John Pilger (28 Nov 02) wrote that "impartiality", a sacred word in the lexicon of British broadcasting, has long lost its dictionary meaning and is a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority. To John Reith, the BBC's founder, impartiality was a "principle" that could be suspended whenever the established authority was threatened. He demonstrated this during the General Strike in 1926 by writing much of Prime Minister Baldwin's propaganda, and broadcasting it on the BBC. The same "principle" has since applied to every major social upheaval, notably national strikes and popular opposition to war. From the General Strike to the 1980s miners' strikes, from the colonial wars to the present-day devastation of Iraq, "impartiality" has held sway over truth.
Until recently, television journalism enjoyed more credibility in Britain than in other countries. But no longer. More and more people recognise the depth and subtlety of the bias of the state in the "impartial" broadcast media with fall in public regard for mainstream news, especially among the young.
Last month (Oct 02), a study for the Independent Television Commission, co-written by Ian Hargreaves, former head of BBC News (and a former editor of the New Statesman), acknowledged the depth of this disenchantment. To stem the decline in audiences, the report recommended that the rules on impartiality should be relaxed and that news channels be allowed to follow a clearly defined agenda. But news channels have already been following a political agenda that has moved so far to the right that it accommodates and consumes "official" conservatism. Listen to British broadcasting's drumbeat on Iraq: the channelling and echoing of black propaganda dressed up as news. Here was Tony Blair, "warning the nation of the grim threat in our midst". BBC television news faithfully echoed word for word this propaganda designed to soften up the public for Blair's attack on Iraq - an attack to which the great majority are opposed. Where is the evidence of these "daily threats we face"? Isn't the British government endangering its own people with its incessant belligerence? These are vital questions that independent journalism fail to raise.
Time and again, the real reason for killing innocent people is obfuscated, made to vanish from the news. Who speaks of the depleted uranium that the Americans will use against Iraq, a country already suffering an epidemic of cancer as a result of the last use of this weapon of mass destruction by America and Britain in 1991? Who recalls the truth in the Medical Education Trust report that a quarter of a million Iraqis died during and in the immediate aftermath of the so-called Gulf war? Who knows about the nation of infants who, as Unicef has reported, have perished as a result of a medieval blockade run from Washington and Whitehall?
We depend now on the worldwide web. In America, ZNet is one of the best (www.zmag.org), and displays the work of Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Eduardo Galeano, Boris Kagarlitsky and others rarely seen in the mainstream. In this country, MediaLens is becoming indispensable (www.medialens.org).
Media Lens July 2004
It is a remarkable fact that the modern conception of ‘objective’ journalism is little more than 100 years old. Previously, it had been understood that journalists should both persuade and inform the public. No one worried that newspapers were partisan so long as the public were free to choose from a wide range of opinions. In the United States in the early 1900s, for example, it was known that the commercial press was a mouthpiece of the wealthy individuals who owned it.
The kind of corporate press now glorified as a liberal standard-bearer fooled no one in the 1940s when it was dismissed by radicals for “carefully glossing over the sins of the banking and industrial magnates who really control the nation”. (Quoted, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, University of Illinois Press, 1994, p.45) Balance was provided by a thriving alternative media, including 325 newspapers and magazines published by members and supporters of the US Socialist Party, reaching 2 million subscribers.
Early last century, the industrialisation of the press, and the associated high cost of newspaper production, meant that wealthy capitalists backed by advertisers rapidly achieved dominance in the mass media. Unable to compete on price and outreach, the previously flourishing radical press was brushed to the margins.
Reviewing the history of the British media, James Curran and Jean Seaton write of “a progressive transfer of power from the working class to wealthy businessmen, while dependence on advertising encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press and stunted its subsequent development before the First World War.” (Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility - The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Routledge, 1991, p.47)
The effect of advertising was dramatic:
“In short, one of four things happened to national radical papers that failed to meet the requirements of advertisers. They either closed down; accommodated to advertising pressure by moving up-market; stayed in a small audience ghetto with manageable losses; or accepted an alternative source of institutional patronage.” (Ibid, p.43)
It is no coincidence that just as corporations achieved this unprecedented stranglehold, the notion of ‘professional journalism’ appeared. American media analyst, Robert McChesney, explains:
“Savvy publishers understood that they needed to have their journalism appear neutral and unbiased, notions entirely foreign to the journalism of the era of the Founding Fathers, or their businesses would be far less profitable.” (McChesney, op., cit, p.367)
By promoting education in formal “schools of journalism”, which did not exist before 1900 in the United States, wealthy owners could claim that trained editors and reporters were granted autonomy to make editorial decisions based on their professional judgement, rather than on the needs of owners and advertisers. As a result, owners could present their media monopoly as a ‘neutral’ service to the community. The claim, McChesney writes, was “entirely bogus”.
Built-in to ‘neutral’ professional journalism were three major biases.First, ostensibly to ensure balanced selection of stories, professional journalists decided that the actions and opinions of official sources should form the basis of legitimate news. As a result, news came to be dominated by mainstream political and business sources representing similar establishment interests.
Politicians are elected by voters. Therefore ‘neutral’ journalism involves reporting the views of elected party officials and prominent public figures answerable to them. If these political parties are, themselves, in reality, pre-selected by powerful state-corporate interests (including the media) working behind the scenes - so that Labour and Tories, Democrats and Republicans, offer a barely distinguishable range of policies benefiting the same elites - then that is not a ‘neutral’ media’s problem. If these same parties all reflexively present the iron fist of realpolitik as the helping hand of “humanitarian intervention”, then that is also not the media’s problem.
Second, journalists agreed that a news “hook” – a dramatic event, official announcement or publication of a report - was required to justify covering a story. This also strongly favoured establishment interests, which were far more able to generate the required “hook” than marginalised dissident groups.
Finally, carrot-and-stick pressures from advertisers, business associations and leading political parties had the effect of herding corporate journalists away from some issues and towards others. Newspapers dependent on corporate advertisers for 75% of their revenues are, after all, unlikely to focus too intensively on the destructive impact of these same corporations on public health, the Third World and environment.
The result is the ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ journalism that today consistently promotes the interests and views of the powerful. Ahead of the war on Iraq, all leading US and UK political parties accepted that Iraq was a threat that had do be dealt with. Because journalists saw it as their duty to communicate the various views of officialdom, and because these views formed a consensus, it was deemed inappropriate to explore arguments challenging the consensus. Thus, former chief UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, who claimed his team had “fundamentally disarmed” Iraq of “90-95%” of its WMD by December 1998, was simply ignored. To explore Ritter’s claim was seen as a form of bias that crossed the line into “crusading journalism”. In the Times last week, ITV News political editor, Nick Robinson, wrote:
“In the run-up to the conflict, I and many of my colleagues, were bombarded with complaints that we were acting as mouthpieces for Mr Blair. Why did we report without question his warning that Saddam was a threat? Hadn't we read what Scott Ritter had said or Hans Blix? I always replied in the same way. It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking... We are not investigative reporters.” (Robinson, ‘”Remember the last time you shouted like that?” I asked the spin doctor’, The Times, July 16, 2004)
Rarely has the inherent bias of mainstream media ‘objectivity’ been more openly declared. As we now know, Blair massively distorted “sporadic and patchy” intelligence on Iraqi WMD to invent a “current and serious threat”. By failing to investigate the truth, to challenge the government, ‘neutral’ reporters allowed Blair to bamboozle his way to war. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have paid the price with their lives, and countless thousands more have been horribly maimed.ReferenceMEDIALENS: The Bias in Balanced Journalism, www.medialens.org (July 28, 2004)John Pilger, Impartiality of British Journalism, ZNet 28 Nov 2002