On another thread I had pointed out how the US military staged the tearing down of Saddam’s statue that was broadcast in the media adnauseam at the beginning of the US led invasion of Iraq, and how the US media ignored it a year later when the military admitted they faked the event. Well here we go again; on April 9th this year at the sight of the staged event in Baghdad tens of thousands spilled into the streets in the largest anti-American demonstration since the US-led invasion. The BBC barely covered it, and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of the story here in the US. This demonstrates how the mainstream media is just a propaganda tool for the government and how we can’t rely on it for any useful and honest information.
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Observations on journalism
By David Edwards
New Statesman
Monday 18th April 2005
Two years to the day after Baghdad fell to US tanks on April 9, 2003, the Press Association reported “the largest anti-American demonstration since the US-led invasion”. The report continued: “Tens of thousands spilled into the streets, waving Iraqi flags and climbing on to an abstract sculpture said to represent freedom and built on the spot where Saddam’s statue once stood.”
Everyone recalls the saturation coverage of a few hundred Iraqis cheering as Saddam’s statue was hauled down in Firdos Square, just as everyone recalls the mass coverage afforded recent demonstrations in the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon. By contrast, Channel 4 News followed its ten minutes of coverage of the royal wedding with 17 seconds on the Iraqi protests.
The programme’s website delivered the facts that mattered: “The bride wore a cream silk basket-weave coat with herringbone stitch embroidery and a chiffon dress with applique woven lacquered disc detail.”
The Orange Revolution, the Cedar Revolution - talk of “tipping points” and “ripples of change” in the Middle East. But when tens of thousands of Iraqis call for an end to our illegal occupation, our slaughter - silence!
Two years ago, the same royal correspondents currently reporting on Charles and Camilla were recruited to lend their considered opinion on the fall of Baghdad. The BBC’s Nicholas Witchell observed: “It is absolutely, without a doubt, a vindication of the strategy.” ITN’s royal watcher, Tom Bradby, agreed: “This war has been a major success.”
Subservience to privilege and power is like a moral illness raging throughout our media, with the Third World acting as its ravaged Dorian Gray ‘portrait’.
The new World Bank president, Paul Wolfowitz, is a “powerful intellectual”, a “very skilful diplomat”, who “believes passionately in the power of democracy and grassroots development”. Thus the BBC’s Matt Frei, who told viewers:
“You have to try and distinguish between the perception of Paul Wolfowitz as he starred in the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11, the famous neo-conservative, and the reality of Paul Wolfowitz, which is actually quite different.”
This of the chief architect of the atrocity in Iraq who, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, talked of “ending states who sponsor terrorism”. This of the man who as ambassador to Indonesia said of the mass murdering Suharto that much of the country’s “progress” on human rights “has to be credited to [his] strong and remarkable leadership”.
But then it is fine for journalists to serve up baseless hagiolatry of Western leaders. Consider, by contrast, this response to serious allegations of US atrocities in Fallujah from the BBC’s director of news, Helen Boaden: “it would not be responsible journalism for the BBC to report such claims without having found hard evidence that they are correct”.
It’s fun to imagine BBC managers nodding in agreement as they nailed hard evidence of Iraqi links to al Qaeda before broadcasting US-UK government claims. And of Iraqi WMD striking within 45 minutes. And of the Iranian “nuclear threat”. Therapy for BBC managers might involve looking in the mirror and repeating: “For you, ‘hard evidence’ is when the powerful claim something is true!”
Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland notes that Bush and Blair are now prevented from bringing peace to places like Darfur because “Britain and the US are simply too overstretched in Iraq”. Moreover, “the invasion of 2003 has tainted the very notion of humanitarian intervention”, so that the public would be “too deeply sceptical” to rally to the call again.
The argument: Britain and the US are too busy killing 100,000 civilians in their illegal occupation of Iraq to restore peace and international law to the world. Curiously, Freedland omits to mention that the notion of “humanitarian intervention” had already been tainted by Hitler’s invasion of France and Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. It’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry.
Back in the real world, Thomas Carothers, director of the Carnegie Endowment Program on Law and Democracy, notes a “strong line of continuity” in the US promotion of ‘democracy’ in the post-Cold War period. Carothers, who served in the State Department on “democracy enhancement” projects in Latin America during the 1980s, identifies the guiding principle:
“Where democracy appears to fit in well with US security and economic interests, the United States promotes democracy. Where democracy clashes with other significant interests, it is downplayed or even ignored.”
Anyone with a shred of integrity and humanity can recognise that Iraq is all about the second sentence.
David Edwards is co-author, along with David Cromwell, of Guardians of Power, forthcoming from Pluto Press
