[Media-watch] FW: Out On A Limb - Part 2

[David Miller {FMS}]

> ----------
> From: 	Medialens Media Alerts
> Sent: 	Wednesday, October 22, 2003 11:11 AM
> To: 	Friend
> Subject: 	Out On A Limb - Part 2
> 
> MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
> 
> 22 October, 2003
> 
> 
> MEDIA ALERT: OUT ON A LIMB - PART 2
> 
> Senior Source at The Independent on Iraq, WMD and Editorials
> 
> 
> In Part 1 of this alert (20 October 2003), we presented part of an email
> exchange with a leader writer and senior journalist at the Independent.
> 
> On 7 October, Media Lens co-editor David Cromwell responded to the
> journalist. In our reply, we detailed the vanishingly small coverage given
> in the Independent to authoritative and critical voices. Cromwell wrote:
> 
> "I've been following the Independent's performance on Iraq closely for
> several years. One aspect that has struck me is how little attention has
> been granted to authoritative voices who have views that challenge the US
> and UK governments' version of events. Consider former UN assistant
> secretary-general Denis Halliday, who set up the 'oil-for-food' programme
> in Iraq, and who resigned in September 1998 describing the sanctions as
> 'genocidal'. Halliday has been mentioned just seven times in your paper in
> over five years, according to a search on the Independent website. Three
> of those mentions were in news stories; the other four were in two
> articles by John Pilger, one by anti-sanctions campaigner Milan Rai and
> one by columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. This is a vanishingly small rate
> for such an important voice in one of the country's leading liberal
> newspapers.
> 
> On WMD, you describe yourself as one of the paper's arch-sceptics as to
> whether they existed at all after the 1991 Gulf War. And yet a Lexis Nexis
> search of your by-lined columns over five years shows that you made no
> mention of former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter. As you know,
> Ritter claims that his team had disarmed Iraq of 90-95% of its WMD by
> December 1998. In the paper as a whole, since 1 January 1999, he has been
> mentioned only 24 times out of 7474 articles in that period that refer to
> Iraq. Your editorial last Friday [3 October] stated: 'It has been apparent
> for some time that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq', but
> the Independent essentially ignored much authoritative testimony to that
> effect for years while constantly channelling the Bush-Blair version of
> events in its news pages."
> 
> Cromwell continued:
> 
> "With regard to UN sanctions, Independent editorials and news reports
> have, unfortunately, obscured the major responsibility of the US and UK
> for maintaining the horrific sanctions regime, and instead have written in
> terms of 'a propaganda war' that Saddam was in danger of winning.
> Consider, for example, this Independent editorial from February 2001:
> 
> 'We repeat, mantra-like, that we have no quarrel with the Iraqi people -
> only with their leader. But we are losing the propaganda war; not only
> many Arabs, but many in the West believe that we are responsible for the
> undoubted suffering of ordinary Iraqis.' ('Let Us Declare Victory Over
> Saddam, End Sanctions And Start Afresh In The Region', The Independent, 27
> February, 2001)
> 
> Or take a typical news report from the same year:
> 
> 'America and Britain maintain a hardline policy on Iraq sanctions. There
> is deep frustration in London and Washington over the Iraqi leader's
> success in depicting UN sanctions as the main cause of Iraqi suffering.'
> (Anne Penketh, 'British and US aircraft bomb Iraqis', The Independent, 17
> February, 2001)
> 
> Compare and contrast these with Denis Halliday's account:
> 
> 'Washington, and to a lesser extent London, have deliberately played games
> through the Sanctions Committee with this programme for years - it's a
> deliberate ploy... That's why I've been using the word 'genocide', because
> this is a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq. I'm afraid I
> have no other view at this late stage.' (Interview with David Edwards, May
> 2000, www.medialens.org)
> 
> There have been several excellent reports on the sanctions issue in the
> Independent. Robert Fisk wrote in September 2002, that 'a massive crime
> against humanity has been committed in Iraq - half a million Iraqi
> children were killed by us for nothing'. But this level of honesty has
> been a rarity. Previously, Patrick Cockburn had gone as far as to say that
> 'UN sanctions have killed far more ordinary Iraqis than Saddam Hussein'
> and that '[t]he result of this prolonged economic siege of the Iraqi
> people has been devastating.' ('If Saddam doesn't get you the UN sanctions
> will', Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, 20 January, 2001). 
> 
> But now Fisk was going further and making an explicit link between 'us'
> (actually the governments in Washington and London) and the deaths of half
> a million Iraqi children - something that had almost never been made clear
> in your paper for years. Why not?
> 
> After this year's invasion, the Independent published a major 5400-word
> analysis on the humanitarian crisis in Iraq : 'The Iraq Conflict: Special
> Analysis - Iraq Has Fallen. Saddam Is Deposed. But, After 27 Days Of War,
> Little Else Is Resolved', the Independent, April 16, 2003. There was not a
> +single+ mention of the well-substantiated claim that the US-UK had been
> primarily responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, and more
> than a million Iraqi civilians in total, in 12 years of sanctions. To omit
> our government's responsibility for such a massive crime against humanity
> in reviewing the situation in Iraq is remarkable."
> 
> Cromwell also wrote:
> 
> "Prior to the war, a key UK government claim was that the Iraqi regime had
> always foiled attempts to achieve peaceful disarmament so that military
> intervention was a tragic necessity. What was so astonishing here was that
> in all the thousands of news reports and commentaries on Iraq in the
> Independent, there were almost literally no attempts to verify the truth
> of this claim. How successful had the earlier inspections regimes actually
> been? What level of success was achieved? To what extent did the Iraqis
> cooperate? Why did inspections break down after so many years? Was
> peaceful disarmament feasible? These questions were almost never asked.
> Ritter, for example, reports:
> 
> 'If this were argued in a court of law, the weight of evidence would go
> the other way. Iraq has in fact demonstrated over and over a willingness
> to cooperate with weapons inspectors.' (Ritter and Rivers Pitt, War On
> Iraq, Profile Books, 2002, p.25)
> 
> Former UNSCOM inspector and member of the College of Commissioners of
> UNMOVIC, Frank Ronald Cleminson, reports:
>  
> 'It is often said, sometimes with dubious authority, that Baghdad never
> cooperated in the UN quest to account for its nuclear, chemical, and
> biological weapons. In fact, that is not entirely correct. Immediately
> following the termination of hostilities in 1991, Iraq did cooperate in a
> significant fashion... Data from the archives in New York bear out the
> contention that UN inspectors proved to be extremely successful in
> effectively accounting for the disposition and ultimate destruction of
> nuclear materials and associated facilities as well as of proscribed
> missiles and of chemical weapons.' ('What Happened to Saddam's Weapons of
> Mass Destruction?', Arms Control Today, September 2003)
> 
> After UNSCOM inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998 amid misleading
> claims that Iraq was refusing to cooperate, Ritter was quoted as saying:
> 
> 'What [head of UNSCOM] Richard Butler did last week with the inspections
> was a set-up. This was designed to generate a conflict that would justify
> a bombing.' (Quoted, New York Post, 17 December, 1998)
> 
> A UN diplomat, described as 'generally sympathetic to Washington', said:
> 'Based on the same facts he [Butler] could have said, "There were
> something like 300 inspections [in recent weeks] and we encountered
> difficulties in five."' (Washington Post, 17 December 1998)
> 
> These realities have rarely, if ever, been discussed by the Independent.
> Why not?
> 
> Is it any wonder that the British public has remained largely ignorant of
> a consistent pattern of deceptions and untruths emanating from London and
> Washington for many years? It is easy and largely meaningless to point to
> the few exceptions of genuinely critical reporting and analysis.  As
> Norman Solomon, Executive Director of the US-based Institute for Public
> Accuracy, puts it: 'scattered islands of independent-minded reporting are
> lost in oceans of the stenographic reliance on official sources'.
> (Solomon, Target Iraq: What The News Media Didn't Tell You, New York:
> Context Books, 2003, p.26) 
> 
> If The Independent, and other mainstream media outlets in this country,
> had examined state propaganda with the intense and systematic scrutiny it
> deserved, rather than provide little more than an echo chamber for
> government deceptions, then perhaps Blair would not have been in a
> position to support Bush in the illegal, immoral and disastrous invasion
> and subsequent occupation of Iraq.
> 
> I look forward to hearing from you.
> 
> Best wishes,
> David Cromwell"
> 
> 
> Turning Up The Propaganda Volume To 11
> 
> On the same day, 7 October, we received a reply from our journalistic
> source which began: 
> 
> "It was remarked quite often here [at the Independent] during the 'war',
> how strange it was that several - perhaps a majority - of our main
> columnists favoured the war, while the editorial line was so fiercely the
> other way. That was no more than chance."
> 
> It is noteworthy that though the paper's editorial line was "so fiercely"
> anti-war, there had, in fact, been only feeble scrutiny of the
> government's war rhetoric, as Media Lens has documented in earlier alerts.
> 
> Our source continued:
> 
> "While I was the main leader writer on Iraq before, during and after the
> war, there were others who wrote when I was away or otherwise occupied.
> They were both less anti-war and less anti-Blair than I was."
> 
> The source then added some remarks about that person's role at the paper:
> 
> "Regrettably, perhaps, I have not spent the past five years dealing with
> Iraq, or WMD! I took over this job [diplomatic editor] two years ago,
> after almost five years in Washington. From there, I was covering mainly
> domestic US politics. The 'war' of the time was Kosovo, and I covered the
> US end of that, as well as such things as Monica Lewinsky, the tied
> election of 2000, etc. Iraq, weapons inspections etc was treated as a UN
> story, from New York. Returning to London, I had the whole diplomatic
> portfolio, which included, as I roughly remember, the aftermath of 9/11,
> Zimbabwe, Gibraltar, Afghanistan and its aftermath. Iraq was still covered
> mostly from the UN or from the region (Fisk)."
> 
> The journalist continued: "I only came into the Iraq debate when war
> clouds loomed (spring/summer last year). I did not, and do not, have a
> regular column, so have to compete for comment space with the regulars.
> There was no problem about my expressing a contrary view; there was, and
> is, huge difficulty getting column space at all. The chief outlet for my
> Iraq war scepticism was, therefore, mainly the leader column. But no one
> would have risked having this paper, or probably any other, say in its
> leader column that there were no WMD. The whole government-generated
> consensus was the other way. At that time, also, there was always the
> chance that they could be discovered the next day and then you would look
> very stupid."
> 
> Once again, note that the Independent source is rejecting an indefensible
> position that no reasonable commentator actually took, namely: to state
> categorically that Iraq had +no+ WMD at all. As we highlighted in Media
> Lens's reply above, the paper's editorials and its news reports failed to
> reflect authoritative testimony that UN weapons inspections teams had
> disarmed Iraq of 90-95% of its capability for chemical and biological
> warfare. 
> 
> Note, moreover, the disingenuous phrase, "government-generated consensus".
> This implies a process whereby the sheer volume and intensity of
> government propaganda generates its own authenticity. This is possible
> only if journalists and editors are happy to allow state-sanctioned
> deceptions to become established truths. The media then becomes little
> more than a giant amplifier - turned up to 11! - for propagating war
> rhetoric.
> 
> 
> Through the Looking Glass
> 
> The Independent's source then shed additional light on the tactics of the
> government propaganda machine. This also reveals the extent to which
> journalists and editors were unable, or unwilling, to treat government
> claims with due scepticism:
> 
> "The reporting front was more complicated. We had three 'reporting
> centres', if you like, as did most papers. The MoD, Downing St (the lobby)
> and the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office]. As was clear at the time
> and is even clearer from the Hutton transcripts, the foreign office was
> largely sidelined through the whole Iraq saga. The two dossiers were
> presented first to the lobby. Technical stuff went thro the MoD. The FCO
> people "span" select bits to us, highlighting such wonders as mustard gas
> and reeling off the figures for awful substances Saddam had. But the
> information was coming first out of the lobby and so it was they who
> reported it. I was very 'uncooperative' at FCO briefings, objecting
> regularly that almost none of the information they were giving us was
> current, and that mustard gas (which they made a big fuss about) was
> hardly what most people imagined when they thought of WMD."
> 
> Our source continued:
> 
> "Now, maybe the answer was simply to ignore the FCO and pursue the WMD
> sceptics. The problem for a daily paper was that the lobby was always
> given the "story" - and it is difficult to argue that an equal and
> opposite story (or any story at all) should be written to rubbish it -
> especially as the contrary info - Ritter et al - was by then not new. The
> only new element that I tried very hard to get into the paper (in a long
> report which, to my displeasure, was greatly cut) was the leaked testimony
> of Saddam's son in law, Kamal, who had said under CIA debriefing that all
> stocks were destroyed in 1995. 
> 
> "This was initially leaked to Newsweek in the US, which printed it - to no
> reverberations whatever. There was then a second attempt to get it out in
> this country. But again, no one really wanted to know. I had to use a peg
> about the find of some suspect chemical substance in Iraq to bring in the
> Kamal info, most of which was then cut for reasons of space. That is a
> judgement the news page editor makes."
> 
> Media Lens finds the above technocratic 'explanation' for media
> acquiescence - indeed, media complicity - in the attack on Iraq truly
> remarkable. Note the curious assertion that, because "contrary info" by
> Ritter and others was "not new", it could not be used to challenge, far
> less discredit, the gross deceptions, omissions and lies that were being
> regularly promulgated by government departments. Ignoring the scientific
> fact that any remaining biological weapons would by now be "useless
> sludge", as Ritter and others had explained, is supposedly justifiable
> because it is "not new". This is Alice in Wonderland logic. Imagine
> physical theories about the structure of the universe having to be rebuilt
> constantly from scratch because observational evidence of the Big Bang was
> "not new".
> 
> The Independent journalist also noted that "it is difficult to argue"
> along a line that diverges from government opinion. But +why+ it should be
> so difficult for the supposed watchdogs of democracy to scrutinise US-UK
> propaganda, especially when it has been so patently absurd and false, is
> quietly passed over. So too are the difficult daily judgments that "the
> news page editor makes". These are judgements that systematically benefit
> established power.
> 
> The journalist then continued with a remarkable observation on public
> opinion: 
> 
> "I think our Sunday paper may have done a better job on the weapons
> scepticism than the daily. But the sceptical reports gained very little
> 'traction' with public opinion. I suppose that Downing Street should be
> well satisfied at this propaganda success!"
> 
> Two million people marching in British streets on 15 February, 2003, then,
> represents "very little 'traction' with public opinion". Downing Street
> might indeed "be well satisfied at this propaganda success", achieved with
> the benefit of a largely willing media. 
> 
> A recurring element in the fiction of a vigorous fourth estate is the
> notion that only brief moments occur in the hurly-burly of current affairs
> when government rhetoric can be challenged - and then the moment vanishes.
> As our Independent source put it:
> 
> "It was clever of the government to use the lobby rather than the FCO as
> its outlet for WMD and war stuff. If the lobby correspondent writes up,
> for instance, the 45 minute warning with the PM's imprimatur, it is quite
> difficult for an editor to prefer a story that questions it. A small
> paragraph of scepticism is almost the most you can get in. I regret being
> on hols when the first - Sept - dossier came out, because that would have
> been an opportunity to put an opposite view, but on a daily paper, the
> moment passes. And on the existence or not of WMD, I was thought very
> peculiar even to pose a question about it."
> 
> Again we see the degree to which media professionals have become embedded
> within state-corporate power, isolating themselves from humane,
> progressive and knowledgeable sources who ask unsettling questions and
> challenge received wisdom. To reflect 'alternative' sources - such as
> former senior UN diplomats, weapons inspectors, aid agencies, and
> indigenous voices - would simply be "very peculiar".  
> 
> The journalist continued:
> 
> "I agree absolutely, that Ritter et al were quite scurrilously disparaged
> (I remember that Ritter's sanity was called into question at one point).
> And no one really took seriously Iraq's denials that it had WMD or the
> extent to which it was cooperating with the UN and weapons inspectors.
> Again, I made similar points at editorial meetings, but you have to
> remember how strong the consensus was on Iraq's weapons capability. Ekeus
> and Blix were rather more cautious and ambiguous in their judgements at
> the time than they have been since (and than you suggest), and as for
> [former UNSCOM chief Richard] Butler."
> 
> Regular Media Lens readers will recall previous media alerts - or can read
> them in our archive at www.medialens.org/alerts.html - that show the
> falsity of the above assertion on "how strong the consensus was on Iraq's
> weapons capability."
> 
> The Independent journalist concluded:
> 
> "With hindsight, I think it was a highly successful government propaganda
> job (on both sides of the Atlantic). Unfortunately for them, the
> information at the centre of it - the existence of WMD, which most of the
> government apparently believed in in some form -  has been discredited on
> the ground. I doubt that any of them anticipated that happening: 1. At
> all, or 2. So soon."
> 
> In reviewing the lengthy reply from this senior Independent journalist,
> Media Lens was astonished that there was no mention of UN sanctions,
> covered at length in our email of 7 October. In other words, there was no
> response at all to the well-documented charge that Washington and London
> bear a heavy responsibility for the deaths of around one million Iraqis
> under 12 years of UN sanctions, and that this was largely buried by the
> media. That this tragic reality could be passed over in silence is a
> remarkable example of thought control in the service of power.
> 
> It is also tragic that the Independent, and other mainstream sources, had
> access to authoritative sources that could have utterly discredited
> government propaganda +before+ the invasion of Iraq. Future historians
> will, one hopes, judge the role of the media appropriately.
> 
>  
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> 
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