The Media's War

From: Free Press, October 2001
Richard Keeble

It's a sobering thought that better evidence is required to prosecute a shoplifter than is needed to commence a world war. This was the wry comment of Anthony Scrivener QC after Tony Blair announced to parliament on 3 October the supposed "proof" of Osama bin Laden's responsibility for the atrocities in the United States. As the Daily Mail commented: "Circumstantial it undoubtedly is. A lawyer would have a field day picking holes in it." Only nine of the document's 70 points focused on the 11 September attacks and provided no evidence that directly linked the Saudi-born dissident to them.

Yet Fleet Street could not allow reason to divert it from standing shoulder to shoulder with battle hungry Blair. So editors over-indulged in Orwellian doublethink pronouncing that the dossier did, indeed, provide all the proof needed to justify military attacks on Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban. According to The Times, the evidence was "compelling". It thundered: "There is no further need for diplomacy or room for negotiation: the choice, as the Prime Minister said, is to defeat the terrorists or be defeated. Action is therefore imminent." The Daily Mail, carried away with Blairite adulation, described it as a "remarkable dossier" that "was never intended to be picked over by lawyers."

For the "liberals" of the Guardian, fresh from their rabid support for the Nato bombing of Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo conflict, "it is simply perverse to pretend that anyone other than bin Laden and his group is responsible". And no independent line was forthcoming from the Independent. The dossier, it claimed, was "more than enough to justify action against al-Qa'ida".

The Express was worried about the inadequacy of the evidence against the "prime suspect". But it continued: "We have to accept on trust that the vital piece of the jigsaw pointing to Bin laden's guilt is in place." No such doubts worried the hyper-hawks at the Daily Telegraph. "Even if there had been no evidence at all to link bin Laden with the terrorist attack of September 11 - even if those attacks had not happened - the United States would be wholly justified in tracking him down and killing him, " it commented chillingly.

This Fleet Street propaganda offensive on the "dubious dossier" - just days before the US led attacks on Afghanistan began - was all too predictable given editors' reactions to recent international crises. Instead of calling for restraint and working for a reduction in tensions, Fleet Street has too often backed bombing. Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, editors immediately went on a war footing calling for "surgical" strikes to take out the new-found monster, Saddam Hussein. And later during the Desert Storm campaign, when 200,000 Iraqi conscripts were estimated to have died, no newspaper spoke out against the massacres (though the Guardian was sceptical throughout).

The pro-war consensus emerged again during the Kosovo conflict of 1999. But once Nato's risk-free bombings from the skies began, Fleet Street's armchair strategists united in calling for a ground assault on Serbia. Not even the generals dared adopt this battle plan. Only one newspaper opposed the bombings, the Independent on Sunday, and its editor was removed days after the strikes were halted. Yet while the vast majority of Fleet Street columnists backed the Desert Storm massacres, dissent did surface during the Kosovo crisis and out of 99 columnists I surveyed 33 opposed the bombings.

The post-11 September crisis has again seen a lively debate amongst the columnists. Voices both for and against the military response to the US outrages were heard. Significantly most of Fleet Street's commentary on the press coverage highlighted this diversity. But the hum of controversy amongst the columnists was drowned by the din from the editorials which almost unanimously backed the military option - and by the news coverage which hyped the inevitability of strikes.

Another crucial element of the propaganda war were the public opinion polls (as, for instance, in the Guardian, Observer and Telegraph) which helped in the manufacture of public consent for the military action. For none of the polls explored in any detail public views about peaceful, legal, diplomatic, humanitarian solutions to the crisis: Since the polls were based, like most of the news coverage, on the inevitability of military action, they served to create rather than reflect opinion.

Moreover, the Bush/Blair "war on terrorism", avidly promoted by Fleet Street, crucially ignored the state terrorism of the US and UK and their new-found "allies" such as Russia and Pakistan. And the hyper-personalising of the crisis, with all the focus on "terrorist warlord" Osama bin Laden, diverted attention from other destabilising factors such as the ever-expanding, global military industrial complex. Indeed, the totally disproportionate display of military might around war-ravaged, famine-striken Afghanistan showed a military industrial complex frighteningly out-of control. The "restraint" of the US-led forces, heralded by Fleet Street before the strikes began, was a myth.

Richard Keeble, senior lecturer in journalism at City University, London, is author of "Secret state, silent press" (John Libbey)


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