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Speech at the conference “The First Casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today”, London School of Economics, November 17, 2007. Nick Davies is an award-winning investigative reporter who writes regularly for the Guardian.

I’m not an expert on Iran or Iraq. I think I’m here partly because I’ve been a hack, a reporter, not just a journalist but a guy running around with a notebook and a pen, for an extraordinarily, ridiculously long time, but also because in the last couple of years I’ve decided to do something rather weird which is to interrogate my colleagues, which has turned into a book to be published next year called Flat Earth News.

The reason it has that title is that for hundreds of years everyone knew the Earth was flat. Indeed it was a heresy to challenge that statement. Eventually someone, Galileo or Copernicus, bothered to check and discovered they were wrong. But if you look at the way the mass media functions today you’ll see we are riddled with “flat earth” statements.

The most notorious, deadly one of those, or collection of those, was everything we were told in the build up to the invasion of Iraq. It was that in particular which made me want to do this. What I want to try to convey is that we can’t understand what went wrong with the media in the build-up to Iraq unless we understand that what went wrong is part of a much bigger picture in which the media now routinely, consistently convey falsehood, distortion and propaganda. Although this has always happened to some extent, I want to argue that this is now happening on a far greater and destructive scale than it has done previously. Speakers in an earlier session talked about systemic weakness, and that’s what I want to try to explain to you – why we are delivering so much flat earth news.

Remember the Millennium bug story? That’s a classic piece of flat earth news. The global media just consuming falsehood and distortion, pumping out this stuff. It’s wonderful, to look back on the cuttings – utterly unreliable. Most of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton was, to use the technical term, bollocks. Just pushed out on this huge scale.

And there’s flat earth policy. I’ve done loads of work over the years on criminal justice, drugs policy, education, digging deep down into government policy, looking at the factual foundations on which this policy is built, the evidence. And what do you find? Nothing. Just a black hole of populist misconception and self-serving politics. It’s terrifying. Routine, small stories flowing through the media. The scale of it is huge.

If you say that to people outside the media on the whole they’ll rapidly they’ll sign up to the idea that you can’t believe everything you read, but what worries me is that if you ask them why you tend to get flat earth stories back about the media itself. So for example there’s been quite a bit of talk today about proprietor interference. The likes of Rupert Murdoch do interfere, it’s part of the picture, it’s disgusting and immoral that they do, perhaps even more disgusting and immoral that it’s so easy for them to do so. You’ll hear people talking about corporate advertising influencing the content of the media. Maybe it happens. I’ve really tried to find evidence of them doing that successfully. You find it in local papers, you find it in specialist magazines like fashion mags, but in the national media that ain’t where it is.

Sami Ramadani was really interesting about ideology earlier today. But if you take proprietor influence, advertising and ideology and say those are factors that perniciously influence the media and then ask how much of the total picture are they responsible for I want to argue that it’s 5 or 10 per cent. That isn’t where the problem is. There’s a much, much bigger problem at work here.

Let me try to explain. I raised a lot of money from the Rowntree Foundation and gave it to some academics at Cardiff University. One of the things I got them to do was to go back through the annual reports of every Fleet Street company going back to 1985. 1985 is an important year because in January 1986 Rupert Murdoch moved his newspapers into Wapping and broke the print unions. He broke the resistance, such resistance as there was in Fleet Street, to the logic of commercialism, to what those big corporations which had taken all those newspapers over wanted to do.

The academics did two things. Year by year they looked at what happened to the editorial staffing levels of those Fleet Street papers over the next 20 years. The second thing they did was they measured the space which those editorial staff were filling, how many column inches of news. You crunch all those numbers for all these companies and you come up with something that is really important – essentially, your average Fleet Street reporter now is filling three times as much space as he or she was 20 years ago. Turn that round, look at it from the reporter’s point of view: we only have one third of the time to do our job. That’s terribly important.

If you take time away from some processes, like if you’re manufacturing cars and you take time out so you do it quicker you can argue that this improves the process, it makes it cheaper so you can sell more and put more money back into production. But if you take time away from reporters you take away our most important working asset. We cannot do our jobs properly if they won’t give us the time to do it. It’s as simple as that. We’ve been caught in this pincer movement where our staffing levels have been cut, our output has been increased – all the newspapers have extra supplements, you have 24-hour broadcasting – the whole nature of being a reporter and the back-up journalists involved has changed: instead of being active news gatherers we’ve become passive processors. Most reporters nowadays don’t have contacts, we don’t go out and find stories, we don’t check facts.

We did a huge analysis with these Cardiff researchers of the extent to which you can look at factual statements in Fleet Street stories and find evidence of whether or not they’ve been checked. The answer was that there is evidence in 12 per cent of those statements. 12 per cent. It’s pathetic. But that’s the reality. It’s not because the journalists are dishonest. It’s not because they’re being told to do so by advertisers or Rupert Murdoch. It’s because we’re not allowed to do our job. I call this “churnalism”. That’s the first part of the picture.

Nevertheless we’ve got to fill all these supplements, all these 24 hours of broadcasting. Where are we going to get our material from? While we’ve been losing our jobs, somebody else has been getting more and more jobs. Which is the PR industry. There was an invisible moment at some point in the last decade when the number of PR people in this country finally exceeded the number of journalists.

When we’re talking about PR, first it’s the whole magical world of Alastair Campbell in central government, which has flowed down into every local authority in the country, and the police and the health service, every limb of the state now has press officers working for it. Even when I started, 30-odd years ago, it wasn’t like that. When I started on local papers, if you wanted to write a story about a hospital you phoned the hospital you talked to the hospital manager or a doctor. Now you deal with a PR. Across the public sector – and across the private sector. All corporations now defend themselves. And charities and even terrorist groups! Everybody has PR people.

Whereas you should have a system where journalists, working honestly and independently, make what used to be called news judgments and say this story is important, this angle needs to be expressed, this research needs to be done, instead now we sit there passively and those decisions are made by Alastair Campbell and the whole magic world of PR and the public and private and the charity sector and the terrorist groups. They write the press releases and we bung ‘em in.

And it isn’t just about press releases. It’s about deeply manipulative behaviour. So for example, PR companies work very assiduously to set up front groups. These are phony grass-roots groups. There are so many phony grass-roots groups in the US that they have a nice little term for them, they call them Astroturf, because they’re not real grass.

A classic example of an Astroturf group is the Iraqi National Congress, the INC. The INC didn’t just emerge out of nowhere, it was invented and created by a man called John Rendon, a PR guy who used to work for the Democrats, he ran Jimmy Carter’s PR campaign. And since the American invasion of Panama in 1987 has been working on contract for American intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, running PR campaigns to change the way we think and feel about the world. And it’s very easy. Once you’ve reduced journalists to churnalism, all they have to do is feed us stories. So John Rendon says okay, we’re going to change the way the world looks at Iraq, I need a story, I’ve got a huge budget from the State Department, I’ll create the INC, I’ll hire Ahmed Chalabi and all these other guys, we’ll hold conferences in Vienna and London, we’ll invite the hacks, the hacks will write the story, we get them to put it across. It’s easy.

While PR has become so huge and so sophisticated and so successful in effectively writing our stories for us and doing our work for us, alongside that, almost unnoticed since September 11, 2001, there has been a significant increase in old-fashioned propaganda activities. PR on the whole doesn’t deal in fiction. Alastair Campbell and his ilk will lie to you if you put them in a corner, but they don’t really want to lie. Really what it’s about is making our judgments for us, picking which story, which angle, which quote, but often it’s in the realm of truth. Propaganda is about fiction.

There’s always been a threat of propaganda, for years and years going back to Elizabethan times, certainly it was active during the Cold War. That’s got much bigger and institutionalised. The problem with propaganda is that it doesn’t tell the truth about itself. The expression it uses is “strategic communication”, so you find that military, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies, particularly in the United States but also in Britain, France and all the NATO countries, are grouped together in order to manipulate us vulnerable hacks into running stories that are fiction.

There are marvellous examples of it. You can see them running on Iran now. I love the Zarqawi story. Remember Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Huge chunks of the Zarqawi story were produced by this strategic communications machine. Absolute bollocks, to use that technical term again. Remember when he first surfaced Zarqawi only had one leg? Then later on when he was on video cutting people’s heads off miraculously he had sprouted a second one. They’d lost their own story line!

If you’re trying to understand what needs to be done to get the media to tell the truth, it’s not just about the traditional explanations about advertising, owners and ideology. They are there, I’m not denying that, and they are pernicious and wrong. But it’s to do with the structural weakness of our profession. Our jobs are being taken away, our output has been increased, we are now almost infinitely vulnerable to being manipulated – and so we are. And that’s why we are seeing the same thing happening about Iran as you earlier saw with Iraq.

In this book that I have written I did a chapter on the Observer. It’s fascinating and scary. It’ was a model of manipulation of a newspaper in the build-up to Iraq where all of this was at work. The PR people, particular from Downing Street, Alastair Campbell’s people working on Kamal Ahmed, the political editor. He resigned a few weeks ago because of the book, he doesn’t want to tell the truth about it. The intelligence agencies producing the anthrax story were working through David Rose. Very interesting. David Rose is actually a very good, experienced reporter, he was completely flipped over on his head, writing absolute crap because he was being manipulated by MI6 and the CIA. And I’ve traced it all. That’s the propaganda element. It’s just scary.

The impact of that was huge, because that’s the paper that’s read by backbench Labour MPs who had to vote in the House of Commons on the Blair resolution. It really mattered. It’s the sickening ease with which it now happens.

If you want to understand what’s going wrong it’s fascinatingly complex.
The internal procedural workings, the operational pressures that incline us towards more falsehood and distortion – it really is interesting how you look at it and find how rotten it is at its core.

The other thing that concerns this meeting is what we can do to improve it. I’m very pessimistic. I think we’ve lost it, I’m afraid we’ve lost the idea of the mass media are anything like a reliable source of information. In an imaginary world I’d like the media to be put through the same sort of regulation as foodstuffs, so that you have to label the content of a newspaper, so you would need some institution to be funded and set up to test the extent to which a particular media outlet produces falsehood and distortion. So the Guardian would have to run its running average – over say the preceding six months, for example, and say, 56 per cent of this newspaper’s output turned out to be not true.

The trouble is that this is an imaginary world. There is no way that I can see that there is anywhere in this country the political power to engineer that kind of change. The question is whether that’s politically possible. I think everyone who has been critical of the Press Complaints Commission is entirely right. I did a huge analysis of their last 10 years of operation and it’s embarrassing to be told as a professional that this organisation is responsible for holding you to standards. It does absolutely nothing. It is an outrage.

Speech at the conference “The First Casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today”, London School of Economics, November 17, 2007. Peter Wilby has a column in the Media Guardian and is a former editor of the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman.

I want to talk about the systemic failures of journalism that led to the problems of the coverage of the Iraq war, which in my view will lead to similar problems with the coverage of the Iran war – which I am sure is going to come sooner or later.

I wrote a leader in the New Statesman (Sep 30, 2002) in the week of Alastair Campbell’s notorious dossier. It came out on a Wednesday so I didn’t have very much time to read it and I didn’t at that stage know how it was going to relate to the press:

“Most people, if they are honest, will confess that the technicalities of the debate on Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities are beyond them. Tony Blair’s dossier provides little enlightenment and was never likely to, as most of the new assertions depend on intelligence that is necessarily vague. Ministers are no better equipped than the rest of us to judge whether a grainy photograph actually shows a missile site, much less whether it is a threatening one. Equally, the journalists now touring factories in Iraq wouldn’t know a phial of Sarin from a thimble of finest malt.

“A few things stand out. Saddam wants uranium (we knew that; that’s why we have sanctions), but, even if he got it, he would need a factory to make nuclear bombs. He would also need the means to deliver them and other weapons of mass destruction. The dossier’s claim that he can ‘deploy’ them within 45 minutes produces the dramatic headlines that Alastair Campbell no doubt demanded. But what does it mean? Deployed how, where, against whom? According to Scott Ritter, ex-head of the UN inspection team, the designs of ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ which the team saw up to 1998 would produce rockets ‘that would spin and cartwheel . . . go north instead of south . . . blow up’. Iraq would have to test missiles. The tests would be detectable and presumably the sites could be bombed. So where lies the argument for all-out war?”

I think that one thing I’d like to note about that, which I think stands the test of time pretty well, is that I quote Scott Ritter, and you can’t get much more authoritative than the former head of the UN inspection team. Yet Ritter was an example – there are other examples – of someone who was treated as a complete non-person by the media at the time. He was hardly ever interviewed on television or radio and was hardly ever quoted in the newspapers.

If you look back at the Daily Telegraph through the whole of 2002-2003 Scott Ritter was only ever quoted on 16 occasions. And there was nearly always an adjective in front of the name Scott Ritter – he was nearly always described as “controversial” or “irascible” and reports of his remarks were almost always followed by American claims that he was an apologist for Saddam Hussein. And many of the occasions when he was mentioned in the Daily or Sunday Telegraph it was when there were attempts to smear him as a corrupt sex maniac.

I could give a lot of examples from our own trade of journalism. John Pilger, in my view one of the most able and objective critics of the war and the media. He appears fortnightly in the New Statesman. But again he is somebody who as far as the mainstream newspapers are concerned is very much marginalised. I noticed recently that the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs gave details of the 100 most influential people on the left, including all sorts of people I’d never heard of, but at number 100 there was John Pilger, with the comment that he was still somebody who appealed to gullible young people, he had a small but visible following. This is only a man who gets hour-long documentaries on ITV that attract audiences into the millions.

As to the core of the systemic failure, the way in which what has been called the “public relations state” operates, the way in which the government tries to establish a narrative and thus control the news agenda. Of course the opposition tries to do the same. And essentially politics in this country is a competition between the government and the opposition to establish a narrative of events. Sometimes the government has the upper hand, sometimes the opposition. What is very difficult, even for a backbench MP, is for anybody outside that system to establish an alternative narrative. That’s what we saw in the case of the Iraq war. There was no serious division between government and opposition on policy.

The second problem was that there was a shortage of credible alternative sources on the facts. Intelligence is necessarily a shadowy area of nudges, winks and disinformation. Almost nothing from intelligence sources is ever said on the record, so readers can’t judge the reliability of the source. Journalists are grateful for what can be presented as secret information so they are rarely willing to treat it sceptically. Suppose you are a journalist and you are told that 1,000 terrorists are plotting to blow up railway stations. Well that’s probably going to make a splash, so the journalist isn’t going to write a second paragraph saying this is a load of hyped-up rubbish. That I think is one of the problems.

The war on terror is a perfect example of a narrative that is controlled entirely by official sources. Nobody from outside can say how it is going. Nobody can say how big the threat is or where the enemy is or anything. When Singapore fell during the Second World War, nobody could very easily deny that it had fallen. During the Cold War nobody could say that the Soviets had marched into West Germany when nobody had actually seen them do so. But when you hear of victories, defeats and threats in the war on terror they are by their nature uncheckable – except I suppose when bombs go off, but perhaps not even then. When lots of bombs were going off in Iraq we were told we were winning, because the terrorists were obviously getting very desperate!

What always gives official sources the upper hand in this war on terror is that they can tell a simple dramatic narrative: good against evil, us against them. Introducing complications into that narrative, introducing doubts, is very difficult. Maybe Saddam doesn’t have WMDs, maybe Iran just wants civil nuclear power. Maybe there are only 20 or so really serious terrorists, or maybe a thousand, and maybe they aren’t very good at what they do. But that doesn’t make good stories. “Saddam/Iran/al-Qaeda not much of a threat” – that’s not a good headline. “They might be but we’re not sure” – that’s an even worse headline.

So what can journalists do? I think there are three things.

First, instead of dismissing non-government, non-official or Iranian sources as marginal, we should be cultivating, trying to build up alternative sources of authority. Right now we should be seeking out sources who know something about how the Iranian government operates and about the relevance of nuclear technology. Almost the only detailed discussion I have read in the newspapers about how countries might go about making an operational nuclear bomb has been in the London Review of Books.

I am not appealing at all for one narrative to take priority over another. It may be true that Iran can and will become a nuclear armed power within a very short space of time and that it can credibly threaten Israel and other countries with annihilation. But I would like the alternative narrative, which does exist, to be presented and given the same airing as the official one.

Second, I would like every American or British government statement on Iraq, including the alleged Iranian arming of militias in Iraq, to be scrutinised rigorously. Where does the evidence for it come from? What is the evidence? Is it disputed and if so by whom? If somebody said that the British government was full of warmongering lunatics nobody would just accept it, people would scrutinise this statement and ask if it’s true. So why are we so willing to accept it when it’s said about another country’s government?

We’re always being told, for example, that we should read what Osama Bin Laden has written, the Iranian president’s speeches, so see what they say about destroying Israel and destroying the west and so on. Neither are ever mentioned – the Iranian president particularly – in the press without reference to their blood-curdling views. So why are we not reminded every time there is a reporting of the US administration’s stance on Iran, the preparations it is making to confront Iran, why are we not reminded of the Project for the New American Century? It sets out in black and white, in very great detail, the Neo-Cons view of their aims and how America should proceed in the future. Why are we not reminded of that every time we read about the US administration?

[Third, there is the language we use.] What does “extraordinary rendition” mean? Is it by any chance kidnapping? What are “abuses” in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo? Are they by any chance torture? Torture is nearly always used in continental newspapers, but hardly ever in British or American newspapers.

Have the British media learned anything from Iraq? I don’t think so. I’m afraid even the Guardian recently led on a story that came from unnamed US sources on the wicked things Iran was up to in Iraq. It may be true, I don’t know. But it was without a word from other sources.

If they are going to do a better job, media outlets are going to have to change the way they operate and the way they deal with sources of information.

Here are some of the comments we received:

A winner. Congratulations. Great conference. I only wished I could have divided myself, several times, to have been able to attend more than one workshop. The whole afternoon was excellent. Thought provoking, informative, enjoyable and you had a really good turn out. With at least two thirds from the media or students of media, you should be very pleased.
Shade

I attended the conference on Saturday and firstly wanted to say thank you for a hugely informative and eye opening day. It’s a topic I’m really interested in (actually doing my dissertation on) and think it’s great that more and more well known journalists and politicians are moving into the spotlight to confront this…
Craig

I was at LSE yesterday and congratulate you and all the contributors on a great event. How could I get hold of a copy of ‘The First Casualty? War, Truth & the Media’ shown during the plenaries? I run an Access to Journalism course for Truro College in Cornwall and would like to show the video to my students.
Jane

I hope you don’t mind me taking this opportunity to say firstly thank you for organising the MWAW Conference I attended at LSE yesterday. The range of speakers was excellent.
Helen

That was one of the best political events I have been to. All credit to you. I aim to be at the meeting on Nov 29
Ian

Fantastic day! It was amazing
Caroline

Congratulations to you and the organising committee on a great conference and a sense of a solid grouping of media folk + others wanting to create Peter Wilby’s famous alternative narrative. Hope further discussion of how to do that on 29 Nov. My feeling is that some will try to ignore the resources MWAW has built up already – briefings and website. I think they should be built on.
Judith

Thanks for organising yesterday’s conference, which I found both thought-provoking and inspiring, especially on account of how many people turned up.
Daniel

Just thought I’d drop a line to say well done for such a great event yesterday – an unequivocal success!
Tim

I thought Saturday’s conference was great. I didn’t stay for the last plenary session so can’t comment on that – but the opening session, and the workshop on Iran, were really useful and informative. A great audience, and some really good speakers.
Margaret

Thanks to everyone for working so hard to make Saturday’s conference at the London School of Comics a success. It was particularly pleasing to see so many new faces. Even I was shocked at the amount of information from Iraq and Afghanistan which is not getting into the media. This is the equivalent on D-Day only reporting Allied landings in Normandy but not reporting Allied landings in the South of France or the 8th Army liberating Italy.
Chris

Just to say many congratulations on a brilliant and really useful day on Saturday. I think the issues you were dealing with are absolutely vital because I believe we now have a military-industrial-media complex. I’m a non-media person & for me the day made explicit lots of things about the way modern media operates that I had half realised but not fully taken on board. I am sure that will be helpful in peace campaigning & general activism. Thanks a lot & best wishes for all you are doing,
Mary

Half-day conference

London School of Economics

Saturday November 17 2pm-6.30pm
Hosted by Media Workers Against the War

Contributors:

Andrew Gilligan, Peter Wilby, Michelle Stanistreet, Nick Davies, Sean Langan, Catherine Mayer, Sami Ramadani, Phillip Knightley, Moazzam Begg, Andrew Murray, Rachel Morarjee, Amir Amirani, Piers Robinson and others

Tickets: £10 / £7 – buy securely online: http://mwaw.net/conference

Major media outlets are becoming markedly less questioning and critical in their coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan. Independent studies show an overwhelming pro-war bias after 9/11.

The drums of a new war, this time with Iran, are beating. Will we allow the media to be used to sex up the Iranian “threat”? Sometimes it seems like the Iraqi WMD fiasco never happened.

With the recent breast-beating about media integrity, now is the time to look again at reporting the “war on terror”. This conference will set out the issues and debate how best to campaign to improve standards. It will seek to identify the main sources of pro-war bias as a first step to providing media workers with tools and resources for combating it.

* Have the media learned the lessons of Iraq?
* What are the pitfalls in reporting Iran?
* What can the BBC do to stand up to government bullying?
* What should accurate coverage of modern war look like?
* Are Muslims being unfairly targeted in the media?

Come and debate these key issues for our industry.

Tickets: £10 / £7 – buy securely online: http://mwaw.net/conference

“I am very critical of the way in which the media failed to ask the proper questions in the run-up to war, and the way in which much of the British media, if not the US, seems now to have put reporting from Iraq in the “too difficult” category. This is the most important story in the world and it’s amazing how little coverage it gets in the British press. “
Andrew Gilligan, sacked by the BBC
September 2007

“The press has apparently learnt nothing from the dodgy dossiers and phantom WMDs that preceded the Iraq war.”
Peter Wilby, Media Guardian
April 2007

For more information and conference updates email thefirstcasualty@mwaw.net or call 07801 789 297

In case you thought it was only US mercenaries who go around shooting Iraqi civilians, here is the infamous “trophy video” taken by British mercenaries employed by Aegis, showing them shooting up cars that get too close – to an Elvis Presley sound track.

Aegis in September won the largest single security contract yet in Iraq, awarded by the Pentagon to co-ordinate the 20,000 private armed guards working in Iraq, and worth up to $475m (£234m). (Financial Times, Sep 15)

A US military inquiry into the videotapes has been closed, with no further action expected.

Since 2004 Aegis says it has travelled more than 3m miles throughout Iraq and completed more than 20,000 missions. Aegis is run by former army officer Tim Spicer, former chief executive of Sandline International, which was involved in the 1998 “arms to Africa” scandal during the Sierra Leone civil war.

Vicki Wood, columnist for the Mail and Telegraph, let slip the commentariat’s attitude to the Iraq war in the Telegraph (Oct 26), when she wrote that three years ago “the world was not yet bored to tears by the unending mess in Iraq”.

This is a real problem for the anti-war movement – the notion among senior editors and managers that “we’ve done Iraq” and that it’s time to move on. Here they are just mimicking Blair’s oft-stated desire to “draw a line” under Iraq.

It means reporters and documentary makers can’t get important investigative work published or broadcast.

Of course, the public’s interest in Iraq isn’t constant: the Financial Times noted recently (Oct 23) that “the war in Iraq has ceased to be the US’s hot political issue”

But that is partly because politicians drop the issue in a concerted attempt to divert attention away from the war, and also because the corporate media takes their lead and gets “bored” with the subject.

Was Piers Morgan rightly sacked three years ago? After all, didn’t he publish faked photos of British troops urinating on Iraqi prisoners?

In fact, Piers’ decision to publish the photos was totally justified. The photos represented what actually took place, even though they were faked.

Stuart MacKenzie, a private in the Territorial Army who served with the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in Iraq, orchestrated the photos. A court martial against him was dropped, however, and he was cleared of all criminal charges in 2005.

Also, Mackenzie kept a diary where he boasted about the violence meted out to Iraqi civilians during his tour of duty in Iraq in 2003. Last year he appeared as a prosecution witness at the court martial of seven soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. The seven soldiers were accused of abusing of 11 Iraqi civilians in Basra, one of whom, Baha Musa, died. Baha Mousa was found to have had 93 separate injuries to his body, including fractured ribs, a broken nose and kidney failure.

The soldiers were acquitted on insufficient evidence, although one of them, Corporal Donald Payne, became Britain’s first convicted war criminal when he admitted that he had treated Iraqis inhumanely and “enjoyed” hearing Iraqis cry out during torture, referring to their screams as a “choir”. He was jailed for a year.

Mackenzie’s diary contained detailed accounts of abuse of Iraqis. Moreover, at the trial Iraqi civilian Muhanned Thaher Abdullah al-Mansouri said that – among other things — he had been urinated on by his captors.

So Piers Morgan published photos of abuse that really happened. He was sacked for depicting the truth of British abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

Those editors of British media who repeated the governments’ lies about the “Iraqi threat”, however, are still in their jobs.

This blog has argued consistently that the recent onslaught from the right on the BBC, launched by its report on “impartiality” in June, was a continuation of Blair’s assault on the media over coverage of the war on terror, which is rarely actually mentioned by name. Now the Financial Times has published an article by one of its leading commentators that neatly confirms the truth of this argument.

If that wasn’t enough, Philip Stephen’s extraordinary article (Oct 5) demonstrates another theme of this blog – namely, the connection between Islamophobia in the media and pro-war reporting.

Stephens launches a scathing attack on CBBC, the BBC’s TV service for 6-12 year olds, accusing it of a politically correct “pseudo-liberalism”, a “perverse and dangerous mindset” that leads it to be biased in favour of al-Qaeda. He singles out a page on the CBBC website which discusses the events of 9/11 and offers it as proof that the BBC is soft on terrorism:

“The BBC’s omissions, the careful juxtaposition of alleged cause and effect, and the choice of language invite the conclusion that there is moral equivalence between a US presence in the Middle East and the random slaughter of innocents.”

This is Stephens’ cue for a lot of self-righteous guff about al-Qaeda, wheeling out the tired canard of neo-cons the world over – that Bin Laden is the new Hitler and al-Qaeda the new Nazism. You can see what’s coming next… Because the BBC doesn’t support the USA (Stephens would have us believe), it is on the side of the terrorists:

“From a studiously neutral standpoint, it becomes entirely logical to condemn abuses perpetrated by the US, while glossing over the bestial violence of its enemies. … The most the BBC will offer by way of judgment on al-Qaeda-inspired jihadis seems to be as follows: ‘Although they claim to be on a holy war, many Muslims say what they are doing is very wrong.’ That is just not good enough. Impartiality cannot throw out universal values.”

Stephens’ argument is fairly easy to tackle at a factual level.

The page on the CBBC website that gives him such offence is part of a package on 9/11. The previous page of the package describes al-Qaeda as “a militant Islamic group” and points out that Bin Laden laughed and boasted about the attacks – which the package makes clear killed 3000 people – and spoke of his joy. Twice the package makes it clear that al-Qaeda is a terrorist organisation.

The implication seems really quite abundantly clear that al-Qaeda is a dreadful organisation that takes pleasure from mass killing. It is hard to detect any “moral equivalence” at work. CBBC is aimed at young children, after all. Is that really the place for red-faced, table-thumping outrage? Moreover, there is certainly no trace of moral equivalence in CBBC’s treatment of the Iraq war (here and here), while the BBC’s adult package on al-Qaeda is completely different.

So Stephens has taken a children’s website and used it, out of all context, to pin all the crudest right-wing slurs on the BBC ’s coverage of war and Islam. Perhaps this was an original piece of research on his part? Sadly, no. It was taken from The Sun on September 11, 2007.

So the Financial Times, the country’s most serious liberal organ, is reduced to taking crumbs from Murdoch’s table and regurgitating them as pseudo-intellectual outrage. How are the mighty fallen.

The only reason the FT could get away with publishing such an article is because of the prevailing climate in politics and the media which screams at every opportunity that the BBC is “left wing” and a sucker for liberal causes. We need to fight back. The conference on November 17 at the London School of Economics must become the beginning of a real campaign to defend the BBC, and to silence those who use the media to make excuses for war.

“Scribbler”

P.S. I have just watched the stunning documentary “Taxi from the Dark Dide” broadcast on BBC 2 late on Monday (Oct 8th). There could be no better rejoinder to Philip Stephens.