Tell me lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq
ed. David Millar
London: Pluto, 2003, £12.99, p/back
One of the downsides of appearing every six months is that occasionally books arrive just too late for the issue in which they should appear and by the time the next issue appears they have lost some of their zip. This is one such. When I received it just before Lobster 46 was published, the details of the invasion of Iraq and the way the media handled it, were still fresh in the memory. David Millar, of Stirling University, put this collection of essays together in a hurry to key into those memories. Six months later some of the political edge has gone and Miller’s collection now read less like a political response or intervention than a kind of reader on the Anglo-American major media and its difficulties in reporting the actions of their states during times of crisis.
Some of the contributors are the usual major suspects, Pilger, Chomsky, Herman, Knightley and Fisk. But the Fisk interview I hadn’t seen (he says he was getting a thousand letters a day during the war!), anything by Chomsky and Herman is worth having and the Pilger pieces, written in the weeks preceding the invasion, stand up pretty well. There are interesting snippets on the intelligence services and disinformation, psy-ops, US propaganda and media behaviour.
The material which has survived best is the essays on the workings of the media and state propaganda; and of those the most interesting pieces to me are by the journalists: Tim Llewellyn, former BBC reporter, on how the corporation persuades itself that it isn’t pro-Israeli; Yvonne Ridley on waking-up to the reality of what the major media was doing; and Faisal Bondi on Al Jazeera.
It’s the actual mechanics of news production that interests me: how individual journalists and media organisations square the circles of official disinformation. In the last 20 years I have met quite a few journalists from the major media and what characterises most of them is an absence of politics as I understand the term. Most of them are intelligent people who have interesting, well-paid jobs. They have families and the usual financial commitments. Their priorities are career, competition with their peers, doing a good job (‘being professional’). Into this mix abstract notions like ‘the truth’ rarely arrive unprompted; and more complex notions involving the state, ideology and disinformation, such as those discussed in this collection of essays, are on the fringe of the fringe for them. And they distrust ‘people with agendas’.
While writing this review I was rung by a TV journalist who had just started surveying the ground prior to making a programme about British intelligence in the light of the Iraq experience. He was an intelligent man but knew little about the subject: he hadn’t heard of Richard Tomlinson or Menwith Hill. Yet he was to start filming a couple of weeks after talking to me. He will do a competent job but he will never get close to what I would regard as the important issues. But – this is one of the central points – there is no reason why he should try: his bosses are very unlikely to let him to include those important issues because they are not within the consensus view of what counts as ‘news’ or ‘reality’.
And this is true not just in journalism. Discussing the possible publication of a book on 9-11, an editor in a London publisher e-mailed me recently:
‘There is further an enormous reluctance among publishers to stick their necks out in areas like this. After all, if true, the 9-11 conspiracy renders the last 3 years of history into a nightmarish farce. Consciously or not publishers exist inside the dom-inant narratives of their culture. Even if someone was to write a sober and careful examination of the evidence that drew on highly authoritative sources, there are very few mainstream editors in London (perhaps none in the corporations, funnily enough) who would touch it. Editors tend to be very sensitive to accusations of being “conspiracy theorists”…Publish a book about Diana, 9-11 or JFK and suddenly you are a “conspiracy theorist”.’ (1)
In a sense this book is an account of how that ‘consensus reality’ and those ‘dominant narratives’ are sustained by their creators during a period of stress.
Notes
1 This is a striking contrast to the rest of Europe where there have been many best-selling conspiratorial books about 9-11. See ‘9-11? It never happened’ in Newsweek 22 September 2003 for a survey of some of them.