The past week has borne witness to that vanishingly rare event: a bout of media self-examination. We've seen major news outlets like the BBC and Channel Four step back and reflect on the quality and accuracy of their output, even going so far as to publicly apologise for mistakes that were made. Well, sort of.
The media have not acknowledged their consistent misreporting of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, in which they create a false symmetry between the two sides and strip the violence of the necessary context in which it becomes intelligible. The situation is so bad that when a BBC reporter accidentally lets slip something approximating reality, he is roundly condemned by fellow journalists for exhibiting an "unbelievable" and "poisonous" "degree of bias".
They have not reflected upon their apparent compulsion to demonise and misrepresent 'official enemies', such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez or the state of Iran, the likely target of President Bush's next 'adventure' in the Middle East. As the UK media watchdog group Media Lens have pointed out, the media finds itself unable to mention Chavez without attaching to him a derogatory prefix: see "strongman" (Channel 4), "controversial left-wing president" (BBC TV News), "extreme left-winger" (BBC Radio 4), "controversial leader" (The Mirror), "outspoken" (The Independent on Sunday), "aggressively populist" (The Times), "left-wing firebrand" (The Independent), "international revolutionary firebrand" (The Observer), "maverick" (The Sunday Times), "virulently anti-American" (The Independent), and so on. The extent to which the mainstream British press is biased against Chavez is illustrated by the recent, manufactured "controversy" over his decision to not renew the public license of a TV channel (RCTV) that openly participated in an illegal coup against him. The typical media line was that Chavez "shut down" RCTV because it was "critical" of his government, or because it was a voice of "dissent". When the station's involvement in the 2002 coup d'etat was mentioned, it was typically framed as an accusation made by Chavez and his government (who, as we have seen above, had already been thoroughly smeared by this point), rather than what it was: namely, an independently verifiable fact. In reality, RCTV was never "shut down" - it's public license was simply not renewed, in full accordance with the law. The station could still broadcast over satellite and cable and, on Monday, it started doing so - Oil Wars has a video. Despite the hysterical (and politically convenient) level of media coverage Chavez' decision not to renew RCTV's license generated, at the time of writing neither The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent or The Times have reported on the station's reopening (the Financial Times, the AP and the BBC have done so, to their credit). The New Statesman recently published what may well be one of the most biased pieces of 'journalism' ever written, describing Chavez as a "power-crazed" "tyrant" who "shut down" RCTV for its "anti-government bias". With this level of reporting, it's no wonder Hélène Mulholland, the London delegate to the recent annual conference of the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ), characterised the majority of mainstream press coverage of Venezuela as "badly affected by deliberate attempts at spreading disinformation".
The treatment of Iran has been even worse. Knowing full well that the U.S. government is preparing for a possible attack on the country, the mainstream media is once again propagandising for power, constantly hyping up the threat posed by Iran to the rest of the world whilst minimising or ignoring the far greater threat Iran itself faces from the aggressive, nuclear-armed world superpower and its regional client. In the mad rush to demonise the enemy, facts have, predictably, been left behind. Take, for example, what one analyst has called the "rumour of the century" - a mistranslation of a speech by President Ahmadinejad to the effect that he wants to see Israel "wiped off the map", widely interpreted in the media as a threat of military action against Israel. In fact, he said no such thing. It was a misquote, easily checkable, and yet (despite a gradual, partial climbdown) mainstream journalists continue to cite it despite the fact that it has long been thoroughly debunked. But even if the quote were accurate, what is almost never reported is that Iran couldn't destroy Israel even if it wanted to and that Ahmadinejad, elected on promises of domestic reforms, has no authority over foreign policy whatsoever. The real power in that regard lies with the Ayatollah Khamenei, who has repeatedly stated that "all native Palestinians, whether they are Muslims, Christians or Jews, should be allowed to take part in a general referendum before the eyes of the world and decide on a Palestinian government". The official Iranian position is anti-Zionist, but it does not call for an attack on Israel (the Saudis even claim to have secured Iran's support for the Arab peace initiative, which calls for a two-state solution). Disgracefully, the many Iranian statements saying that Iran is not a threat to Israel have received far less collective coverage than a single misquote from a man with no authority over the matter anyway - needless to say, the many statements by U.S. and Israeli politicians threatening Iran far more explicitly and with far greater credibility have also received scant coverage. Such is the rush to demonise the enemy. I can't recall reading in any mainstream newspaper that when British and American politicians refuse to take military action against Iran "off the table", they are violating Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter. The Guardian stooped even lower recently, elevating to the front page what was essentially a Pentagon press release accusing Iran of preparing for open war on U.S. forces in Iraq, in what media analyst Edward Herman described as a relapse of the "Judy Miller syndrome". Once again, the establishment press is performing the required function, softening the public up for war.
There has been no apology for the consistent minimising and downplaying of the horror we have inflicted upon the people of Iraq. A peer-reviewed, professionally conducted survey into Iraqi morality rates, published in the prestigious Lancet medical journal, last year put the excess deaths in Iraq since the 2003 invasion at 655,000 - that is, 655,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, on top of an already inflated mortality rate as a result of the pre-war "genocidal" sanctions regime. The Ministry of Defence's Chief Scientific Advisor described the study as "robust" and "close to best practice". A more recent estimate, based on the Lancet survey, puts the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the invasion and occupation at close to a million. Despite this, the media have invariably opted for the much lower casualty figures of the Iraq Body Count website, which passively surveys those Iraqi deaths reported by at least two reputable media sources. As Iraq Body Count themselves admit (though not nearly prominently enough), they "rely on the combined, and self-correcting, professionalism of the world's press to deliver meaningful maxima and minima for our count". They continue,
"Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths - which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war."
Despite this, journalists have continued to cite the IBC's gross underestimate of civilian deaths, often without qualification - an outrageous dereliction of duty given the huge responsibility Britain bears for the carnage. As one editor bafflingly explained, "I've used the 35,000 figure [from Iraq Body Count] because that is the lowest number". That the Lancet survey is cited at all is largely thanks to the tireless efforts of groups like Media Lens, who have relentlessly confronted journalists about their distortions. The media, itself heavily complicit in the invasion of Iraq, has continued to misrepresent the situation there, largely ignoring the massive Coalition air assault on the country (U.S. aircraft 'dropped 437 bombs and missiles in Iraq in the first six months of 2007, a fivefold increase over the 86 used in the first half of 2006, and three times more than in the second half of 2006...In June, bombs dropped at a rate of more than five a day') and generally portraying Coalition forces as innocent bystanders, merely trying to keep Iraqis from killing each other. To do this it has been necessary to downplay the strength and popular support of the Iraqi resistance and falsely equate it with al-Qaeda and "foreign fighters", who in reality constitute only a tiny minority of the insurgency.
There has been no reflection on the media's propensity to whitewash the crimes of the leaders of Western or client states, there's been no look at the tendency to ridicule popular movements (if they're reported at all) and there has certainly been no attempt to analyse the corporate structure of the media and examine the consequences of this on the accuracy and objectivity of mainstream reporting.
No, there's been none of that. Instead, the BBC has apologised for making the Queen appear to have a tantrum when in fact she didn't and has admitted to editing footage for the antiques show 'Flog It!' to make it seem like a woman was bidding on one auction when in fact she had been bidding on another, whilst Channel Four apologised for misleading viewers into thinking that Gordon Ramsay had caught some fish.
Hurrah for media accountability!
Published at UK Watch and The Heathlander