Unfree Media – State Stenography And Shameful Silence

A recent viral clip of Jeremy Corbyn featured vital truths about the corporate media that ought to be at the forefront of public consciousness in the approach to the UK General Election on December 12. The clip began:

'A free press is essential to our democracy. But much of our press isn't very free at all.'

Corbyn continued:

'Just three companies control 71 per cent of national newspaper circulation and five companies control 81 per cent of local newspaper circulation.

'This unhealthy sway of a few corporations and billionaires shapes and skews the priorities and worldview of powerful sections of the media.

'And it doesn't stop with the newspapers, on and offline. Print too often sets the broadcast agenda, even though it is wedded so firmly to the Tories politically and to corporate interests more generally.'

Corbyn's words were not from a recent speech. They were actually delivered as part of his Alternative Mactaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August 2018. But they remain as relevant as ever; hence being picked up anew by 'Tory Fibs', a grassroots socialist Twitter account.

Corbyn shone on a spotlight on the BBC:

'the BBC should be freed of government control, democratised and made representative of the country it serves to help it do that.

'The BBC is meant to be independent, but its charter grants governments the power to appoint the chair and four directors of the board and set the level of the licence fee.'

As regular readers will be well aware, Media Lens has long highlighted the BBC's lack of independence and, more particularly, the insidious role of BBC News in protecting the establishment, promoting deference to the royal family and class system, as well as deflecting scrutiny of state and corporate crimes.

Corbyn concluded on the state of the media today:

'We need to set journalists and citizens free to hold power to account, by breaking the grip of tech giants and billionaires on our media.'

All this is arguably never more evident than when a General Election is looming. Right now, established power is fighting tooth and nail to maintain its control on society. Corporate media, including gatekeepers like the BBC and the Guardian - 'thus far and no farther', in the words of Noam Chomsky - play a central role in maintaining the destructive status quo.

Filtering Facts

The state-corporate management and manipulation of 'the news' relies on a subtle filtering process whereby leading journalists select – consciously or otherwise - which facts are 'fit' to be reported, and which can or should be ignored.

Consider an item on BBC News at Ten last Thursday when political editor Laura Kuenssberg reported Boris Johnson's visit to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. She presented the Prime Minister in a favourable light, having amiable encounters with people in Addenbrooke's. What the BBC did not show were the jeers of staff and patients ringing in Johnson's ears as he left the hospital. Nor did Kuenssberg report on the young medical student who was 'pushed aside by [a] Boris Johnson aide'while attempting to challenge Johnson on the NHS and the climate crisis. Julia Simons, who is training at the hospital to become a doctor, called his visit a 'PR stunt'.

We challenged the BBC political editor via Twitter:

'Hello @bbclaurak,

'Why did your @BBCNews at Ten piece on Boris Johnson's visit to a Cambridge hospital omit the part where he left with jeers from staff and patients ringing in his ears?'

Our tweet was 'liked' and retweeted hundreds of times, but there was no reply from Kuenssberg. Her Twitter bio states:

'I know it's fashionable, but even in 2019 there is nothing big or clever about shooting the messenger - tweets or retweets here aren't necessarily my view'

But, by heavily filtering the facts that Kuenssberg selects to tweet or retweet, 'the messenger' has transformed into an echo chamber and amplifier of government propaganda. This phenomenon of state stenography – which, of course, is far from new - was highlighted in an excellent article recently by Peter Oborne, former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph. Under the title, 'British journalists have become part of Johnson's fake news machine', Oborne argued that:

'From the Mail, The Times to the BBC and ITN, everyone is peddling Downing Street's lies and smears. They're turning their readers into dupes.'

As Oborne noted, 'mainstream' political journalism too often relies upon whatever 'a senior No 10 source' says:

'This modus operandi, which allow pro-government narratives to enter the public domain unmediated by proper interrogation, has become routine among political reporters since Johnson and his Vote Leave media team entered Downing Street.'

Oborne observed:

'There is an implicit deal. In return for access and information (much of it false) the political media spins a pro-government narrative.'

As a recent example, Oborne pointed to the government's deceitful response to the leaked 'Yellowhammer dossier' setting out the damaging consequences of a no-deal Brexit on the UK – a news story that 'deeply embarrassed' Boris Johnson and senior ministers. Downing Street responded by feeding a false claim to compliant journalists that the leak happened on Theresa May's watch; and that Remain-supporting ex-ministers led by Philip Hammond, Chancellor of the Exchequer in May's Cabinet, were responsible. Newspapers were full of convenient headlines and stories about the alleged leakers, distracting attention from the damaging analysis of the leaked dossier itself. As Oborne noted, it turned out that the leaked document was dated nine days after Johnson came to power: the leak had occurred under his watch, not May's.

This issue of journalist access in return for maintaining a power-friendly narrative has long been known. The media's heavy reliance on state and corporate sources is one of the five 'news filters' – along with corporate ownership, advertising, flak and 'anti-Communism' - in the propaganda model of the media introduced by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 'Manufacturing Consent' (1988).

Focusing on the country's two main political editors – the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg and Robert Peston of ITV News – Oborne added:

'Political editors are so pleased to be given "insider" or "exclusive" information that they report it without challenge or question.'

Oborne, as a senior journalist with experience and clout, was afforded follow-up media interviews to make his case. Perhaps the most noteworthy example was his fiery appearance on Radio 2 where he was interviewed by Amol Rajan, a former editor of the oligarch-owned Independent and now the BBC's media editor. You do not get to such exalted positions in the corporate media, as Rajan has done, by being a thorn in the side of the establishment. In a remarkable exchange, not only did Oborne name and shame major political editors for cosying up to power, he directly, and correctly, accused Rajan of the same. (Click here, starting at around 1:09:20; or, once the BBC link has expired, listen to the relevant segment here)

Oborne commented:

'You, yourself, when you were Independent editor, notoriously sucked up to power. You are a client journalist yourself...you were a crony journalist yourself. It's time this system was exploded'.

Rajan blustered:

'It's unbecoming of you, Peter, it's unbecoming.'

When Oborne added that Rajan had also 'failed to notice' stories as BBC media editor, there was a brief stunned silence.

In 2014, when Rajan was the Independent's editor, he boasted of 'our proud record on coverage of Iraq'. We responded at the time:

'Sorry, we have analysed the Independent's performance closely. Your record was and is shameful. Where to start?'

Rajan did not reply. It was around this time that he blocked us on Twitter.

OPCW Whistleblowers Question The Douma Narrative

A further, grave example of present-day propaganda filtering involves the corporate media blanking of further proof that western powers, notably the US, have been manipulating the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

Last month, WikiLeaks published evidence from an OPCW whistleblower showing that the international chemical watchdog had suppressed evidence suggesting that the Syrian government had not, in fact, mounted a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, on April 7, 2018. In other words, there is clear authoritative testimony from an OPCW insider contradicting the endlessly repeated narrative that 'Assad used weapons against his own civilians' in Douma. This state-approved script, propagated throughout the major western news media, served as the 'justification' for the US, UK and France to launch missile strikes on Syria seven days later.

Shockingly, as reported by WikiLeaks, a panel of experts convened by the Courage Foundation, an independent British civil society organisation, reported that:

'Not only did the panel find that OPCW tampered with the evidence to produce an outcome desired by the geopolitical actors involved in this instance, it tried to silence its own senior civil servants'.

One member of the panel, Richard Falk – an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years - noted that the credibility of the panel's conclusions were strengthened by having José Bustani, a former Director-General of the OPCW, among its members.

Falk added:

'Not only is there a lack of transparency and accountability with respect to the undertakings of major national governments, but there is a deliberate manipulation of evidence and obstruction of procedures designed to protect the citizenry against abuses of state, and in the case of major states, especially the United States, to protect the public interest.'

This new testimony added to the earlier revelations in May that Ian Henderson, a senior OPCW scientist, had written a detailed report, suppressed by OPCW, calling into question the official version of events in Douma. As our media alert at the time noted, very little media coverage was devoted to this expert evidence questioning the Washington-stamped 'consensus' view.

Robert Fisk's article in the Independent ten days after the Douma incident was a vanishingly rare exception. He interviewed a Syrian doctor who told him that the victims of the alleged chemical attack had actually suffered from hypoxia – oxygen starvation in the dusty tunnels where they had taken refuge from bombing– and not gas poisoning. As we also observed in our media alert, BBC Syria producer Riam Dalati stated on Twitter that after almost six months of investigation he had concludedthat:

'I can prove without a doubt that the Douma Hospital scene was staged.'

Two days after the Douma attack, he had tweeted:

'Sick and tired of activists and rebels using corpses of dead children to stage emotive scenes for Western consumption. Then they wonder why some serious journos are questioning part of the narrative.'

Dalati later deleted his tweet and set his Twitter account to 'private' status (it has since become accessible to the public again).

Typically, the BBC sought to minimise any public doubts about the official narrative on Douma by including only Syrian and Russian claims of 'fabrication'. There was little, or no, coverage of sceptical Western voices. In similar fashion, in the runup to the Iraq war of 2003, BBC News and other 'mainstream' outlets had relegated credible allegations that the 'threat' of 'Iraqi WMD' was fake news to the 'evil dictator' Saddam Hussein.

Readers may recall that award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh had difficulty publishing his in-depth, sceptical reporting about an earlier alleged Syrian government chemical weapons attack at Ghouta in 2013. In the end, he had to publish in the London Review of Books, of all places (here and here).

This is so often the fate of the best journalism: pushed to the margins where it can be safely ignored.

Corporate Eyes Averted And Tongues Bitten

The fact that a second OPCW whistleblower has now revealed extremely serious manipulation of evidence surrounding what happened at Douma has been greeted by a wall of corporate media silence. However, it was mentioned briefly by Jonathan Steele, a former senior Middle East correspondent for the Guardian, in a radio interview with Paul Henley on the BBC World Service on October 27, 2019 (listen here; from around 11:00; if no longer available from the BBC, listen to the extract archived here by Caitlin Johnstone and read her article):

Jonathan Steele: I was in Brussels last week ... I attended a briefing by a whistleblower from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He was one of the inspectors who was sent out to Douma in Syria in April last year to check into the allegations by the rebels that Syrian aeroplanes had dropped two canisters of chlorine gas, killing up to 43 people. He claims he was in charge of picking up the samples in the affected areas, and in neutral areas, to check whether there were chlorine derivatives there ...

Paul Henley: And?

JS: ... and he found that there was no difference. So it rather suggested there was no chemical gas attack, because in the buildings where the people allegedly died there was no extra chlorinated organic chemicals than in the normal streets elsewhere. And I put this to the OPCW for comment, and they haven't yet replied. But it rather suggests that a lot of this was propaganda...

PH: Propaganda led by?

JS: ... led by the rebel side to try and bring in American planes, which in fact did happen. American, British and French planes bombed Damascus a few days after these reports. And actually this is the second whistleblower to come forward. A few months ago there was a leaked report by the person [senior OPCW scientist Ian Henderson – mentioned earlier in this alert] who looked into the ballistics, as to whether these cylinders had been dropped by planes, looking at the damage of the building and the damage on the side of the cylinders. And he decided, concluded, that the higher probability was that these cylinders were placed on the ground, rather than from planes.

PH: This would be a major revelation...

JS: ... it would be a major revelation ...

PH: ... given the number of people rubbishing the idea that these could have been fake videos at the time.

JS: Well, these two scientists, I think they're non-political – they wouldn't have been sent to Douma, if they'd had strong political views, by the OPCW. They want to speak to the Conference of the Member States in November, next month, and give their views, and be allowed to come forward publicly with their concerns. Because they've tried to raise them internally and been – they say they've been – suppressed, their views have been suppressed.

PH: Very interesting.

(Transcript courtesy of Tim Hayward of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media.)

In May, when the suppressed engineering assessment report on Douma by the OPCW's Ian Henderson was leaked, Lyse Doucet, the BBC's chief international correspondent, agreed that this was 'an important story'. Despite polite nudges from Media Lens, and others, she said no more on the matter. Did BBC colleagues have a quiet word in her ear?

Following revelations of a second whistleblower last week, we challenged her once more. She again ignored us, but she did reply to one of our Twitter followers:

'Thanks Philip. I've been in Canada this month reporting on elections & in Afghanistan for most of Sept. I did forward the earlier information to programmes but was away during more recent news so other teams /programmes would have looked at it.'

While it is heartening to see any reply – perhaps a measure of Doucet's desire to give at least the impression of being accountable to the public – it is a very evasive reply. It is remarkable that for five months she had not been around to report vital testimony from OPCW insiders blowing a hole in the official, US-friendly narrative used to 'justify' missile attacks on Syria. Clearly, she had decided it was not that important after all.

And what does 'so other teams /programmes would have looked at it' actually mean? What evidence did they examine? And how closely? Where are the BBC headlines and major coverage these revelations deserve? As far as we can tell, there has been no mention of the OPCW whistleblowers on the BBC News website; nor has there been any coverage on the main BBC News programmes. Our challenges to Paul Royall, editor of the BBC News flagship News at Six and Ten programmes, and Nick Sutton, editor of the BBC News website, have gone unanswered.

Meanwhile, the General Election on December 12 may well be, as Jeremy Corbyn says:

'a once-in-a-generation chance to transform our country and take on the vested interests holding people back.'

But time is rapidly running out for real change - whether that be on foreign policy, such as Syria, or the largest crisis now facing all of us. A global group of 11,000 scientists declared this week that the evidence is 'clear and unequivocal' that humanity is in a climate emergency. The stakes, then, are even higher than 'once-in-a-generation'. As Extinction Rebellion have repeatedly warned, there may not be more than one new generation of humanity that will survive, given the severity of climate breakdown.

DC

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