Beyond The 'Blog-O-Bots' - Robert Fisk On The British Media

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Thu, 12 Jan 2006 14:50:47 UT

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Beyond The 'Blog-O-Bots' - Robert Fisk On The British Media -

Part 1

 

 

 

 

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

 

January 12, 2006

 

 

MEDIA ALERT: BEYOND THE `BLOG-O-BOTS'

 

Robert Fisk On The British Media - Part 1

 

 

In the 1960s, psychologist Lester Luborsky used a camera to track the

eye movements of subjects asked to look at a set of pictures. Some of

the pictures were sexual in content - one showed the outline of a woman's

breast, beyond which a man could be seen reading a newspaper. The

response of some subjects was remarkable. They were able to avoid letting

their eyes stray even once to the sexual content of the pictures. When

later asked to describe the pictures, these subjects remembered little or

nothing sexually suggestive about them.

 

In a similar way, journalistic performance consistently traces a path

around the issues that would land them in trouble with owners, parent

companies, advertisers, potential future employers, and key news sources.

 

Thus we find that even normally honest and rational British journalists

find fault with the American press, but not with the British press. Or

they find fault with the right-wing but not the `liberal' media. Or

they find fault with the BBC but not their own newspaper. This pattern

cannot be random and it cannot be the product of ignorance or instinct.

 

Robert Fisk, who is employed by the Independent, famously declared:

 

" I don't work for Colin Powell, I work for a British newspaper called

The Independent; if you read it, you'll find that we are. " (Live From

Iraq,' Democracy Now!, March 25, 2003)

 

But the Independent is quite obviously no more independent from

corporate power than General Motors, for the simple reason that it +is+

corporate power. It is not independent from its own corporate need to

maximise short-term profits in dependence on advertisers. This is

obvious,

undeniable, but all but unthinkable in our society. Fisk commented in a

recent interview with Canadian journalist Justin Podur:

 

" the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post version of

events doesn't satisfy millions of people. So more and more people are

trying to find a different and more accurate narrative of events in the

Middle East. It is a tribute to their intelligence that instead of

searching for blog-o-bots or whatever, they are looking to the European

`mainstream' newspapers like The Independent, the Guardian, The Financial

Times.

 

" One of the reasons they read The Independent is that they can hear

things they suspected to be the case, but published by a major paper. I'm

not just running some internet site. This is a big operation with

foreign correspondents. We are the British equivalent of what the

Washington

Post should be... So people in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, South

Africa, the United States, Canada and many other places, are finding

that a

British journalist can write things they can't read elsewhere but which

must have considerable basis in truth because otherwise it wouldn't

appear in a major British paper.

 

" I'm not some cranky left wing or right wing nut. We are a newspaper,

that's the point. That gives us an authority — most people are used to

growing up with newspapers. The internet is a new thing, and it's also

unreliable. " (Justin Podur, `Fisk: War is the total failure of the human

spirit,' December 5, 2005;

http://www.rabble.ca/rabble_interview.shtml?sh_itm=a37c84dbd62690c4c1abb1a898a77\

047 & rXn=1 & )

 

Here Fisk's normally courageous journalistic eye is tracing carefully

around uncomfortable issues in much the same way as Luborsky's subjects.

It is of course true that many internet sites have limited or zero

credibility. But it is also true that a " big operation " such as " a major

British paper " can be structurally hobbled, and to a spectacular degree,

in its ability to report the truth. We have documented countless

examples where the Independent, the Guardian and the Financial Times have

demonstrated a capacity for self-delusion that matches the crankiest

" nuts " and " blog-o-bots " . It is absurd to wave away the clear facts of

structural mainstream compromise in this way.

 

It is also patronising and misleading to assert so baldly that people

in Pakistan, India and other countries find that " a British journalist

can write things they can't read elsewhere " . In fact readers can often

find commentary in newspapers in, say, India, South Korea and the United

Arab Emirates that puts most British journalism to shame. Consider, for

example, that while almost all mainstream British editors - including

Fisk's own editors at the Independent - supported the British

government's cynical " humanitarian intervention " in Kosovo in 1999,

M.D. Nalapat,

a senior editor, wrote in the Times of India:

 

" Watching the likes of Christiane Amanpour and her BBC counterparts,

one is reminded of Stalin's USSR, when lies were first believed

thoroughly and then uttered. To these `unbiased' commentators, there

is no

connection between the Nato bombing and the refugee floods. There is

no harm

in killing Serbian media persons, or in bombing away at a country in a

manner reminiscent of Hitler's war against Republican Spain in the

1930s. " (Quoted, Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman editors, Degraded

Capability - The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, Pluto Press, 2000, p.187)

 

Try finding comparable insight and honesty from a senior British editor

in 1999. Similarly, T.V. Rajeshwar wrote in the Hindustan Times:

 

" The war unleashed by the North Atlantic Treaty organisation on the

sovereign nation of Serbia on March 24 was a clear case of aggression. "

(Ibid, p.190)

 

Reviewing UK media performance, British historian Mark Curtis wrote of

the attack on Serbia:

 

" The liberal press - notably the Guardian and Independent - backed the

war to the hilt (while questioning the tactics used to wage it) and

lent critical weight to the government's arguments. " (Curtis, Web of

Deceit, Vintage, 2003, pp.134-5)

 

And which British newspaper has afforded a long and positive review of

Kristina Borjesson's important new book, Feet To The Fire - The Media

After 9/11 (Prometheus, 2005), as the Korea Times did in November 2005?

The answer is that the book has so far not been mentioned anywhere in

the British press. Several leading South Korean newspapers last year

also published long, informed, illustrated reviews of a new edition of

the

book Free to be Human by Media Lens co-editor David Edwards - something

that has never happened in Britain.

 

It is simply not true that the best British media provide an oasis of

honesty and reason in a world otherwise deprived of honest journalism.

 

As so often in the past Fisk makes clear that many a " big [uS]

operation with foreign correspondents " is massively flawed:

 

" Look across daily newspapers in the United States and the coverage of

the Middle East is lamentable and incomprehensible. There are semantics

introduced to avoid controversy, mostly controversy from Israeli

supporters. Colonies become `neighbourhoods,' occupied becomes

`disputed`, a

wall turns into a `fence' magically — I mean I hope my house isn't made

of fences. "

 

But exactly these criticisms have been made of the media operating out

of Fisk's home country - criticisms that make a nonsense of his claim

that published work " must have considerable basis in truth because

otherwise it wouldn't appear in a major British paper " .

 

Curiously, Fisk does often indicate flaws in media performance, but (to

our knowledge) has never focussed on the failings of `liberal`

newspapers like the Guardian and Independent, and has not drawn

attention to

structural problems inherent to all corporate media. Fisk quite often

criticises the BBC:

 

" The Israeli line - that Palestinians are essentially responsible for

`violence`, responsible for the killing of their own children by Israeli

soldiers, responsible for refusing to make concessions for peace - has

been accepted almost totally by the media. Only yesterday, a BBC World

Service anchorman allowed an Israeli diplomat in Washington, Tara

Herzl, to excuse the shooting of stone-throwers - almost 200 of them - by

Israeli soldiers on the grounds that `they are there with people who are

shooting`. If that was the case - which it usually is not - then why

were the Israelis shooting the stone-throwers rather than the gunmen? "

(Fisk, 'The biased reporting that makes killing acceptable', The

Independent, November 14, 2000)

 

The BBC (like the American media) is a favourite target for British

journalists with established press careers, even though their own media

consistently share very similar faults. BBC performance +was+ appalling

in the run up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, but so

was the performance of the Guardian, the Financial Times and the

Independent. In our analysis of the media, we have failed to find

dramatic

differences separating the BBC from these newspapers - indeed the BBC

often

takes its lead from them, seeking safety in the centre of the 'quality'

media herd. The BBC is often more patriotic, more openly servile to

state power, but it consistently shares very similar propaganda

assumptions with the liberal press. To suggest that the BBC should be

singled out

for criticism is false and misleading.

 

Fisk's comments are disturbing in one further respect. He vigorously

promotes the idea that his is a highly skilled profession that is somehow

uniquely qualified to report honestly on the world. This is the

standard myth of " professional journalism " with its mysterious " know-how "

based on a trained depth of insight and understanding.

 

But the reality is that journalists are employees of a psychopathic

corporate system organised around the pursuit of unlimited greed. And

unlimited greed is +not+ a friend of honest inquiry. In discussing his

newspaper's support for the Iraq war, Observer editor Roger Alton

explains

the operative level of moral accountability:

 

" If other people disagree I don't give a #### about that. I mean they

don't have to buy the paper. " (James Silver, `Roger Alton: The Observer

editor on the relaunch of the world's oldest Sunday paper,' The

Independent, January 9, 2006)

 

It is truly remarkable that Fisk can make such flattering comments

about the British media system after one of its most demonstrably

wretched

performances of modern times - coverage of the vast crime that is

Western policy in Iraq. The rational response must be to expose the

structural corruption of this system - its inherent dependence on

power, its

establishment embeds, its manifest determination to protect a brutal

status quo - the 'liberal' press very much included.

 

Part 2 will follow shortly...

 

 

 

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The Myth Of The Liberal Media' by David Edwards and David Cromwell

(Pluto Books, London, 2006). For further details, please

 

http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php

 

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