(This is the cover story of this week's New Statesman and "is an abridged version of an address, "Reporting War and Empire", by John Pilger at Columbia University, New York, in company with Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk and Charles Glass".)During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive."
This acute scepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is urgently needed in supposedly free societies today. Take the reporting of state-sponsored war. The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognised in the United States, Britain and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq.
(...)
The tragedy in Iraq is different, but, for journalists, there are haunting similarities. On 24 August last year, a New York Times editorial declared: "If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion
would have been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had not betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them.
We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI6, the secret intelligence service. In what was called "Operation Mass Appeal", MI6 agents planted stories about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction - such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All these stories were fake. But this is not the point. The point is that the dark deeds of MI6 were quite unnecessary. Recently, the BBC's director of news, Helen Boaden, was asked to explain how one of her "embedded" reporters in Iraq, having accepted US denials of the use of chemical weapons against civilians, could possibly describe the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as to "bring democracy and human rights" to Iraq. She replied with quotations from Blair that this was indeed the aim, as if Blair's utterances and the truth were in any way related. On the third anniversary of the invasion, a BBC newsreader described this illegal, unprovoked act, based on lies, as a "miscalculation". Thus, to use Edward Herman's memorable phrase, the unthinkable was normalised.
(...)
http://www.newstatesman.com/200604240013
http://www.globalecho.org/view_article.php?aid=7230
This is the event at Columbia, but I can't find a transcript of the complete address:
http://www.heymancenter.org/events.php?id=29
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
