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Today
is International Press Freedom
Day. It should be welcomed given the service to
a fuller public understanding which a free press can
bring. Throughout the world there is much suppression
of journalists and manipulation of journalism. Writing
two days ago in the Los Angeles Times Ian Masterson
made the point that ‘totalitarian regimes don't
tolerate any distinction between journalism and propaganda’.
But he went on to express a concern about the existence
of a similar phenomenon in liberal democracies. Elsewhere,
Kanak Mani Dixit, reinforced this point:
American
journalists are acting no differently from journalists
in repressive societies when they cower before the
vehement beliefs of the ruling elite. Fear of being
labeled unpatriotic forces US reporters to toe the
line, the same way it happens in, say, Nepal, India,
Pakistan, Kenya, Thailand ... or Iraq.
On
International Press Freedom Day, it seems ironic that
one shackle journalists need to free themselves from
is that of their own self-censorship fuelled by some
sense of patriotism. The Irish Times columnist
Kevin Myers has critically asked, 'what is patriotism other than
a loyalty to current perceptions of one's country?'
Is it the job of writers and journalists to slavishly
acquiesce in such perceptions? Or should their objective
be to enhance the public knowledge of the nation to
which they are patriotic? Nadine Gordimer, for example,
once expressed the matter in these terms: 'I am fiercely
patriotic and loyal about South Africa, but part of
loyalty is the right to be critical when it is appropriate.
To serve your society best you have to be honest and
frank.' Being critical may on occasion extend to incorporate
the position of the 'desert anarchist', Edward Abbey:
‘a patriot must always be ready to defend his
country against his government’.
Two
views of our means of accessing news have come from
those on the American Left who have stood four square
against the war on Iraq. The first from Michael Albert:
We
have suffered a media that reports war like it was
soccer, that obscures context and substance to highlight
dismissive details, and that lies and denies and
even fabricates news so that it is fit to print
in the eyes of the masters. Mainstream media presents
what suits the masters. It obscures what doesn't.
Media mystification so swamps the air waves, the
sound waves, and the byways, that any person not
directly plugged into alternative avenues of thought
and not sustained by a community that ratifies true
information and analysis, cannot help but to some
degree succumb to the fear and loathing and triumphalism
screaming forth from every orifice of society.
The
following from Noam Chomsky
I
actually have a high regard for the American media,
because I think there is a high level of professional
competence in a narrow sense. For example, if some
event is taking place somewhere in the world, and
I had to choose between the descriptions given by
a professional American reporter and reporters from
other countries where I know a lot about, I would
tend, by and large, to rely on the American reporter.
I think there is a high level of professional competence
and integrity in a technical sense. That is, I think
they are not going to lie. Well, there are some
who will, but, by and large, our reporters will,
in a sort of technical sense, try to find out what
is going on. What goes wrong is the choice of topics,
the framework of assumptions, the set of presuppositions
within which things are presented, the emphasis,
the tone and so on.
One
good point about these differing views is the lack
of imposed homogeneity that so often characterises
Left discourse. Yet, it would seem that our experience
of the reporting on the war on Iraq would leave us
hard pressed to find merit in Chomsky’s view.
Certainly,
Eason Jordan - the chief news executive at CNN - failed
to report many of the facts under Saddam’s brutal
regime. When asked by the The New Republic's
Franklin Foer what was the purpose in maintaining
a presence in Baghdad if he could not report on the
findings, Jordan’s response was: ‘First,
because it's newsworthy; second, because there's an
expectation that if anybody is in Iraq, it will be
CNN.’ What sort of answer was that? In return
for access to Baghdad, CNN struck a sordid deal with
a major violator of human rights. Rich Noyes, director
of research at the conservative Media Research Center,
certainly crafts a valid question when he asks ‘if
accurate reporting from Iraq was impossible, why was
access to this dictatorship so important in the first
place?’
A
critique of the lack of accuracy in war reporting
has been made by those journalists whose integrity
means they will rarely be after-dinner speakers at
establishment banquets. John Pilger asks of the media
covering Iraq:
And
where were the pictures from the village of Furat,
where 80 men, women and children were rocketed to
death? Apart from the Mirror, where were the pictures,
and footage, of small children holding up their
hands in terror while Bush's thugs forced their
families to kneel in the street? Imagine that in
a British high street. It is a glimpse of fascism,
and we have a right to see it.
Likewise
Robert Fisk:
It
looks very neat on television, the American marines
on the banks of the Tigris, the oh-so-funny visit
to the presidential palace, the videotape of Saddam
Hussein's golden loo. But the innocent are bleeding
and screaming with pain to bring us our exciting
television pictures and to provide Messrs Bush and
Blair with their boastful talk of victory …On
television, it looks so clean. On Sunday evening,
the BBC showed burning civilian cars, its reporter
"embedded" with US forces
saying that he saw some of their passengers lying
dead beside them. That was all. No pictures of the
charred corpses, no close-ups of the shrivelled
children.
As
part of the process of conditioning the general public
the Pentagon embedded 600 war correspondents - including
some from Al-Jazeera. Amongst them was Oliver North
reporting for Fox News. In his military days he achieved
notoriety as the colonel whose brains were behind
the Iran-Contra scandal. During his broadcasting he
referred to ‘my Marines.’ Some chance of
accuracy and balance in his coverage. Robert Fisk
accurately notes that ‘wars have a habit of turning
normally sane people into cheerleaders, of transforming
rational journalists into nasty little puffed-up fantasy
colonels.’ But North was a puffed-up colonel
long before he ever functioned as a ‘journalist’.
In
Foucauldian terms where there is power there is invaraibly
resistance. And so, not all embeds were hopeless Pentagon
hacks eager to assume the slave to power approach
characteristic of Judy Miller, recently rubbished
by Alexander Cockburn, or Paula Zahn who unashamedly
stated that ‘we at no time want to provide any
information that can be of aid to the enemy.’
Nor were they all to be found drooling at the mouth
in slavish agreement with one of their colleagues,
Ann Coulter, who urges ‘we should invade their
countries, kill their leaders and convert them to
Christianity.’ As Robert Jensen points out ‘such
performances leave the rest of the world with the
impression that American journalists - especially
those on television - are sycophants (and) de facto
war boosters.’ On occasion some embeds provided
versions flatly contradicting Pentagon accounts. Micheal
Foley comments: ‘the so-called embedded reporters
are not always the tame hacks they have been accused
of being.’ They have been aided by others such
as Peter Arnett referred to by The Mirror,
as ‘the reporter sacked by American TV for telling
the truth about the war.’ But telling it in a
manner other than that approved by the political elite
is never easy. According to NBC News correspondent
Ashleigh Banfield:
as
a journalist, I have been ostracized just from going
on television and saying, ‘Here's what the
leaders of Hezbollah, a radical Moslem group, are
telling me about what is needed to bring peace to
Israel’’
Such
blatant cynicism by media corporations when confronted
with a challenge to the dominant narrative not surprisingly
produced the type of public reaction witnessed when
86 per cent of respondents to an Irish Times
on-line poll answered ‘no’ when asked if
they trusted the media's war coverage.
In
the US, the so called land of the free, the era of
Bernstein and Woodward has died - an era where independently
minded journalists took freedom of the press seriously
enough to bring down the country's president. Kanak
Mani Dixit claimed that at one time ‘journalists
worldwide, in the developing world in particular,
looked up to the US press with awe and respect, as
models of probity, independence, courage and investigative
zeal. Watergate was the catchword.’ But no longer,
it seems. Argentinean magazine Noticias, showing
some of the spirit of Jacobo Timerman - once tortured
and imprisoned by the military juanta because of his
oppositon to its murderous regime - accused the US
media of having swapped its ‘sacred sense of
objectivity’ for ‘patriotic disinformation.’
Thankfully, somewhere, media corporate power is still
being challenged. Not everyone is more afraid of being
isolated than they fear being wrong.
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