Charles Glass
The
London media world is under fire and taking shelter. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s
head flack, Alistair Campbell, has challenged the patriotism of the British
press. It’s as if Sid Blumenthal had questioned the loyalty under fire of the
New York Times op-ed writers from Tom Friedman to Bill Safire. There are
reminders of America’s greatest vice-president Spiro Agnew’s denunciations of
the "nattering nabobs of negativism."
Anyone
who visits London this summer will hear the howls of righteous indignation from
the bar of the Groucho Club, the corridors of the Garrick, the rat-infested
sewers of Canary Wharf and the ramparts of Rupert Murdoch’s Death Ship Wapping.
Hell hath no outrage like angry hacks declaring love of country and natural
subservience to power. Campbell’s McCarthyite smear on their collective
character [sic] has brought their John Bull’s blood to the boil and spilled it
onto the pages of their newspapers. The battle within the media elite [sic], for
Campbell himself is an ex-hack, will provide much amusement to a public whose
intelligence is daily insulted by press and government alike.
Campbell
led the assault on media loyalty in a speech to the Royal United Services
Institute for Defence Studies, a research center and club mainly for
ex-servicemen. Most of New Labour’s ministers improved their public standing
with their apparently heroic performances: no photo opportunity missed, aboard
empty tanks and grounded bombers far from the field of battle. Campbell himself
missed the glory, so widely was his mishandling the propaganda war criticised.
At one stage, when his statements and those of Nato’s British spokesman in
Brussels, Jamie Shea, were too obviously in conflict, Campbell flew to Brussels
to coordinate strategy – i.e., get their stories straight. Even after the
Campbell-Shea flack summit, nearly every journalist who followed the war gave
Campbell low marks for the ineffectiveness of his propaganda. If he had lied
more effectively, they might have admired him.
Campbell
declared victory over our hearts and minds and launched a counter-offensive
against a press that increasingly resents his interference and bullying.
"In the face of aggressive media," he told the old soldiers gathered
in Whitehall, "you sometimes need aggression in return." No one,
including fellow travelling New Labour editors of British nationals, can recall
Campbell ever having been unassertive. "It may mean journalists getting
annoyed when you criticise their reporting."
Campbell
did not care for British press accounts of NATO bombardment of refugee columns,
embassies, hospitals and schools. Not that they didn’t happen, just that no one
should have reported them. Referring to press accounts of one "convoy
incident" (his euphemism for the NATO slaughter of Kosovo Albanian
refugees), Campbell conceded that it happened. It was impossible to deny,
although he tried at the time. His admission that "there will be accidents
in war" preceded his lament that the media had reported "that
different things were said in different parts of the operation." He
neglected to mention that he and Jamie Shea were the ones who said the
"different" (that is, mutually contradictory) things in the aftermath
of an atrocity that only Campbell refers to as "an operation."
Campbell
allowed himself a gentle back pat over the bombing of the Chinese embassy, which
most of the world regards still as a diplomatic disaster. "By the time of
the Chinese embassy bombing," he said, we had learnt our lesson." To
stop bombing embassies? No. "Coordination was improved… As a story, it
reverberated for several days less [sic] than the convoy incident." That
is, he and Shea were back in control.
Despite
what he saw as media opposition to his crusade for truth, Campbell claimed to
have achieved his objective. "In the end, our message got through. It got
through to Milosevic, who apparently spent hours watching western TV." How
it got through to Milosevic, when Campbell said that disloyal elements in
control of broadcasting were wasting valuable air time on NATO bombs killing
real people, is something of a mystery. Yet mystery, rule by smoke and mirrors,
is what this government is all about. Anyone who reads the text of its new
Freedom [sic] of Information [sic] Bill knows that mystery will remain at the
center of the enigma of New Labour’s Third Way.
A
junior minister in the Foreign Office picked up Campbell’s theme, saying the
press was "just plain sick" to write that NATO provoked Serb
massacres. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose officials had not
recorded any refugees outside Kosovo until NATO’s bombs fell, came to the same
"sick" conclusion.
The
journalists are fighting back by insisting that their reporting was plus
royalist que le roi. Channel Four correspondent Alex Thomson wrote, "So, if
you want to know why the public supported the war, thank a journalist, not the
present government’s propagandist-in-chief." Well, thanks. The Guardian’s
Maggie O’Kane, a brave Irish journalist who has covered all of Yugoslavia’s
wars, made the same point: "But Campbell should acknowledge that it was the
press reporting of the Bosnian war and the Kosovar refugee crisis that gave his
boss the public support and sympathy he needed to fight the good fight against
Milosevic." John Simpson of the BBC joined the battle. An excellent
reporter, he had already forced the government’s spin-doctors withdraw their
criticisms of his reporting from Belgrade when he considered suing for libel.
Yet he too believes that journalists, rather than exposing the war as illegal or
immoral, were vital to its prosecution: "Why did British, American, German,
and French public opinion stay rock-solid for the bombing, in spite of Nato’s
mistakes? Because they knew the war was right. Who gave them the information?
The media."
It
was left to a few individual voices, notably Australian journalist John Pilger
and novelist Andrew Wilson, to question the legitimacy and legality of an
undeclared NATO war. Pilger wrote for the tiny readership of the New Statesman,
"Thousands of men, women and children, including those Kosovars NATO was
claiming to ‘save’, would now be alive were it not for the post-cold-war
machinations of American power, egged on by Blair, [Defence Minister] Robertson
and [Foreign Minister] Cook with their few ageing Harrier aircraft and squadrons
of propagandists." Wilson asked in the Evening Standard, which does not
circulate outside London, "But do you remember the British columnists
telling us that the war was justified because Milosevic had killed tens of
thousands? Where are the tens of thousands of graves? Milosevic has killed about
as many people [in Kosovo] as the IRA has killed in Ireland."
Pilger
and Wilson are in a tiny minority. Murdoch’s Sun led the war coverage with
headlines like "Clobba Slobba," and, in subtler forms, the others
followed. Britain has nearly twenty daily, weekly and Sunday national
publications Nearly all of them limited the debate to the effectiveness of
high-altitude bombing. Only one paper opposed the war on principle: The
Independent on Sunday. In the aftermath of Kosovo, its editor has just been
fired. He is an accomplished journalist and honorable man named Kim Fletcher.
His successor is, suitably, the former presenter of downmarket television talk
shows.
©
Charles Glass 1999