetition as fact. 

This raises another question. The BBC has many distinguished journalists in
the war zone. What is there task? What is their journalistic mission? Are
they briefed to challenge war propaganda, to question what they are told,
make such efforts as a possible and prudent to verify statements by the
military and to tell the public what is going on. Because there are other
outlets, including Al-Jazeera, who are doing in my view a better job at this
at the moment. 

Are the BBC journalists so "embedded" that, however skilled they may be,
they cannot properly discharge their responsibilities to the public by
exercising their faculties of independent and critical journalists because
they are dependent on the army not just for their basic survival but because
they are embedded within the operations, outlook and perspectives of the
units they are attached to.

I also want to touch on the issue of images. There must be a concern that
the BBC is hiding behind legitimate concerns about upsetting the viewer to
shield the British public from the brutal reality of this war. Of course
sensitive judgements have to be made. Civilians have been killed, British
soldiers have been killed, those images are being broadcast elsewhere in the
world, but very little has been shown on the BBC -- instead the war is being
reduced to a sort of abstract firework display. The script calls for a
swift, sanitised war, and when it is not happening we are being denied
images that bring home graphically the horror of what is being done,
including in some cases the horror of what is being done by British armed
forces, the horror of what is being done in our name. If this is a
professional judgement by the BBC, it is one that corresponds all too
closely to the needs of the government itself.

A couple of concluding points. The BBC doesn't operate in a vacuum. It is an
ideologically competitive market, and it clearly doesn't exist as a
broadcast monopoly. There are other sources of news who are offering a
competing and in many ways more critical coverage of this war.

In the last few days Al-Jazeera has suffered a hacking attack on all its
systems of unprecedented complexity and sophistication. One can hear the
vitriol that is being poured on their operation -- not because of being
biased towards the Iraqi government, of which there is no evidence
whatsoever, but simply for presenting a balanced and very detailed on the
ground report of what's going on. It is a fact that the US government has
leant very heavily on companies supplying al-Jazeera with services and goods
to cease those contracts, so it must be clear that media pluralism will not
be a major part of the New World Order that is to be imposed on the Middle
East.

This is not just an issue of information, it is ultimately an issue of world
view. The BBC presents an image of Britain and presents an image of how
Britain should be seen to the British people itself. It presents a liberal
-- with a small L -- image of our country. The BBC of course can accept that
our government and the military can make mistakes, but not that they are
engaged in a fundamentally criminal exercise. Yet that is how very many
people around the world see what is being done, and the fact that they see
it because of a greater access to a diversity of media sources means that
many people here understand that is happening. We see ourselves as other see
us and it is not a comfortable BBC point of view.

The idea that this country is inescapably on the side of right is now
challenged by people in almost every part of this world. For example, if you
were to say that this war marks a re-birth of British colonialism and
imperialism that would scarcely be controversial in very large areas of this
world, yet it is marginalised from public debate here. 

How many people know that Iraq was a British colony well within living
memory and that Iraq was where chemical weapons were used by the RAF bombing
Iraqi villages in the 1920s. Yet it is increasingly dawning on the British
people that this finds no reflection in the analytical favour of the BBC.
And it raises the fundamental concluding point. If the BBC is a public
service broadcaster, it should be in the service of the public that is
overwhelmingly sceptical and largely opposed to this war. It should not
oppose the government but it should reflect that scepticism in its treatment
of the war and realise that the viewing public challenge the government's
rationale for entering this war and that they recognise the possibility of
continuing deceit as to its course and conduct.

Or is the BBC a state broadcaster inextricably tied into a state that is now
engaged in aggression against international law, aggression against the
Iraqi people, a state that is blowing off the backs of children's heads in
Basra 

To be in the service of that state now would be to write a deeply degrading
chapter in the history of a great institution. 






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