The party game is over. Stand and fight The lesson of the French anti-government protests is that “normal” politics exists only to promote corporate interests. Britain must prepare for a rebirth of the only thing that works — direct action.
"Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall'n on you:
Ye are many - they are few."
These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" may seem unattainable. I don't think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spreadsheet.
Born of the "never again" spirit of 1945, social democracy has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when £1trn of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described "financiers" as the nation's "great example" and his personal "inspiration".
This is not to say parliamentary politics is meaningless. It has one meaning now: the replacement of democracy with a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born.
No rationale
The old myths of British rectitude, imperial in origin, provided false comfort while the Blair gang built the foundation of the present "coalition". This is led by a former PR man for an asset stripper and by a bagman who will inherit his knighthood and the tax-shielded fortune of his father, the 17th Baronet of Ballintaylor. David Cameron and George Osborne are essentially fossilised spivs who, in colonial times, would have been sent by their daddies to claim foreign terrain and plunder.
Today, they are claiming 21st-century Britain and imposing their vicious, antique ideology, albeit served as economic snake oil. Their designs have nothing to do with a "deficit crisis". A deficit of 10 per cent is not remotely a crisis. When Britain was officially bankrupt at the end of the Second World War, the government built its greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service and the arts edifices of London's South Bank.
There is no economic rationale for the assault described cravenly by the BBC as a "public spending review". The debt is exclusively the responsibility of those who incurred it, the super-rich and the gamblers. However, that's beside the point. What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state. It is a coup, a "shock doctrine" as applied to Pinochet's Chile and Yeltsin's Russia.
In Britain, there is no need for tanks in the streets. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms it is said to hold dear, bourgeois Britain has allowed parliament to create a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. Powers of arrest and detention have never been greater. The police have the impunity to kill; and asylum-seekers can be "restrained" to death on commercial flights.
Athol Fugard is right. With Harold Pinter gone, no acclaimed writer or artist dare depart from their well-remunerated vanity. With so much in need of saying, they have nothing to say. Liberalism, the vainest ideology, has hauled up its ladder. The chief opportunist, Nick Clegg, gave no electoral hint of his odious faction's compliance with the dismantling of much of British postwar society. The theft of £83bn in jobs and services matches almost exactly the amount of tax legally avoided by piratical corporations. Without fanfare, the super-rich have been assured they can dodge up to £40bn in tax payments in the secrecy of Swiss banks. The day this was sewn up, Osborne attacked those who "cheat" the welfare system. He omitted the real amount lost, a minuscule £0.5bn, and that £10.5bn in benefit payments was not claimed at all. Labour is his silent partner.
The propaganda arm in the press and broadcasting dutifully presents this as unfortunate but necessary. Mark how the firefighters' action is "covered". On Channel 4 News, following an item that portrayed modest, courageous people as basically reckless, Jon Snow demanded that the leaders of the London Fire Authority and the Fire Brigades Union go straight from the studio and "mediate" now, this minute. "I'll get the taxis!" he declared. Forget the thousands of jobs that are to be eliminated from the fire service and the public danger beyond Bonfire Night; knock their jolly heads together. "Good stuff!" said the presenter.
To the barricades
Ken Loach's 1983 documentary series Questions of Leadership opens with a sequence of earnest young trade unionists on platforms, exhorting the masses. They are then shown older, florid, self-satisfied and finally adorned in the ermine of the House of Lords. Once, at a Durham Miners' Gala, I asked Tony Woodley, now joint general secretary of Unite, "Isn't the problem the clockwork collaboration of the union leadership?" He almost agreed, implying that the rise of bloods like himself would change that. The British Airways cabin crew strike, over which Woodley presides, is said to have made gains. Has it? And why haven't the unions risen against totalitarian laws that place free trade unionism in a vice?
The BA workers, the firefighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; listen to the public's support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.
New Pilger film 'The War You Don't See' opens in cinemas and on ITV in December
In an extraordinary alliance of TV and cinema, John Pilger's new film, 'The War You Don't See', opens in the UK mid-December. Following its premiere at the Barbican on Tuesday 7 December 2010, the first Pilger film for three years will be showing at the Curzon Soho on Monday 13 December 2010 and at cinemas nationally, followed by a satellite Q&A. The following night, Tuesday 14 December, ITV will broadcast 'The War You Don't See' at 10.35pm.
The new film is a powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war, tracing the history of 'embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq. As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an 'electronic battlefield'. in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?
The Curzon Soho box office opens for bookings on Wednesday 1 December. Booking details and information about further showings in the UK and abroad will appear here soon.
The War You Don't See trailer The official trailer for John Pilger's new film, 'The War You Don't See', in UK cinemas from 13 December 2010 and on ITV the following evening at 10.35pm
In another year distinguished by the silence of fiction writers about rapacious wars and a society at home assaulted by extremists in power in Westminster - a silence exemplified by the Man Booker Prize short-list and its compromise winner - three books are a blessed relief. The first is Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam by the historian Mark Curtis (Serpent's Tail). Excavating long forgotten official files, Curtis illuminates the darkest corners of Britain's critical role in the rise of islamicism as a means of blocking Arab nationalism and guarding western "interests". He explains much about the current colonial adventures.
In Newspeak in the 21st Century by David Edwards and David Cromwell, the editors of the website Medialens.org (Pluto), brilliantly decode the propaganda that so often passes for news and give us with an A to Z of how corporate journalism demonises "our" enemies, from Venezuela to Iran.
My other choice for finding out how power works is Noam Chomsky's latest bonfire of the illusions and falsehoods that masquerade as public policy. This is Hope and Prospects (Haymarket Books). All three books provide a moral and intellectual survival kit in these extraordinary times.
JOHN PILGER CALLS ON AUSTRALIANS TO DEFEND WIKILEAKS EDITOR JULIAN ASSANGE
In an ABC Radio Australia interview, John Pilger asks Australians to break their silence and rally round compatriot Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of Wikileaks. John Pilger's new film, 'The War You Don't See', due to be released in Australia in 2011, will feature an interview with Queensland born Assange
Interview with John Pilger John Pilger has clear views about the duty of journalists. True to form, his latest film pulls no punches. He talks to us on the eve of its release.
NI: What’s The War You Don't See about?
JP: The film asks: ‘What is the role of the media in rapacious wars like Iraq and Afghanistan? Why do so many journalists beat the drums of war and not challenge the spin and lies of governments? And how are the crimes of war reported and justified when they are our crimes?’ It’s a film about truth and justice.
In the opening sequence, I refer to David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister during much of the First World War, who had a private chat with the editor of The Guardian, CP Scott, at the height of the carnage. ‘If people really knew the truth,’ said Lloyd George, ‘the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.’ My film is about people’s right to know.
It has always seemed odd to me that as journalists we examine people’s professional lives, but not our own. We treasure our myths. Edmund Burke called the press a ‘fourth estate’ that would check the other great institutions of democracy. It was a quintessentially liberal view. It was also romantic nonsense – honourable exceptions aside. Up till the arrival of the corporate press at the turn of the 20th century, newspapers were often fiercely independent and saw themselves as voices of ordinary people. The media – press and broadcasting – has long since become an extension of the established order, and frequently its mouthpiece and valet.
These days, we surely owe it to the public to come clean about the pressures and seductions, crude and subliminal, that subvert our independence. War – the industrial killing of people and the destruction of their society – is the ultimate test. One of my favourite quotations is Claud Cockburn’s: ‘Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.’ I suggest some of us might engrave that on our bathroom mirrors.
What led you to do a film on this theme? Was there a specific trigger for it?
The first trigger was the sight of children burned almost to death by Napalm B – which keeps on burning beneath the skin – then finding out that such an atrocity was not an aberration. It was realizing the racism in colonial warfare, and how apologetic reporting perpetuates this.
You’ve said ‘the media is not covering war. It is promoting war.’ Are there any media outlets whose activities have especially shocked or outraged you?
Well, you get crude examples of war promotion on Fox television in the United States. However, Fox has the virtue of leaving us in no doubt where it stands; and that’s true of most of the Murdoch empire. Murdoch himself has said that war is OK. Too bad about the innocents; war is necessary, says the great baron. Certainly, it is necessary for the arms corporations which are a pillar of the US war economy. The more insidious and perhaps more powerful war promoters are in the respectable media, such as the New York Times and the BBC. Two important studies following the invasion of Iraq received little media attention. Cardiff University found that the BBC overwhelmingly promoted the Blair government’s war agenda; and Media Tenor, based in Berlin, found that of the world’s principal broadcasters, the BBC gave just three per cent of its pre-invasion coverage to anti-war voices. Only CBS in the United States was worse. Censorship by omission is, in my view, the most virulent form of warmongering. ‘When the truth is replaced by silence,’ said the Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko, ‘the silence is a lie.’
Do you think the reporting of war is actually worse now than it was at the beginning of your career? Is the modern ‘embedding’ of journalists a major factor?
It’s not worse, it’s just better organized – though in many respects it’s far less successful. The last British war completely free of state censorship was the Crimea, which produced some of the greatest war reporting of all time: William Howard Russell’s exposé of the disaster of the charge of the Light Brigade. He and his editor at The Times, John Delane, were almost charged with treason for telling the truth. This changed completely during the First World War, when journalists saw their job, wrote Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle, as telling ‘only tales of gallantry’. The modern idea of ‘embedding’ is similar. More than 700 journalists were embedded with US and British forces during the invasion of Iraq. They told good action stories and showed us a little of the obligatory ‘bang-bang’ but they managed to pass over or obscure the truth that the brutal conquest and plunder of a defenceless country was under way. That said, the reporting on the worldwide web was an important antidote; look at Dahr Jamail’s powerful, independent reporting from Fallujah and the independent filmmaking that gave civilians a voice. We show some remarkable examples in The War You Don't See.
You have talked about ‘wars of perception’ in which the news media plays a major role. What do you mean by this?
The term belongs to General David Petraeus, the current US commander in Afghanistan, who wrote in the 2006 US Counterinsurgency Manual that what mattered was not so much military superiority as persuading the public at home that you were winning, regardless of the reality. In other words, the public is the true enemy of governments that pursue unpopular colonial wars which can only be ‘won’ if the public is successfully deceived. This owes much to Edward Bernays, who is said to have invented the term ‘public relations’ soon after the First World War. Bernays’ dictum was that the facts didn’t matter as much as the success of ‘false reality’, and that the manipulators of public thinking belonged to an ‘invisible government that is the true ruling power in our country’. Of course, none of this can succeed without the media as its transmitter and amplifier. And these days it hasn’t really succeeded. Some 77 per cent of the British public is opposed to the colonial adventure in Afghanistan, and most were against the invasion of Iraq.
What do you think can be done to improve the coverage of war, so that the public gets a picture of what is really going on?
The answer is: tell the obvious truth; and the truth of war is the grotesque. It is trees hanging with the body parts of children. It is people going insane before your eyes. It is terrified soldiers with their trousers full of shit. It is human damage that runs through countless families: civilians and soldiers. That’s war. The coverage of war should be this eyewitness but it should also try to tell us the why. That means journalists not colluding but investigating. One of the most revealing documents released by Wikileaks was a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document that equated investigative journalists with terrorists. That reflects the lethal stupidity that runs like a current through the war-making industry. It says they are afraid of the truth.
Should we be giving more space to local reporters who are from the regions where the wars are being fought?
Only if they try to tell the why of a war, not dispense sentimentalized tales about soldiers from local families – which the military relish.
You have also talked about ‘a war against journalism’. What do you mean by this?
Journalism ought to be about telling as much of the truth as possible in the circumstances. And governments can be expected to wage a constant war on truth-tellers, be they whistleblowers or fearless reporters. That’s why the Pentagon recently set up a department to fight ‘cyberwar’. To the military propagandists, cyberspace is unconquered and, worse, populated by mavericks they can’t control. This is only partly true, of course, but there are enough good journalists writing exclusively for the web to justify the war-makers’ alarm.
Do you draw a distinction between the corporate media world of Murdoch, CNN and the BBC and independent media in terms of which stories are told and the ways in which they are told?
Yes, but mostly in style. Look at Andrew Marr’s recent interview with Tony Blair to mark, or celebrate, Blair’s self-serving memoirs. Marr didn’t ask a single probing question about Blair’s record on Iraq and allowed Blair to promote an attack on Iran. That’s not much different from an interview conducted in the Murdoch media, which I doubt would be as compliant. Look at the BBC’s coverage of the day of the invasion of Iraq; it’s an echo chamber: the message is that Blair is vindicated. Fox did the same in America for Bush.
Do you see any glimmers of hope in the way important issues are being discussed in the mass media?
There are some superb reporters in the mainstream – Patrick Cockburn in The Independent has been a most honourable exception in Iraq. Ian Cobain of The Guardian has brilliantly exposed the torture and injustice of the so-called War on Terror.
On the web, there is some exciting new journalism – not to be confused with top-of-the-head blogging. Look at some of the work posted on Tom Feeley’s excellent Information Clearing House and on ZNet. In Britain, Media Lens has broken new ground with the first informed and literate analysis and criticism of the liberal media. This is the new fifth estate.
Is there another issue on which you think the public is currently being massively deceived?
The major deception in Britain today is the political/media consensus that there is an economic crisis requiring a devastation of public finances and people’s lives. If you look back on the coverage of the ‘crash’ in the autumn two years ago, the shock of it forced the media to tell the truth: corrupt banks and an unregulated financial sector were rightly identified as the source of the problem, and that was the news. Within a year, journalists were back ‘on message’ and the assumptions of the media echoed the nonsense of the political élite that ‘we are all in this together’: a deception so gross it insults the nation’s intelligence. Britain is not on the edge of bankruptcy: this is one of the world’s wealthiest economies; the richest 10 per cent control $6,300 billion with an average per household of $6.3 million. An equitable rate of tax would see off the so-called deficit in no time. In any case, the ‘deficit’ is ideological: the product of an almost cultish obsession of central banks and financiers with shifting the wealth of nations to the very top and keeping it there. At the end of the Second World War, Britain was officially bankrupt yet the Labour government created some of the country’s greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service. None of this would be a mystery to a media that saw itself as an agency of people, not power.
What is the good news?
The good news is that much of direct and indirect propaganda is not working. As I say, most people oppose colonial wars. There is a critical public intelligence that runs counter to the authority of the media in all its wondrous digital forms. Perhaps people sense the historical moment: that their social democracy is being appropriated by insatiable corporatism, regardless of which party is in power. In many countries – Greece, France, Spain – this is well understood and is being translated into direct action. In Britain, it is still a seed beneath the snow. But that will change; it has to.
John Pilger was interviewed by Vanessa Baird.
The War You Don't See has its première at the Barbican, London on 7 December and at the Curzon Soho, London on 13 December. It will go to air on ITV on 14 December at 10.35 pm. For further details go to www.johnpilger.com
Journalist John Pilger voices support for Julian Assange Journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger is one of many high profile figures to come out in support of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been refused bail in London on sexual assault charges...
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been remanded in custody by a British court over allegations of sex crimes in Sweden.
He appeared at the Westminster Magistrates Court overnight where he was supported by a number of high profile figures, including veteran investigative journalist John Pilger, who offered surety of $32,000 for Mr Assange.
"This case is about, number one, a person's right to justice, when they're innocent until proven guilty," Mr Pilger explains to Adam Spencer on 702 Breakfast when discussing his reasons for getting involved in the case.
Mr Pilger goes further, describing the case against Mr Assange as a 'political stunt', noting, "the chief prosecutor in Sweden abandoned this case, threw it away, saw no worth in it."
John Pilger spoke to Mr Assange soon after the hearing, when he was in police custody and explained he was taking the ruling in his stride...
"I don't know how I would be, I would be full of trepidation, and I'm sure he was too, but he has quite a dry wit, he saw the black side of it."
Mr Pilger, on the other hand, is critical of the Australian government, and Prime Minister Julia Gillard over her stance.
"Gillard's statement, saying that what Wikileaks was doing in disclosing these documents was illegal - it's not illegal at all, under any laws in Australia.
"That's the sort of thing that most Australians should be concerned about," he says.
John Pilger first came to know the Wikileaks founder after interviewing him for a documentary called The War You Don't See.
He says Julian Assange has been encouraged by the support he's received from himself and other high profile figures who signed an open letter in support of his actions.
"To be at the epicentre of something like this, requires a particular fortitude, it also requires people to understand the basic issues and give their support [and] those of us who do understand, I believe, are giving that."
John Pilger says he was struck by the commitment of Julian Assange when he first met him.
"I think he has quite a moral commitment to this, he believes there should be an ethical dimension, a moral dimension to world affairs, that's his personal view... that came through clearly to me when I first met him."
John Pilger: Why are wars not being reported honestly? The public needs to know the truth about wars. So why have journalists colluded with governments to hoodwink us?
In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a "war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media". What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where "the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences". Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. "We had a secret weapon," he boasted. "We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media."
Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now "perpetual". In echoing the west's more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated "50 years of war", they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.
At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of Defence's psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon world of "information dominance", "asymmetric threats" and "cyberthreats". They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.
Of course, only the jargon is new. In the opening sequence of my film, The War You Don't See, there is reference to a pre-WikiLeaks private conversation in December 1917 between David Lloyd George, Britain's prime minister during much of the first world war, and CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. "If people really knew the truth," the prime minister said, "the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."
In the wake of this "war to end all wars", Edward Bernays, a confidante of President Woodrow Wilson, coined the term "public relations" as a euphemism for propaganda "which was given a bad name in the war". In his book, Propaganda (1928), Bernays described PR as "an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country" thanks to "the intelligent manipulation of the masses". This was achieved by "false realities" and their adoption by the media. (One of Bernays's early successes was persuading women to smoke in public. By associating smoking with women's liberation, he achieved headlines that lauded cigarettes as "torches of freedom".)
I began to understand this as a young reporter during the American war in Vietnam. During my first assignment, I saw the results of the bombing of two villages and the use of Napalm B, which continues to burn beneath the skin; many of the victims were children; trees were festooned with body parts. The lament that "these unavoidable tragedies happen in wars" did not explain why virtually the entire population of South Vietnam was at grave risk from the forces of their declared "ally", the United States. PR terms like "pacification" and "collateral damage" became our currency. Almost no reporter used the word "invasion". "Involvement" and later "quagmire" became staples of a news vocabulary that recognised the killing of civilians merely as tragic mistakes and seldom questioned the good intentions of the invaders.
On the walls of the Saigon bureaus of major American news organisations were often displayed horrific photographs that were never published and rarely sent because it was said they were would "sensationalise" the war by upsetting readers and viewers and therefore were not "objective". The My Lai massacre in 1968 was not reported from Vietnam, even though a number of reporters knew about it (and other atrocities like it), but by a freelance in the US, Seymour Hersh. The cover of Newsweek magazine called it an "American tragedy", implying that the invaders were the victims: a purging theme enthusiastically taken up by Hollywood in movies such as The Deer Hunter and Platoon. The war was flawed and tragic, but the cause was essentially noble. Moreover, it was "lost" thanks to the irresponsibility of a hostile, uncensored media.
Although the opposite of the truth, such false realties became the "lessons" learned by the makers of present-day wars and by much of the media. Following Vietnam, "embedding" journalists became central to war policy on both sides of the Atlantic. With honourable exceptions, this succeeded, especially in the US. In March 2003, some 700 embedded reporters and camera crews accompanied the invading American forces in Iraq. Watch their excited reports, and it is the liberation of Europe all over again. The Iraqi people are distant, fleeting bit players; John Wayne had risen again.
The apogee was the victorious entry into Baghdad, and the TV pictures of crowds cheering the felling of a statue of Saddam Hussein. Behind this façade, an American Psyops team successfully manipulated what an ignored US army report describes as a "media circus [with] almost as many reporters as Iraqis". Rageh Omaar, who was there for the BBC, reported on the main evening news: "People have come out welcoming [the Americans], holding up V-signs. This is an image taking place across the whole of the Iraqi capital." In fact, across most of Iraq, largely unreported, the bloody conquest and destruction of a whole society was well under way.
In The War You Don't See, Omaar speaks with admirable frankness. "I didn't really do my job properly," he says. "I'd hold my hand up and say that one didn't press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough." He describes how British military propaganda successfully manipulated coverage of the fall of Basra, which BBC News 24 reported as having fallen "17 times". This coverage, he says, was "a giant echo chamber".
The sheer magnitude of Iraqi suffering in the onslaught had little place in the news. Standing outside 10 Downing St, on the night of the invasion, Andrew Marr, then the BBC's political editor, declared, "[Tony Blair] said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating, and on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right . . ." I asked Marr for an interview, but received no reply. In studies of the television coverage by the University of Wales, Cardiff, and Media Tenor, the BBC's coverage was found to reflect overwhelmingly the government line and that reports of civilian suffering were relegated. Media Tenor places the BBC and America's CBS at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they allotted to opposition to the invasion. "I am perfectly open to the accusation that we were hoodwinked," said Jeremy Paxman, talking about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction to a group of students last year. "Clearly we were." As a highly paid professional broadcaster, he omitted to say why he was hoodwinked.
Dan Rather, who was the CBS news anchor for 24 years, was less reticent. "There was a fear in every newsroom in America," he told me, "a fear of losing your job . . . the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise." Rather says war has made "stenographers out of us" and that had journalists questioned the deceptions that led to the Iraq war, instead of amplifying them, the invasion would not have happened. This is a view now shared by a number of senior journalists I interviewed in the US.
In Britain, David Rose, whose Observer articles played a major part in falsely linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida and 9/11, gave me a courageous interview in which he said, "I can make no excuses . . . What happened [in Iraq] was a crime, a crime on a very large scale . . ."
"Does that make journalists accomplices?" I asked him.
"Yes . . . unwitting perhaps, but yes."
What is the value of journalists speaking like this? The answer is provided by the great reporter James Cameron, whose brave and revealing filmed report, made with Malcolm Aird, of the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam was banned by the BBC. "If we who are meant to find out what the bastards are up to, if we don't report what we find, if we don't speak up," he told me, "who's going to stop the whole bloody business happening again?"
Cameron could not have imagined a modern phenomenon such as WikiLeaks but he would have surely approved. In the current avalanche of official documents, especially those that describe the secret machinations that lead to war – such as the American mania over Iran – the failure of journalism is rarely noted. And perhaps the reason Julian Assange seems to excite such hostility among journalists serving a variety of "lobbies", those whom George Bush's press spokesman once called "complicit enablers", is that WikiLeaks and its truth-telling shames them. Why has the public had to wait for WikiLeaks to find out how great power really operates? As a leaked 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document reveals, the most effective journalists are those who are regarded in places of power not as embedded or clubbable, but as a "threat". This is the threat of real democracy, whose "currency", said Thomas Jefferson, is "free flowing information".
In my film, I asked Assange how WikiLeaks dealt with the draconian secrecy laws for which Britain is famous. "Well," he said, "when we look at the Official Secrets Act labelled documents, we see a statement that it is an offence to retain the information and it is an offence to destroy the information, so the only possible outcome is that we have to publish the information." These are extraordinary times.
its just finished and its well worth watching. i wonder if it'll get shown in america ... it really needs to be seen by as wide an audience as possible.
thats a shame, maybe it'll be on another night up there, or maybe you can watch it through the itv site
heres an interview with pilger and description of the film from the itv press pack;
John Pilger: The War You Don't See
In this new documentary John Pilger, the winner of journalism's top awards for both press and broadcasting, including academy awards in the UK and US, questions the role of the media in war. In The War You Don't See, Pilger, himself a renowned correspondent, asks whether mainstream news has become an integral part of war-making.
Focusing on the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Pilger reflects on the history of the relationship between the media and government in times of conflict stretching back to World War I and explores the impact on the information fed to the public of the modern day practice of public relations in the guise of 'embedding' journalists with the military.
Featuring interviews with senior figures at major UK broadcasters, the BBC and ITV, and high profile journalists on both sides of the Atlantic, including Rageh Omaar and Dan Rather, the film investigates the reporting of government claims that Iraq harboured weapons of mass destruction.
Pilger also speaks to independent film makers, and whistleblowers, including the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange and to former senior British Foreign Office official Carne Ross to investigate why what he believes were key voices and key details did not figure prominently on the mainstream media's agenda. The film also includes hard-hitting footage from independent media sources showing scenes in Afghanistan and Iraq, including footage leaked to Wikileaks.
Dan Rather, the famous CBS news anchor, and BBC World Affairs Correspondent Rageh Omaar both reflect on their own roles during the lead up to hostilities in Afghanistan and Iraq and the lessons they have learned. Rather speaks about pressure felt by journalists who face the danger of becoming what he calls mere 'stenographers'. Rageh Omaar speaks about the proliferation of 24 hour news and the effects this has on war reporting, including his own experience reporting on the liberation of Basra.
Fran Unsworth, the BBC Head of Newsgathering and David Mannion, Editor in Chief of ITV News, both face questioning on their news departments' reporting of the Iraq war and the scrutiny of George Bush and Tony Blair's claims about weapons of mass destruction.
The documentary also focuses on the abuse of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers and speaks to Phil Shiner, a lawyer who is representing a number of Iraqi victims. It examines the notion that our media distinguishes between 'worthy' and 'unworthy' victims of conflicts and how that influences the reporting of Iraqi civilian deaths.
The War You Don't See also looks at the balance of the media's reporting on the hostilities between Palestinians and Israelis, with particular focus on mainstream broadcasters' coverage of the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla in Gaza earlier this year. Both the BBC and ITV are asked about the influence of Israeli government efforts to shape the reporting of such incidents on their coverage.
Interview with John Pilger
What led you to make the film?
I have reported six wars and over the years I have come to appreciate that we journalists are rarely neutral witnesses, either on the battlefield or back in the TV studio or newspaper office. We also play a role of which many of us may not even be aware: we amplify and echo the rationales and deceptions of ‘our’ governments that often lead to invasions such as the disaster in Iraq. In other words, we almost instinctively see ‘our side’ as benign and so we play a part in minimizing the culpability of governments in wars that are not threatening to us at home and which claim mostly civilian lives. That means journalists share the responsibility. I’ve long felt the public has a right to know and debate this.
Did anything surprise you while making it?
I was pleasantly surprised to find that many journalists want to talk about their own misgivings and not at all surprised that certain high-paid stars in TV didn’t want to talk.
How has the world of war reporting changed in the last few decades?
Technically, almost everything has changed. The communications are breathtaking now. So it’s striking that although the means have been revolutionised, much of the thinking in the media has not. Today, we have 24 hour news, but do we get more truth than when, say, the great Times correspondent William Howard Russell exposed the truth about the catastrophe of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimea war in the 19th century? It took Russell several weeks to get his dispatches back to London – by horse and mule and boat. Has a reporter with a satellite phone achieved anything similar in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
How has the proliferation of 24 hour news channels, newspaper websites etc in the past decade affected it?
We certainly get more news, more media, but as so much of it is repetitive, do we get more real, independent information – more truth? The media has become insatiable for ‘rolling news’. In The War You Don’t See, the former BBC war correspondent Rageh Omaar describes how on BBC News 24 the city of Basra in Iraq ‘fell’ to British forces 17 times—when in fact it hadn’t fallen once. The demands on many war reporters are now extraordinary. They are called upon to be at the end of a phone or email 24/7, to know what is happening all the time, to tell viewers something, anything, all the time. I sympathise hugely; there is a frustration in not having the time to get and assess an important story that viewers know little about. It’s time journalists rebelled against this system which entraps so many able people.
How do you think the internet will affect war reporting?
The internet has already had a powerful impact and here, I believe, lies a future positive influence. Those journalists and non-journalists who have not been ‘embedded’ have used the web to get out some remarkable reporting. For example, Dahr Jamail in Iraq, who appears in my film. This unembedded independent American journalist broke many stories in Iraq by being where embedded journalist could not go. And yet none of his dispatches appeared in the so-called mainstream in the US and only belatedly in the UK. In the mainstream, great honourable exceptions like Patrick Cockburn of the Independent managed to report the truth about Iraq by remaining sceptical and brave.
What are the changes you would like to see in the reporting of war?
I would like to see mainstream journalism look beyond establishment or ‘accredited’ sources for the news. If nothing else, the epic Wikileaks disclosures should teach us that. Accepting at face value what governments, the military and intelligence ‘sources’ tell us, is not journalism, as the former CBS star Dan Rather says in the film, it’s ‘stenography’.
What do you think is the biggest achievement of the film?
Just getting it made! ITV can share much of the credit for that.
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