Rather than dismissing it, the Left should be intelligent consumers of the mainstream media

Rather than dismissing it the Left should be intelligent consumers of the mainstream media
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
15 November 2019

There seems to be an increasing and dismaying tendency amongst some people who self-identify as left-wing to dismiss mainstream media reporting out of hand.

Anything the Guardian or other corporate newspapers report is ridiculed and ignored. For example, I recently tweeted about a Guardian article which gave an overview of the ongoing protests around the world. I quickly received this sarcastic response: “From the newspaper that supports Assange [the Guardian has repeatedly smeared Julian Assange]… The Sun seems honest in comparison.” What part of the article did my correspondent take issue with? “I’d rather ignore that rags liberal pretensions from here on. They’re just a collection of churnalists and presstitutes” they replied.

I agree, of course, that the Guardian and the rest of the mainstream media are horribly compromised and establishment-friendly in much of their journalism and political positions.

Though most journalists do their best to ignore it, there is copious amounts of academic research which confirm this. In his new book The Media, the Public and the Great Financial Crisis, Dr Mike Berry from Cardiff University shows how the British media played a key role in narrowing the national debate after the 2008 financial crisis in ways that suited elite interests. Similarly, the new Pluto Press book from the Glasgow Media Group, Bad News For Labour, explains how the often erroneous coverage of the antisemitism controversy by the print and broadcast media has led the general public to massively overestimate its incidence within the Labour Party.

Notwithstanding this strong evidence I would like to make the case for a more nuanced and intelligent engagement with the mainstream media by left-wing and progressive people.

Because while the left should oppose the way the corporate media inevitably sides with elite power, there is nevertheless important information to be gleaned from its reporting through careful and critical monitoring. They are, after all, the news organisations with the biggest budgets, best access to policymakers and largest staff rosters, including journalists reporting on the ground across the world.

Moreover, it is important to understand they are not monolithic structures – radical voices and useful information will often appear. Speaking to Andrew Marr in 1996 for the BBC Big Ideas programme, US dissident Noam Chomsky talked of investigative journalists in the US who “regard the media as a sham” and “consciously talk about how they try to play it like a violin. If they see a little opening, they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through.” Interviewed for the 2016 documentary All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception and the Spirit of I. F. Stone, US filmmaker Michael Moore said something similar: “He [I. F. Stone] said ‘When you pick up the paper you go to page 17 first. Don’t read the front page. Skip the front page. Go to page 17 because that’s where the truth is. And it’s going to be really small. It might be in a little two paragraph story, or it will be buried in paragraph 78. But that’s where they are putting it, and they know what they are doing.’”

Writing in his 2008 book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies provides a fascinating example of this from 2002-3. Davies records how Observer journalist Ed Vulliamy’s story looking at concerns within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about intelligence on Iraq had been rejected five times by the newspaper, which had taken a strong pro-war position under editor Roger Alton. “At the sixth attempt… Vulliamy had finally managed to slip a small fraction of his story… into the paper – as the final two paragraphs of a 1,200-word story on page 16”, Davies relates.

If you read Chomsky’s work critiquing US foreign policy you will see his arguments are often backed up by mainstream media sources. Likewise UK media watchdog Media Lens often use arguments and information sourced from one part of the mainstream media to criticise the coverage of another part of the mainstream media. Another example is Voices in the Wilderness UK, the grassroots anti-sanctions and anti-war group which produced some of the most well-informed, critical coverage of the US-UK attack and occupation of Iraq. If you take a look at their regular newsletters it’s clear they were buying and reading the Telegraph, Times, Financial Times, Guardian and Independent every day – and sometimes tabloids too – to assist in gaining a full understanding of what was going on.

When it comes to ‘defence’ news the Telegraph is well known to be close to the armed forces, and therefore may publish information of interest to those who oppose war. During the occupation of Iraq, for example, it was the Telegraph which published the leaked 2005 internal Ministry of Defence poll which found 45 per cent of Iraqis believed attacks against the US and UK troops were justified (rising to 65 per cent in the British controlled Maysan province).

I myself have collected some of the most damning quotes I’ve heard about UK military aggression abroad from BBC programmes.

It was listening to BBC Radio 4‘s The World Tonight in February 2009 that I caught Colonel Richard Kemp, Commander of British forces in Afghanistan in 2003, saying British forces used White Phosphorus in Afghanistan and Iraq “even in areas that do have a certain amount of civilian population”. Indeed it was in the right-wing Spectator magazine in January 2009 that Daniel Yates, a former British soldier, reported the British military was using White Phosphorus in Afghanistan “almost daily”.

Amidst the colonial-style violence and pro-military propaganda, there was also a hugely telling quote from a British soldier in Our War: Return to Death Valley, the 2012 BBC3 documentary series about Afghanistan. “One of the problems, especially with IEDs [improvised explosive devices] on the route 611 is that the insurgents aren’t trying to blow up the Ancop [Afghan National Civil Order Police], or even the civilians, they are just trying to blow up us”, Lieutenant Jimmy Clark from 2nd Battalion, Mercian Regiment noted about an operation to secure a road in Helmand province. “So we are actually in a position where we are protecting a route which only needs protecting because we use it.”

A similar sentiment was aired about the British occupation of Iraq on The World Tonight in February 2007: “90 per cent of the attacks here, or the violence levels recorded here, are against the British.  If you took the British out of it 90 per cent would drop, and you would be left with a residual bit”, Major General Jonathan Shaw, Commander of the British Forces in Basra, explained.

Of course, we should read and support alternative, non-corporate media outlets – the Morning Star, Peace News, Media Lens, Tribune magazine and Novara Media to name a few – and we should be vocal in our criticism of the corporate media. However, we shouldn’t forget a careful and critical engagement with mainstream news can often uncover important information and arguments that can be used against elite interests.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

The original Fake News? The BBC and the Information Research Department

The original Fake News? The BBC and the Information Research Department
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
9 January 2019

Last month Ritula Shah presented a BBC World Service discussion programme titled Is ‘Fake News’ A Threat To Democracy? Predictably the debate focused on Russian attempts to influence Western populations and political systems.

Asked whether the US has been involved in similar activities, Dr Kathleen Bailey, a senior figure in the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the 1980s, was dismissive: “We [the US] certainly do not have a budget, bureaucracy or intellectual commitment to doing that kind of thing.”

Carl Miller, the Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, also played down the West’s activities: “I think Western countries do do less of this as a kind of tool of foreign policy than autocracies”.

“Read real journalism” – presumably BBC journalism – was one of the guest’s suggestions for countering Fake News.

Putting this self-serving and self-congratulatory narrative to one side, it is worth considering the BBC’s, and particularly the BBC World Service’s, own relationship to the British government’s own propaganda.

“Directly funded by government [the Foreign Office], rather than the licence fee” the World Service is “deeply embedded in the foreign policy, security and intelligence apparatus of the British state”, Dr Tom Mills notes in his must-read 2016 book The BBC: Myth of a Public Service.

In particular, the BBC had a very close relationship to the Information Research Department [IRD] – “a Foreign Office propaganda outfit which sought especially to foster anti-communist sentiments on the left”, explains Mills, a Lecturer in Sociology and Policy at Aston University.

Set up in 1948, the IRD “was one of the largest and best-funded sections of the Foreign Office until it was discreetly shut down in 1977 on the orders of [then Foreign Secretary] David Owen”, investigative journalist Ian Cobain reported in the Guardian in July 2018. A 1963 Foreign Office review of IRD sets out the work of the covert unit: “The primary aim is unattributable propaganda through IRD outlets – eg in the press, the political parties… and a number of societies”.

Focusing on the Soviet Union and its supposed influence around the world, “IRD material poured into the BBC and was directed to news desks, talks writers and different specialist correspondents”, according to Paul Lashmar and James Oliver in Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, their 1998 history of the clandestine organisation. The programming of the BBC’s Overseas Service [which would change its name to the World Service in 1965] “was developed in close consultation with the Foreign Office and its information departments”, they highlight.

The BBC “were seemingly quite content to be directed by the FO [Foreign Office] as to how to deal with Middle Eastern personalities, and enquired whether it was desirable for them ‘to deal in a more or less bare-fisted manner with any of the leading statesmen (or their principle spokesmen)’”, notes Simon Collier in his 2013 PhD thesis on IRD and UK foreign policy. Infamously, the BBC played a key role in the US-UK assisted overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, with the signal for the coup to begin arranged with the BBC. That day the corporation begun its Persian language news broadcast not with the usual “it is now midnight in London”, but instead with “it is now exactly midnight”, reveals historian Mark Curtis in his 2003 book Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World.

When it came to nuclear war, the BBC was similarly careful about what was broadcast, effectively banning the dramatised documentary film War Game in 1965 (even though they had originally commissioned it). Discussing the film’s depiction of a nuclear attack on the UK, the Chairman of the BBC wrote to the Cabinet Secretary arguing that the “showing of the film on television might well have a significant effect on public attitudes towards the policy of the nuclear deterrent.”

Though formally concerned with foreign influence, IRD also took a close interest in UK domestic politics, including in the Northern Ireland conflict, aswell as carrying out campaigns against people they suspected were Communists and trade unionists. For example, writing in the Guardian last year Cobain reported “senior figures in Harold Wilson’s Labour government plotted to use a secret Foreign Office propaganda unit [IRD] to smear a number of leftwing trade union leaders”, including Jack Jones, the General-Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. In the same report Cobain highlights a letter the BBC Director General wrote to IRD in 1974 asking for a briefing on “subversives” working in broadcasting. This, it seems likely, was a complement to the wider political vetting the BBC undertook, with the help of MI5, between the 1930s and 1985. Communists and members of the Socialist Worker’s Party and Militant Tendency were barred from key positions at the BBC, or denied promotion if they were already working for the corporation, according to a memo from 1984, with an image reassembling a Christmas tree added to the personnel files of individuals under suspicion.

It is important to understand the relationship between the BBC and IRD and the wider British state was kept deliberately vague, a quintessential British fudge of formal and informal connections and influence. “Many of the executives of the BBC had gone to the same public schools, and inevitably Oxbridge, with their Foreign Office colleagues”, note Lashmar and Oliver. “Both were part of the establishment, attending the same gentleman’s clubs and having an implicit understanding of what constituted the national interest.”

Cutting through this fog, Mills provides a concise summary: “During the Cold War period the BBC was… distributing propaganda material in close cooperation with the British state”. However, he is keen to highlight that though “there is a temptation to view all this as merely a feature of the Cold War… there is no good reason to think that there is not still significant collusion”.

He quotes Dr Emma Briant, who notes in her 2015 book Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism the BBC Director General receives direct briefings from the UK intelligence services “on the right line to take on whether something is in the national and operational interest to broadcast.”

Indeed, out of all the UK broadcasters’ coverage of the Iraq War, the BBC was revealed to by the most sympathetic to the government, according to a 2003 study led by Professor Justin Lewis from Cardiff University’s School of Journalism. Defending the BBC’s reporting in a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2003, then BBC Director General Greg Dyke noted he had “set up a committee… which insisted that we had to find a balanced audience for programmes like Question Time at a time when it was very hard to find supporters of the war willing to come on.” The same committee “when faced with a massive bias against the war among phone-in callers, decided to increase the number of phone lines so that pro-war listeners had a better chance of getting through and getting onto the programmes”, Dyke explained. This “was done in an attempt to ensure our coverage was balanced”, Dyke wrote, apparently with a straight face.

Moreover, academic studies on issues such as the Israel-Palestine conflict and the financial crisis shows the BBC has tended to reflect “the ideas and interests of elite groups, and marginalised alternative and oppositional perspectives”, to quote Mills on the BBC’s overall journalistic output.

Turning to contemporary politics, in 2016 Sir Michael Lyons, the former Chair of the BBC Trust, raised concerns about the corporation’s coverage of new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn “I can understand why people are worried about whether some of the most senior editorial voices in the BBC have lost their impartiality on this”, he noted.

As is often the case, a careful reading of establishment sources can provide illumination about what is really going on. Concerned about the government proposed cuts to the World Service, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee highlighted the propaganda role of the BBC in 2014: “We believe that it would not be in the interests of the UK for the BBC to lose sight of the priorities of the FCO, which relies upon the World Service as an instrument of ‘soft power’.”

Fake News indeed.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Media Amnesia and the economic crisis: Interview with Laura Basu

Media Amnesia and the economic crisis: Interview with Laura Basu
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
6 December 2018

Earlier this year Dr Laura Basu, currently a researcher with the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, published Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis. In the book, Basu provides a sharp critique of the British media’s coverage of the crisis, analysing 1,133 news items from the Guardian, Telegraph, Sun, Mirror and BBC between 2007 and 2015, and conducting interviews with journalists.

Ian Sinclair asked Basu about how this Media Amnesia relates to public opinion, the importance of Ed Miliband’s positioning of the Labour Party during the crisis, the role of the Guardian and how media reporting can be changed for the better.

Ian Sinclair: Regarding the economic crisis, what do you mean by Media Amnesia, and what are its primary characteristics?

Laura Basu: Media amnesia in general refers to the ways that media can forget, misremember and rewrite events over time, in ways that can serve particular interests. With the economic crisis, this amnesia happened in spectacular fashion. As the crisis morphed from a banking meltdown to recession, to public debt crises to a living standards crisis, media narratives about the problems also shifted. Blame was reallocated to the public sector. Suddenly, instead of talking about the greedy bankers and the faulty free market economic model, it was all about public sector waste, Labour overspending and benefits scroungers. This helped legitimise austerity, more privatisation and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. So media amnesia helped legitimise an intensification of the same economic model that produced the crisis in the first place.

This amnesia happened at incredible speed, and involved the media rewriting its own very recent coverage of events. To a large extent, this was a very active, politically-motivated selective amnesia, pushed by Conservative politicians and the right-wing sections of the press. But it was also passively reproduced by the public broadcasters and more liberal media.

IS: How does this Media Amnesia relate to public opinion?

LB: The media forgot the real causes of the crisis and reallocated blame onto the public sector. This helped narrow the range of debate and make certain crisis-responses appear as common sense. The crisis was the result of the dynamics of the neoliberal form of capitalism that became dominant in the 1970s and 80s. It’s not that this analysis was splashed all over the media at the time back in 2008 – the media analysis was mostly more superficial – but there was some acknowledgement that deregulation, free-markets-gone-wild and ‘casino capitalism’ were the culprits. Even the right wing papers blamed deregulation and the culture of greed. This recognition of structural problems with the economic model could have been an opportunity to discuss a whole range of possible alternative models. But the deeper problems were quickly forgotten and this was accompanied by an extreme narrowing of the debate about solutions.

At the same time, the shifting of blame away from the banks to the public sector meant that serious financial reform fell off the media agenda while austerity began to seem like common sense – if the problems were caused by excessive public spending, it makes sense that we should be talking about reducing public spending. And, forgetting that the neoliberal model had produced the crisis meant that bringing in further neoliberal reforms in response to the crisis, like deregulation and corporation tax cuts, seemed less absurd than they may have done had the real causes been remembered.

IS: What effect did Ed Miliband’s Labour Party not fully opposing austerity have on media reporting of the economic crisis?

LB: All media agendas – regardless of which political party a media outlet supports or if they are required to be impartial like the public broadcasters – tend to be led by Westminster. Pretty much all analyses of the sources journalists rely on, including my own, show that politicians and other state officials are the ‘primary definers’ of news – they set the terms and parameters of debate. This means that if the opposition party does not strongly oppose a government policy, or doesn’t offer a real policy alternative, criticism and alternatives are unlikely to make it into media coverage at all. Ed Miliband’s soundbite about austerity was ‘too far too fast’. And that translated into the media debate – discussions revolved around how much austerity there should be and the timing of cuts, rather than whether there should be any austerity and what other kinds of policies could be pursued. Similarly, the 2015 Labour manifesto promised that Britain would continue to have the most competitive rate of corporation tax in the G7. This meant that these kinds of ‘business friendly’ policies did not receive much scrutiny.

IS: What did you find regarding the Guardian’s reporting?

LB: That was very interesting. The Guardian has a different ownership and organisational structure than other mainstream newspapers. And the Guardian journalists I spoke to do feel that they have more autonomy than their colleagues at other outlets. And that could help explain why there was more diversity in the Guardian coverage than in the other outlets. On the one hand, pieces by Seumas Milne, Zoe Williams, Aditya Chakrabortty, George Monbiot and others, were genuinely critical and tried to change the terms of the debate. On the other hand, a lot of the news reporting and comments pieces tended to reproduce narratives and assumptions coming from within the establishment. When it came to austerity, the Guardian contained a lot of highly critical coverage about the cuts the government was implementing. However, it was criticising the extent of the cuts and the way the cuts were carried out, rather than opposing austerity per se or hashing out what other kinds of policy agenda could be pursued. The implicit assumption was that some austerity was necessary.

IS: How can we, as a society, cure ourselves of this dangerous Media Amnesia?

LB: We can campaign for media reform. There is now an interesting media reform agenda in the UK, coming from the Media Reform Coalition and other groups. We need a media that is free from control both of the state and of corporations. We need a plurality framework to break up media oligopolies and give journalists more independence. We need to reform the BBC to make it more independent and more representative. And we need large-scale public investment in media that serve the public interest. This kind of reform would be done through the mechanism of the state, but should be decentralised, in such a way as to support an ecosystem of non-profit media collectives. This goes not just for content provision but also for digital infrastructure. We might think that social media provides a good alternative to the old-school media barons, but the digital giants are some of the biggest monopolies in economic history. We need public alternatives that help us understand the world in which we live and enable us to take informed political action.

Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis is published by Pluto Press, priced £24.99.

 

Book review. Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis by Laura Basu

Book review. Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis by Laura Basu
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
December 2018-January 2019

This is an essential read for anybody – activists very much included – who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of the 2007–2008 economic crash and its subsequent political after-shocks, from the election of Donald Trump in the US to Brexit and rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

However, first and foremost, the book is a sharp critique of the media’s coverage of the economic crisis.

As well as interviewing journalists, Laura Basu, a researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University, has analysed 1,133 news items from the Guardian, Telegraph, Sun, Mirror and BBC between 2007 and 2015.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model – along with other theoretical frameworks – is cited as relevant to the patterns of media coverage set out in the book.

Basu’s central, very persuasive, thesis is that a ‘phenomenon of media amnesia [concerning the history and causes of the crisis]… has been created purposely by politicians and sections of the press’. Facts and arguments go unreported, presenting audiences with a very particular ideological framework that has legitimised neoliberal ‘solutions’ to the crisis.

Basu argues there are three primary characteristics of the media coverage that have contributed to this political con trick: a lack of historical context, a narrow range of elite perspectives, and a dearth of global context.

For example, she highlights how, after the crisis was successfully framed as an outcome of overspending by previous Labour governments, the media and focus groups largely accepted that austerity should be the response.

Of course, this makes sense if the problem was Labour profligacy, though it ignores the structural and global causes of the crash, and sidelines the Keynesian responses to the crisis advocated by Nobel Prize-winning economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz (who advocated policies such as ditching austerity, fundamental reforms to the financial system, and kickstarting the economy with ambitious government spending).

With the media defining the bounds of debate as the positions of the main political parties, Labour’s decision, under Ed Miliband, not to significantly oppose the Coalition government’s cuts was disastrous.

Indeed, this political weakness likely influenced the progressive media like the Guardian, which Basu notes accepted some degree of austerity.

‘The Guardian projects an image of representing a social democratic agenda, but when social democrats begin to attain positions of power the paper closes ranks’, she argues, referencing the paper’s coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Detailed and academic with a wide-ranging bibliography, this is an accessible and engrossing read, concluding with a range of potential cures for the Media Amnesia that are worthy of activists’ attention, from greater media plurality to Dan Hind’s intriguing proposals for the public and democratic commissioning of investigative journalism.

Basu has also co-edited The Media and Austerity (Routledge, 2018) which, judging from her references to it here, should also be revelatory.

Changing the Media to Beat Climate Change

Changing the Media to Beat Climate Change
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
27 September 2018

A common, dispiriting problem activists often face is the difficulty in discerning any direct effects of all their hard work.

This does not apply to Dr Rupert Read’s latest action on climate change.

On 1 August Read, Chair of the Green House thinktank and a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, tweeted that he decided to turn down an invitation from BBC Radio Cambridgeshire to debate with a climate change denier. “When the call came through, my initial instinct was to say ‘Yes’, just because it is a media opportunity”, he tells me. “But before the word ‘Yes’ left my mouth, something deep inside me made me hesitate – and say ‘No’. I couldn’t stomach it any more. I couldn’t see how, in the midst of a summer of climate chaos, it made any sense to be debating whether this was really happening.”

The next day Read published an online piece with the Guardian – retweeted by the former Head of BBC News Richard Sambrook – arguing that by giving climate change deniers “a full position, producers make their position seem infinitely more reasonable than it is” even though “the scientific debate is as settled as the ‘debate’ about whether smoking causes cancer.”

“I will no longer be part of such a charade”, he pledged, calling on others to refuse to debate with climate change deniers.

This wish became a reality on 27 August, when an open letter organised by Read was published in the Guardian pledging exactly this. Importantly, it was signed by the great and the good of the green world, including Jonathan Porritt, Greenpeace’s John Sauven, Caroline Lucas MP and George Monbiot, along with Morning Star editor Ben Chacko.

Then, amazingly, on 6 September, Fran Unsworth, the BBC’s director of news and current affairs, sent a briefing note to BBC journalists on climate change, including the corporation’s editorial policy.

“Climate change has been a difficult subject for the BBC, and we get coverage of it wrong too often”, it reads.

Under the heading What Is The BBC’s Position? the note explains “Man-made climate change exists: If the science proves it we should report it”, before asking journalists to be aware of “false balance”.

“To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken.”

The note does say there may be occasions where “contrarians and sceptics” could be included in debates, though the example given is “debating the speed and intensity of what will happen in the future, or what policies government should adopt”, rather than whether climate change is happening at all. Promisingly, it says the BBC should highlight which organisation a speaker represents and “potentially how that group is funded” – something climate activists have long pushed for.

CarbonBrief news website, who published the internal memo, noted “this is the first time the BBC has issued formal reporting guidance to its staff on this topic.”

“I think that this memo is a game-changer”, comments Read. “The BBC is a ‘world-leading’ media organisation, and it has been dragging its feet on this for so many years. Now, perhaps, no longer. I am hoping that what we have done on this will ‘go international’; and in the meantime I am looking at seeking to ensure that other UK broadcasters follow or indeed exceed the BBC’s lead here.”

“What broadcasters need to do now is to have the right kinds debates about climate”, he adds. “Who wants a carbon tax, and why? What are the possible downsides of geoengineering technologies? etc. We need to put pressure on them to do this, right.”

However, a note of caution needs to be added to the huge victory it looks like Read triggered with his actions.

As Justin Lewis, Professor of Communication in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University, has noted, the erroneous presentation of climate change as a debate is just one problem with the media’s coverage of the topic.

For example, as well as providing news, the media is an important vehicle for advertising, with the corporate press in the UK relying on advertising for more than half of its income.

This pervasive advertising promotes “the pleasures of consumerism” and helps create “a set of cultural conditions that make us less inclined to deal with climate change”, according to Lewis and his co-author Tammy Boyce in their 2009 book Climate Change and the Media. “Advertisements may be individually innocent” but “collectively they are the propaganda wing of a consumerist ideology… our current growth in consumption is unsustainable”, Lewis argued in a 2011 Open Democracy article.

The Guardian, seen by many greens as the newspaper that best reflects the environmental movement, is not immune to this humanity-endangering ideology, with a December 2012 editorial preposterously titled Shopping: Your Patriotic Duty.

Another connected problem with the news media when it comes to climate change is its reckless reporting of economic growth, the engine that is driving up carbon emissions.

For her new book Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis, the academic Laura Basu studied 1,113 news and comment items from the BBC News at Ten, Guardian, Telegraph, Sun and Mirror between 2007 and 2015. She found just one of the 1,113 pieces challenged the assumption that economic growth was a good thing – a 2008 Guardian op-ed written by Monbiot.

In thinking about the media and climate change, Boyce and Lewis “insist that a media and telecommunications industry fuelled by advertising and profit maximisation is, at the moment, part of the problem rather than part of the solution.”

If correct, this analysis creates additional obstacles to the central argument made by Naomi Klein in here 2014 book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate – that stopping climate change will require mass social movements successfully “challenging the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism”.

Because if Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has taught us anything it is that the British media is overwhelmingly hostile to significant change that takes power away from the corporate-backed British elite, mass grassroots movements and any attempt to increase democracy within the Labour Party itself.

And though it may seem unconnected, the BBC’s pro-establishment coverage of the 2008 financial crisis highlights just how wedded the media is to the current economic system. There was, for a brief historical moment, a chance for fresh thinking and policies following the crash. Instead, in a 2012 study Cardiff University’s Mike Berry found in the weeks after the banking collapse the debate on the BBC Today Programme “was almost completely dominated by stockbrokers, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other City voices. Civil society voices or commentators who questioned the benefits of having such a large finance sector were almost completely absent from coverage.”

“The evidence from the research is clear”, Berry notes. “The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative… pro-business version of the world, not a left-wing, anti-business agenda.”

Being positive, Read’s actions pushing the BBC to cover climate change in a more serious and helpful way shows that significant changes can be made. However, successfully challenging the media’s reliance on advertising, its assumption that economic growth is positive and its de facto support of the neoliberal status quo – all of which will needs to happen if we are to stand a chance of stopping climate change – is a substantially larger, far more difficult task.

Furthermore, time is very short. “Climate change is moving faster than we are”, Antonio Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, recently warned. Discussing the 2015 Paris climate agreement, he noted “these targets were the bare minimum to avoid the worst aspects of climate change.” However, “scientists tell us that we are far off track”.

“Nothing less than our future and the fate of humankind depends on how we rise to the climate challenge.”

And the award for ‘Best channeling of government propaganda during wartime’ goes to…

Here is a double-page spread published in the Sun on 20 March 2003, a day after the start of the US-UK invasion of Iraq.

 

Iraq Body Count: Real and Imagined

Iraq Body Count: Real and Imagined
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
4 April 2015

“We don’t do body counts”, US General Tommy Franks, Commander of US forces in Afghanistan, infamously stated in 2002.

Depressingly, much of the mainstream media’s (lack of) coverage of the post 9/11 wars has broadly mirrored Western Government’s disinterest in those killed by their aggressive foreign policy.

This failure of journalism has had a predictable effect on US and UK public understanding of the Iraq War. A 2007 Ipsos poll of US public opinion included a question about how many Iraqis the interviewee thought had died in the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation. The median answer given was 9,890, with 72 percent of respondents believing under 50,000 Iraqis had died. Similarly, a 2013 ComRes survey found 74 per cent of Britons estimated that less than 50,000 Iraqi combatants and civilians had died as a consequence of the war, with 59 per cent estimating that less than 10,000 Iraqis had died. Only 6 per cent of the poll’s respondents estimated the death toll to be over 500,000 Iraqis.

It is this ginormous gap between public knowledge and reality that makes the new report from the Nobel Prize-winning Physicians For Social Responsibility (PSR) so important. Titled ‘Body Count’, the paper investigates the total number of deaths caused by the so-called War on Terror. PSR estimates the war “directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.” Though they believe this shocking figure to be a conservative estimate, PSR note it is “approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs.”

The report is particularly good on the relative merits of the different mortality surveys conducted in Iraq, comparing Iraq Body Count (IBC) with the 2006 Lancet survey. IBC, which recorded approximately 110,000 dead Iraqi civilians between 2003 and 2011, is repeatedly cited by the media. In contrast, the Lancet study’s estimate of 655,000 Iraqi dead was quickly attacked and rejected by politicians and many journalists.

Of course, the differing responses can be explained by how the respective results fit with Western Governments’ self-serving narrative of the war. This conclusion is inescapable when one considers an earlier mortality study on the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which used similar methods to the Lancet study, had been uncritically accepted by Western governments. In addition the Ministry of Defence’s Chief Scientific Advisor noted the Lancet study’s design was “robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to ‘best practice’ in this area”. As one of the report’s chapter headings says: the Lancet’s methodology is “barely disputed among experts”.

In contrast, the report explains how the IBC’s passive counting of Iraqi civilian deaths using Western media outlets and registered deaths by hospitals and morgues severely underestimates the total number of dead. The gaping flaws in their methodology are numerous and serious: Western media reports were often based on US military or Iraqi government sources, both of whom had a vested interest in downplaying the number of civilian dead; the Baghdad-based Western media’s coverage of provincial Iraq was patchy at best; as the level of violence rises in a particular area there is a corresponding reduction in media coverage; Western occupation forces often blocked journalists from investigating instances of civilian deaths; Iraqi government statistics from morgues were deliberately downplayed for political purposes.

There is a lot of hard evidence for the IBC’s gross underestimation. For example, in 2007 Najaf governorate’s spokesperson said they had buried 40,000 non-identified corpses since the start of the war. The IBC database records only 1,354 victims in Najaf. IBC recorded no violent deaths in Anbar province in June 2006, despite it being a stronghold of violent resistance to the occupation at the time.

Since the report was released on 19 March 2015, there has been zero coverage in the supposedly free and questioning British media. In addition to being morally reprehensible, this omission has huge ramifications for democracy and foreign policy: How can the British general public make informed decisions about foreign policy if they are not aware of the consequences of military action carried out by the UK and its allies?  T

his mass ignorance is no coincidence. Rather it is advantageous to the US and UK Governments. “The figure of 655,000 deaths in the first three war years alone… clearly points to a crime against humanity approaching genocide”, notes the PSR report about the 2006 Lancet survey. “Had this been understood and recognized by the public at large, the Iraq policy of the US and its European allies would not have been tenable for long.”

*Please note my article reproduces a couple of small factual errors from the original PRS report. Please read the comments below for more details.

“Baa! Reluctant warrior! Baa!”: Professional journalists fall in with the flock

“Baa! Reluctant warrior! Baa!”: Professional journalists fall in with the herd
by Ian Sinclair
1 October 2014

Journalists are “awash in countless highly ideological assumptions that are anything but objective”, noted Glenn Greenwald in 2012. “These assumptions are almost always unacknowledged as such and are usually unexamined, which means that often the journalists themselves are not even consciously aware that they have embraced them.”

Like Andrew Marr, corporate journalists who see themselves and their colleagues as latter day Woodwards and Bernsteins will find this description of their profession hard to swallow.

However, Greenwald’s perceptive comments are particularly relevant to the ongoing media coverage of the US bombing of Iraq and now Syria. Take the following examples of the common description of President Obama’s stance on Iraq and Syria:

• Cathy Newman, Channel 4 News Snowmail, 10 August 2014: “The US president, a notoriously reluctant warrior, has been forced to reconsider his hands-off, softly-softly approach to foreign policy.”
• Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, 3 September 2014: “Barack Obama is the reluctant interventionist.”
• Title of editorial, Independent, 11 September 2014: “The reluctant warrior: Barack Obama came to power after opposing the Iraq War. To salvage his second term, he has to write its postscript’.
• Peter Foster, The Telegraph blog, 23 September 2014: “Barack Obama has justifiably been tagged the reluctant warrior during his six years in office.”
• John Sopel, BBC News, 24 September 2014: “Perhaps the most significant thing this reluctant warrior has done is assemble a broad-based coalition.”

Compare these herd-like statements with the simple fact Obama has now bombed seven countries – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. (The Brooking Institution says Obama has also bombed The Philippines, though this has been denied).

On what planet, then, can all of these supposedly free-thinking, often highly educated journalists describe Obama as a “reluctant warrior?” Perhaps the journalists are comparing him to other world leaders? If so, which leader has bombed more countries than Obama? Or perhaps the journalists are comparing him to other US presidents? If so, which ones do they have in mind?

More likely (and more frightening) is that the journalists in question are, as Greenwald points out, blindly repeating “highly ideological assumptions… not even consciously aware that they have embraced them.” Less All The President’s Men then, and more Manufacturing Consent.

‘It Never Happened’ – US Intervention in Syria

‘It Never Happened’ – US Intervention in Syria
by Ian Sinclair
Huffington Post
23 September 2014

Though it’s rarely mentioned in polite company, Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech continues to resonate nearly ten years later.

“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest”, Pinter explained about the death and destruction caused by the United States across the globe. He went on: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.”

How can something not happen even while it was happening, you ask? Let me explain.

In June 2012 the New York Times, published a report headed ‘CIA Said To Aid In Steering Arms To Syrian Opposition.’ According to the report “a small number of CIA officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey” coordinating the delivery of arms to rebels in Syria, including “automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons.” In March 2013 the New York Times published another report, titled ‘Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From CIA’. This report noted the arms deliveries had “grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes”. According to the New York Times the size of the arms transfers were such they “correlated with shifts in the war within Syria, as rebels drove Syria’s army from territory by the middle of last year.”

So, to summarise, in mid-2012 the most influential newspaper in the world reported the US was helping to arm the rebels – a fact confirmed by subsequent stories in the New York Times itself aswell as numerous reports in other mainstream news outlets around the world.

Contrast this publicly available, easily accessed information with these summaries from the mainstream media of the ongoing US role in Syria:

• The Telegraph, 21 April 2013: “While Saudi Arabia and Qatar are both known to be
channeling arms to the rebels, there was no indication that the United States, Britain or other western allies might follow suit.”

• New York Times, 4 May 2013: “President [Obama] seems to be moving closer to providing
lethal assistance to the Syrian rebels, even though he rejected such a policy just months
ago.”

• The Guardian, 8 May 2013: “The US, which has outlawed al-Nusra as a terrorist group, has
hesitated to arm the FSA [Free Syrian Army]…”

• The Guardian, 23 July 2013: “Obama, who has been reluctant to engage too deeply in the
Syrian conflict, changed [his] position on arming opponents of Assad’s regime last month”.

• New York Times, 9 September 2014: “Mr Obama has resisted military engagement in
Syria for more than three years, out of fear early on that arming the rebels who oppose Mr
Assad would fail to alter the balance in the civil war.”

• BBC Today Programme, 11 September 2014, Presenter Mishal Husein to US
Ambassador: “If you [the US] had helped the moderate Syrian opposition, the Free Syrian
Army, three years ago, even two years ago, we might well not be in the position that we are
now. President Obama’s reluctance to intervene and to take action on Syria has contributed
to what we are seeing now.” (1 hour 52 minutes in)

As Pinter said, “Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening”.

Why are all of these professional journalists – supposedly a profession made up of stroppy, questioning cynics – incapable of stating the most basic of facts about the US role in Syria?

The recent admission of former senior Reuters journalist Andrew MacGregor Marshall may provide the answer. Describing Reuters’s Iraq coverage as “pretty useless”, the ex-Baghdad Bureau Chief explained “there is a certain discourse that becomes normalized, in which certain views are acceptable and others not.” In this atmosphere, if you make obvious factual statements “you are often marginalised as some sort of looney figure”, he notes. “It is through this process that the mainstream media basically becomes a tool of misinforming people, rather than informing people.”

Another reason is alluded to in a September 2013 New York Times article that noted “Saudi Arabia, quietly cooperating with American and British intelligence and other Arab governments, has modestly increased deliveries of weapons to rebels fighting in southern Syria”. The US and UK cooperation with Saudi Arabia is covert, the report explained, because “American and British intelligence and Arab Governments… do not want their support publicly known”.

By refusing to inform their readers that the US has been arming the rebels in Syria since 2012 the mainstream liberal media have done exactly what best suits the US and UK governments. And by so closely following the US and UK Governments’ preferred narrative, the media continues to minimise the US’s responsibility for the on-going carnage in Syria and the rise of Islamic State.