Guardians of Power

David Cromwell, David Edwards

Description

Guardians of Power is a thought-provoking and controversial challenge to the idea that western media is unbiased, fearless and open to different ideas.



This book argues that a corporate media system be never be expected to tell the truth about a world dominated by corporations. It challenges the complacent view that newspapers, including the 'liberal' Guardian and the Independent, tell the truth about climate change, war and problems in society when they are profit-oriented businesses dependent on advertisers for 75% of their revenues.



Guardians of Power is a radical intervention which will spark debate amongst media students and journalists, and all those who believe in the values of a free and independent media.
Acknowledgements

Foreword by John Pilger

1 The Mass Media – Neutral, Honest, Psychopathic

2 Iraq – The Sanctions of Mass Destruction

3 Iraq Disarmed – Burying the 1991-98 Weapons Inspections

4 Iraq – Gunning For War And Burying The Dead

5 Afghanistan – Let Them Eat Grass

6 Kosovo – Real Bombs, Fictional Genocide

7 East Timor – The Practical Limits Of Crusading Humanitarianism

8 Haiti – The Hidden Logic Of Exploitation

9 Idolatry Ink – Reagan, The ‘Cheerful Conservative’ And ‘Chubby Bubba’ Clinton

10 Climate Change – The Ultimate Media Betrayal

11 Disciplined Media – Professional Conformity To Power

12 Towards A Compassionate Media

13 Full Human Dissent

Resources

Index

Sujets

• Political Science
• Journalism
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783710713
• Langue: English

Extrait

Guardians of Power

First published 2006 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright David Edwards and David Cromwell 2006
Foreword copyright John Pilger 2006
The right of David Edwards and David Cromwell to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
John Pilger hereby asserts his moral right as author of the Foreword
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13 978-0-7453-2482-1 pbk ISBN-13 978-1-7837-1071-3 ePub
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services Ltd, 33 Livonia Road, Sidmouth, EX10 9JB, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Printed and bound in the European Union by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword by John Pilger
1  The Mass Media - Neutral, Honest, Psychopathic
Pulling The Other One - The Corporate Free Press
Outlawing Social Responsibility
Of Big Brother and Auntie Beeb - The Propaganda Model
The Convenient Rise of Professional Journalism
A Note About the Structure of this Book
2  Iraq - The Sanctions of Mass Destruction
Blair s Big Bad Lie - The Moral Case for War
Effectively Terminated - The US-UK Genocide in Iraq
Media Complicity - The Pilger-Baathist Line
Burying the Effects of Sanctions
Observer Editor Roger Alton and the 83-year-old War Veteran
Three Remarkable Emails from Nick Cohen
3  Iraq Disarmed - Burying the 1991-98 Weapons Inspections
Find Me a Way to do This
Fundamentally Disarmed by 1998
Pushed or Pulled? The Art of Truth-Reversal
No Particular Answer - Media Lens and BBC Newsnight Editor George Entwistle
Serious and Current Threat? - The Sludge of Mass Destruction
4  Iraq - Gunning for War and Burying the Dead
The Message from America
Falling into Execute Mode
A Larger Man and a Stronger Prime Minister - The Fall of Baghdad
Outdoing Saddam - The US–UK are Absolutely Accountable
Necessary Dud - The Lancet Report
Our Data Have Been Back and Forth
The Charnel House - A Simple Question from a Couple of Amateurs
All Hail Democratic Iraq! - A Tragi-Comedy
Democracy Born and Still-Born - A Tale of Two Elections
He Wants Democracy - Media Lens and BBC Newsnight Editor Peter Barron
5  Afghanistan - Let Them Eat Grass
Normalising the Unthinkable
In The Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Lion Is News
Killing as a First Resort
Bombing it Better
Outside Looking In - Media Lens and the BBC s Director of News, Richard Sambrook
6  Kosovo - Real Bombs, Fictional Genocide
Iraq And Kosovo - The Forbidden Parallels
Lights out in Belgrade - The Media Line Up
Pure Invention - The Kosovo Genocide
Questioning Racak
Pernicious and Anti-Journalistic - Media Lens and the BBC s Andrew Marr
7  East Timor - The Practical Limits of Crusading Humanitarianism
A Toothless Moral Crusade
No One Gave a Damn - The Blessing of the West
Impoverished Territory - The Calculations of Realpolitik
8  Haiti - The Hidden Logic of Exploitation
Conquering Paradise - The Logic of Exploitation
Haiti s Big Surprise - Aristide
Media Silence on Washington s Double Game
Aristide Toppled - The Disputed Elections
9  Idolatry Ink - Reagan, the Cheerful Conservative and Chubby Bubba Clinton
Will the Real Paul Wolfowitz Please Stand Up?
Reagan - An Extraordinarily Successful Presidency
Killing is Not Enough
Nicaragua - The Threat of a Good Example
Reagan s Legacy in Central America
Clinton - The Bitter Ironies
Dimbleby Dumbs Down
10  Climate Change - The Ultimate Media Betrayal
Uninhabitable Planet?
The High Cost of Buying Time
Global Climate Catastrophe - Mustn t Grumble!
Put a Hog in it - Liberal Media Greenwash
Neither do I, Too! - The Fossil-Fuelled Guardian
Dead Planet s Society - The Mystery of the Guardian s Post Box
The Guardian s Readers Editor Serves up a Liberal Herring
What is our Problem?
11  Disciplined Media - Professional Conformity to Power
How do you Shoot Babies?
The Gushing Phenomenon
Trained for Timidity
Hell, the System Works Just Fine!
Making a Difference - Why We Can Influence the Media
12  Towards a Compassionate Media
West is Best - How Media Compassion Radiates Outwards
So What Would you do? The Guardian Editor Bowls a Googly
The Netizens are Coming!
Towards a Compassionate Mass Media
Honest, Compassionate, Non-Corporate
The Media is not Just Another Issue
13  Full Human Dissent
The Reality Filters
Life, Liberty and Happiness - The Corporate Versions
Enlightened Self-Interest - The Curious Qualities of Kindness
Towards Full Human Dissent
Resources
About Media Lens
Index
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our thanks to the following people for their help with this book and with the Media Lens project: Michael Albert, Gilbert Burnham, Gabriel Carlyle, Phil Chandler, Noam Chomsky, Sue Cullum, Mark Curtis, Denis Halliday, Edward Herman, Richard Keeble, Tim Llewellyn, Marianne McKiggan, Oliver Maw, Aubrey Meyer, David Miller, Milan Rai, Les Roberts, Andy Rowell, Hans von Sponeck, John Theobald and all at Pluto Press. We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, the Lipman Miliband Trust, the Foundation de Sauve, the Marmot Trust, the Tinsley Charitable Trust and many individual donors over the years.We would like to thank our families for their love and support. David Cromwell would like to thank Foske, Sean and Stuart. We would particularly like to thank John Pilger for his encouragement and support.
Foreword
John Pilger
Two epic episodes have determined how many of us in the West see the world beyond. They are the Second World War and the Cold War. As this is being written, the British are being called upon, yet again, to celebrate the good war against Hitler: that ethical bath where the sins of centuries of conquest, slavery and exploitation were expatiated , to quote Richard Drayton on the latest crop of imperial historians like Niall Fergusson. He might as well have been referring to many mainstream journalists.
The good war , wrote Drayton, has underwritten sixty years of war-making. It has become an ethical blank cheque for British and American power. We claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism. When we fall out with such tyrant friends as Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam, we re-brand them as Hitler . In the good war against them, all bad things become forgettable (Drayton, An Ethical Blank Cheque , Guardian , May 10, 2005).
During the Cold War, the ultimate bad thing was the threatened use of nuclear weapons. Declassified official files now reveal the them-and-us propaganda of the Cold War as largely fiction. British planning documents from the 1960s actually dismiss the Soviet threat in Europe as exaggerated and non-existent in most of the world, even in the Middle East. The real Cold War was fought by our governments, not against Russians, but expendable brown and black people, often in places of great impoverishment. This was not so much a war between East and West as between North and South, rich and poor, big and small. Indeed, the smaller the adversary, the greater the threat, because triumph by the weak might be contagious. Thus the weak, whose homelands often contained vast treasuries of oil and gas, minerals and beckoning markets, were the true goals of the West s crusaders, and still are. Western state terrorism was used from Palestine to Nicaragua, Indochina to the Congo. And when on September 11, 2001, the weak, in effect, struck back, a new mythical war, the War on Terror , was launched.
The latest bad things , such as America s and Britain s bombing of civilian targets with cluster bombs, and use of napalm and depleted uranium, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not reported as acts of rapacious conquest but as imperfect liberation, justified by the myths of the good war and the Cold War. The principal conveyer of these myths is that amorphous extension of the established order known as the media . While occasionally begging to differ on tactics and political personalities, journalists know, almost instinctively or by training, or both, the true nature of their tasks, especially when the established order appears to be threatened or goes to war. Societies are to be reported in terms of their threat or usefulness to us . Official enemies are to be identified and pursued. Parallels are to be drawn with the good war and the Cold War, while official friends are to be treated as one views one s own government: benign, regardless of compelling evidence to the contrary.
What has changed is the public s perception and knowledge. No longer trusting what they read and see and hear, people are questioning as never before. A critical public intelligence is often denied by journalists, who prefer notions of an apathetic public that justify their mantra of giving the people what they want . These days, however, the public is well ahead of the media, refusing to accept the limits of what academics called the public discourse . For example, according to the polls, a majority of the British people regard their prime minister as a liar: not one who has misled parliament