So
much of mainstream journalism has descended to the level of a
cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission. Subjectivism is all;
slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is “perception,”
says John Pilger.
by
John Pilger
The
death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the
age of the reporter. Parry was “a trailblazer for independent
journalism”, wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in
common.
Hersh
revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of
Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running
conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately
produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had
not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.
Driven
from the “mainstream”, Hersh must publish his work outside the
United States. Parry set up his own independent news website
Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he
referred to journalism’s veneration of “approved opinions”
while “unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged
regardless of its quality.”
Although
journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power,
something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I
joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to
a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form
of corporate dictatorship. This is a seismic shift, with journalists
policing the new “groupthink”, as Parry called it, dispensing its
myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.
Witness
the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the willful
abandonment by the “MeToo” zealots of our oldest freedom,
presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit
hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of a
warning of world war.
With
many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the
“mainstream”, a corner of the Internet has become a vital source
of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism sites such
as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, wsws.org, truthdig.com,
globalresearch.org, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.com
are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in
which science and technology advance wondrously while political and
economic life in the fearful “democracies” regress behind a media
facade of narcissistic spectacle.
Propaganda
Blitz
In
Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media
criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens — remarkable partly
because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David
Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze
not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of
reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, The Guardian, Channel 4 News.
Their
method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful
and polite when they ask why a journalist why he or she produced such
a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted
discredited myths.
The
replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are
hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected
species.
I would
say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism.
Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they
represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the
media’s power.
What is
especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist.
David Edwards is a former teacher, David Cromwell is an
oceanographer. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism
— a term rarely used; let’s call it true objectivity — is a
bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches.
I think
their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just published
book, Propaganda Blitz, in every journalism school that
services the corporate system, as they all do.
Take the
chapter, Dismantling the National Health Service, in which
Edwards and Cromwell describe the critical part played by journalists
in the crisis facing Britain’s pioneering health service.
The NHS
crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as
“austerity”, with its deceitful, weasel language of “efficiency
savings” (the BBC term for slashing public expenditure) and “hard
choices” (the willful destruction of the premises of civilized life
in modern Britain).
“Austerity”
is an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed by its
crooked banks, not its people. The resources that would comfortably
fund the National Health Service have been stolen in broad daylight
by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes.
Using a
vocabulary of corporate euphemisms, the publicly-funded Health
Service is being deliberately run down by free market fanatics, to
justify its selling-off. The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn may appear
to oppose this, but is it? The answer is very likely no. Little of
any of this is alluded to in the media, let alone explained.
Edwards
and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act,
whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most
of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British
governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on
which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private
companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece.
Where,
asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was
making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to
“providing a breadth of view” and to properly inform the
public of “matters of public policy,” the BBC never spelt
out the threat posed to one of the nation’s most cherished
institutions. A BBC headline said: “Bill which gives power to
GPs passes.” This was pure state propaganda.
Media
and Iraq Invasion
There is
a striking similarity with the BBC’s coverage of Prime Minister
Tony Blair’s lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million
dead and many more dispossessed. A study by the University of Wales,
Cardiff, found that the BBC reflected the government line
“overwhelmingly” while relegating reports of civilian suffering.
A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of
western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the
invasion. The corporation’s much-vaunted “principle” of
impartiality was never a consideration.
One of
the most telling chapters in Propaganda Blitz describes the
smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political
mavericks and whistleblowers. The Guardian’s campaign
against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing.
Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism
prizes and largesse to The Guardian, was abandoned when he was
no longer useful. He was then subjected to a vituperative – and
cowardly — onslaught of a kind I have rarely known.
With not
a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative
Hollywood movie deal. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David
Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality”
and “callous.” They also disclosed the secret password he
had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a
digital file containing the U.S. embassy cables.
With
Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing
among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland
Yard may get the last laugh.”
The
Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, “I bet Assange is
stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most
massive turd.”
Moore,
who describes herself as a feminist, later complained that, after
attacking Assange, she had suffered “vile abuse.” Edwards
and Cromwell wrote to her: “That’s a real shame, sorry to hear
that. But how would you describe calling someone ‘the most massive
turd’? Vile abuse?”
Moore
replied that no, she would not, adding, “I would advise you to
stop being so bloody patronizing.” Her former Guardian
colleague James Ball wrote, “It’s difficult to imagine what
Ecuador’s London embassy smells like more than five and a half
years after Julian Assange moved in.”
Such
slow-witted viciousness appeared in a newspaper described by its
editor, Katharine Viner, as “thoughtful and progressive.”
What is the root of this vindictiveness? Is it jealousy, a perverse
recognition that Assange has achieved more journalistic firsts than
his snipers can claim in a lifetime? Is it that he refuses to be “one
of us” and shames those who have long sold out the independence of
journalism?
Journalism
students should study this to understand that the source of “fake
news” is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox News, or Donald
Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a
liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but,
in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. The
amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom The Guardian has
failed to rehabilitate, is its echo.
“[It
is] an age in which people yearn for new ideas and fresh
alternatives,” wrote Katharine Viner. Her political writer
Jonathan Freedland dismissed the yearning of young people who
supported the modest policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as “a
form of narcissism.”
“How
did this man ….,” brayed the Guardian‘s Zoe Williams, “get
on the ballot in the first place?” A choir of the paper’s
precocious windbags joined in, thereafter queuing to fall on their
blunt swords when Corbyn came close to winning the 2017 general
election in spite of the media.
Complex
stories are reported to a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and
omission: Brexit, Venezuela, Russia, Syria. On Syria, only the
investigations of a group of independent journalists have countered
this, revealing the network of Anglo-American backing of jihadists in
Syria, including those related to ISIS.
Supported
by a “psyops” campaign funded by the British Foreign Office and
the U.S. Agency for International Development, the aim is to hoodwink
the Western public and speed the overthrow of the government in
Damascus, regardless of the medieval alternative and the risk of war
with Russia.
The
Syria Campaign, set up by a New York PR agency called Purpose,
funds a group known as the White Helmets, who claim falsely to
be “Syria Civil Defense” and are seen uncritically on TV news and
social media, apparently rescuing the victims of bombing, which they
film and edit themselves, though viewers are unlikely to be told
this. George Clooney is a fan.
The
White Helmets are appendages to the jihadists with whom they
share addresses. Their media-smart uniforms and equipment are
supplied by their Western paymasters. That their exploits are not
questioned by major news organizations is an indication of how deep
the influence of state-backed PR now runs in the media. As Robert
Fisk noted recently, no “mainstream” reporter reports Syria.
In what
is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San
Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to
smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa
Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as “propagated
online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy
theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government.”
This
abuse was published without permitting a single correction, let alone
a right-of-reply. The Guardian Comment page was blocked, as
Edwards and Cromwell document. I saw the list of questions Solon
sent to Beeley, which reads like a McCarthyite charge sheet — “Have
you ever been invited to North Korea?”
So much
of the mainstream has descended to this level. Subjectivism is all;
slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is the
“perception.”
When he
was U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared
what he called “a war of perception… conducted continuously
using the news media.” What really mattered was not the facts
but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared
enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home.
Nothing
has changed. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s
film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerized the German public.
She told
me the “messages” of her films were dependent not on
“orders from above”, but on the “submissive void”
of an uninformed public.
“Did
that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked.
“Everyone,”
she said. “Propaganda always wins, if you allow it.”
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