David Miller,
Pluto Press, London, 1994,
£14.95 (paper) 40.00 (cloth)
In his introduction Miller thanks his ‘colleagues at the Glasgow University Media Group’, from whence came the pioneering studies of the way the British media handle politically sensitive events, such as Bad News, More Bad News and Really Bad News. That, with the book’s title, tells you pretty much what to expect. What it does not tell you about is the quality and thoroughness of Miller’s research: a very large number of people have been interviewed – some for the first time – and pretty well everything in sight has been read. The fact that some of the book’s content is predictable – we know already who the bad guys are; and know, roughly, how the media works in this country – does not diminish Miller’s achievement in putting substantial flesh on those assumptions.
Miller starts with an account of the policing of the media by the state, covering the period from the Second World War through to more recent furores about the TV programmes Real Lives and Death on the Rock, about the Gibraltar shootings. He moves into the development of the propaganda role of the state in the early 1970s in Northern Ireland, including the creation of the Information Policy Unit in 1971. (There is a slight misunderstanding of Inf Pol: Miller treats ‘psychological operations’ as synonymous with disinformation. Not so: only a small part of psy-ops is disinformation.)
In chapter 3 he gives a good account of the mechanics of newspaper coverage; emphasises the importance placed by the British state on international coverage, especially in the USA; and reveals that an IRD-type operation is still running, feeding Foreign and Commonwealth Office material into the US radio network through ‘the London Radio Service’.
Chapter 4 is a study of the international coverage, contrasting the near uniformity of language use among the major British media – the language and the concepts suggested by the state – and that used in overseas media where the British state’s grip is weaker.
In chapter 5 Miller studies people’s perceptions of the shootings in Gibraltar as shaped by the media. Depressingly, if unsurprisingly, he demonstrates empirically that the government’s initial misinformation was successful: it is the first impression which sticks. For the only time in the book Colin Wallace is quoted on this: ‘The important thing is to get saturation coverage for your story as soon after the controversial event as possible. Once the papers have printed it the damage is done. Even when the facts come out, the original image is the one that sticks.’ (p. 238)
Miller notes that, ‘The day after [the Gibraltar shootings] every single British national newspaper and television news programme had given their readers and viewers a false account of what had happened in Gibraltar, there were no apologies and no headlines on government misinformation. It was almost as if journalists could not quite believe that they had been so comprehensively misled.’ (p. 218)
In my limited experience, that would be true for some. Many ‘serious’ journalists have a strong sense that they, perhaps uniquely, can detect bullshit. Others simply would not care; and others would not want to deal with something as awkward as acknowledging that the state/government lies to them. As I said somewhere else: are British journalists cynical? Yes, they are, but usually about the wrong things. Jeremy Paxman may sit on BBC2’s Newsnight interviewing government ministers, thinking, as he apparently does, ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’, but most daily newspaper and broadcast journalists cannot afford to do that: it would just make their jobs too complicated.
The book has two faults. The first, oddly enough, is that what’s missing from Miller’s account is the voice of journalists who have worked in Northern Ireland. The second is related to the first. For all his deconstruction and demystification, Miller has not done enough to show the allegiance to the state among media personnel.
- Daphne Park, for example, of the BBC Board of Governors, is not described as former senior MI6 officer.
- Paul Wilkinson is frequently quoted, but there is nothing on his part in the disinformation campaign against Colin Wallace, discussed in Lobster 16, which led, I am told, to his losing the job as ITN’s ‘consultant’ on terrorism, etc.
- Journalists James Adams and Chris Ryder are treated as straightforward sources despite public knowledge about their disinformation roles.
- Alan Protheroe of the BBC is not described as a former Army TA intelligence officer.
Still, these are minor criticisms of the best analysis I have read of the politics of news production in this country – and the best book about the propaganda struggle over Ireland since Liz Curtis’ Ireland: The Propaganda War.