[Media-watch] MEDIA ALERT: NO MEA CULPA FROM THE BRITISH MEDIA - PART 1

[antony_wright at blueyonder.co.uk]

Media Lens Challenges Senior Editors

"The evidence suggests we have no need for a mea culpa. We did our job well." (David Mannion, Head of Independent Television News, to Media Lens, August 2004)


Blair - Refreshed And Refocused

It is an ugly reality that, every day, people are dying in Iraq as a result of the criminal actions of Western leaders who remain comfortably in office. Journalists describe how, 'refreshed' after his summer break, Tony Blair is 'determined to focus on domestic issues' - another bitter irony from a man who has endlessly indulged his love of parading the international stage.

News of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq has been buried beneath patriotic headlines of ecstatic and crestfallen Olympians. The "terrible distress" of one exhausted British marathon runner was deemed worthy of far more extensive and emotive coverage than armoured superpower thrusts into Najaf and Falluja. Noam Chomsky explains the emphasis:

"This is an oversimplification, but for the eighty percent [of the public] or whatever they are, the main thing is to divert them. To get them to watch the National Football League. And to worry about 'Mother With Child With Six Heads,' or whatever you pick up on the supermarket stands and so on. Or look at astrology. Or get involved in fundamentalist stuff or something or other. Just get them away. Get them away from things that matter. And for that it's important to reduce their capacity to think." (Quoted, Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky and The Media, Mark Achbar Ed., Black Rose Books, 1994, p.90)

Iraq does still merit occasional mention. On the BBC's Newsnight, Gavin Esler noted that US crimes at Abu Ghraib prison had produced: "Images that shamed America's mission in Iraq." (Newsnight, 24 August, 2004) Much as crimes in Kabul shamed the Soviet Union's mission in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Esler's comment recalled his Newsnight colleague Kirsty Wark's observation last year that the declining humanitarian situation in Iraq threatened to "take the shine off" the "Shock and Awe" bombing campaign (Newsnight, 21 March, 2003). One wonders if Chinese journalists warned that similar problems threatened to "take the shine off" China's invasion of Tibet in 1949. The BBC's Caroline Hawley noted in July that the interim Iraqi government would need to ensure the security of the Iraqi people "if it's to keep their support" (BBC1, 18:00 News, 28 July, 2004). The propaganda is often subliminal, but rarely this crude.

According to a two-month survey carried out by an Iraqi non-governmental organisation, the People's Kifah, comprising hundreds of activists and academics, more than 37,000 Iraqi civilians were killed between the start of the US-led invasion in March 2003 and October 2003. (Ahmed Janabi, 'Iraqi group: Civilian toll now 37,000', 31 July, 2004, http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/66E32EAF-0E4E-4765-9339-594C323A777F.htm)

We searched in vain for coverage of this important survey in news reports by ITN, the BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, Financial Times and others. On 30 August, 2004, we conducted an online news search, using the extensive Lexis-Nexis database, and were able to find only two mentions in the UK press: one, a brief account in the Western Mail, a Cardiff-based newspaper, on 26 August. The only other mention was a passing reference in a Guardian comment piece by activist Tariq Ali. ('The withdrawal of foreign troops is the only solution', The Guardian, 12 August, 2004)

More ..... http://www.medialens.org/blog/archives/00000082.htm