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"Reporting Iraq: the Challenge for Public Service Broadcasting" - Speech by Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop the War Coalition, March 27, 2003.
From the debate organised by Media Workers Against the War
For 28 years I have been a member of the National Union of Journalists. I speak as someone who's proud of my profession and I certainly haven't come here to make any sweeping or blanket attacks on the work of journalists at the BBC or anywhere else. The death of Terry Lloyd and his colleagues should remind us that this is no time for any cheap shots. I am going to be critical of the BBC as an institution, but I think there needs to be a qualification. I get a lot of emails from people in the USA who say that they depend on the BBC for a superior quality of information than they get from their own broadcasters. In British broadcasting generally the rather frenzied, overheated patriotism bordering on chauvinism has not reached as far as our media culture. And of course any formal assessment of the BBC's coverage of the war on Iraq must wait a bit, at least until we can judge over a longer period.
I want to address three things. First is the democratic context of this conflict, because that is the environment in which the BBC has to operate. Second there is the BBC's coverage of the anti-war movement in this country. And third there is the reporting of the war itself.
One cannot avoid the critical context to some degree, for that shapes what we would expect of a public service broadcaster. Our expectations if this were 1940 would be very different. Even if it was 1982 and the Falkland's war one would acknowledge a different mood in the country than there is now.
Also there is the broader issue of this war and democracy. Andrew Marr made a very powerful piece to camera in early February that concluded that never at any time could he recall that there was such a division between opinion in parliament and opinion in the country. And that does form part of the essential background to the situation now, whatever week-by-week fluctuations there might be in the opinion polls. It is an important truth that we have a government that has taken this country to war in the teeth of the biggest anti-war movement this country has ever seen. Not since public opinion became a factor in government, and certainly not since the BBC was chartered, has a war been attempted with popular consent withheld to such an extent.
I believe that this does pose special issues for the BBC right from the outset. The BBC has obligations to political balance and normally that can be satisfied by having one person speaking from the government, one person speaking for the opposition, and on most issues that provides some sort of balance that works. But how to you represent that political balance when the two major parliamentary leaderships are united and the leader of the official opposition is disgracing the terms of his office by officially supporting the government? Yet the great majority of the people do oppose this policy. And at certain stages that opposition has reached up to 80% or more. It's never been less than substantial.
So this raises straight away the important question of whether the BBC is a public service broadcaster or a state broadcaster. How does the BBC discharge its responsibilities to the wider public, and not simply to the establishment, when the consensus in the establishment seems to be very far from the one in the country?
I believe -- with certain qualifications, which I shall come to -- that the BBC has not addressed this democratic crisis. And it is not a democratic crisis that has come out of the clear blue sky. The disengagement of large numbers of citizens from parliament and the major parties can be tracked in any number of ways, but it has never been expressed so sharply as on this great issue: whether to follow the United States into a war against Iraq.
The anti-war movement that has developed in Britain over the last 18 months has been a social movement without precedent in its breadth and extent. Just in the last 6 weeks it has organised the biggest ever peace-time demonstration this country has ever seen, the biggest ever war-time demonstration and the biggest ever day of direct action on the day war broke out. Yet for months this movement seemed to fly largely beneath the BBC's radar.
Because its roots and its focus are by and large outside parliament, outside the establishment, the movement has seemed beyond the ken of many broadcasters. For example we now have reporters embedded here there and everywhere -- I'll come back to that -- with the forces fighting in the Gulf, yet the BBC has not designated a reporter to cover the anti-war movement. Obviously we don't expect an uncritical reporter, but no one has been given that brief to report on this vast, popular movement.
For very many months, and even when the movement was organising larger and larger protests, the movement had to fight long and hard to get a hearing on the main BBC outlets. This criticism must be qualified: on those BBC outlets that are not at a premium -- BBC online, BBC News 24, and so on -- the anti-war movement has received good coverage throughout, and more recently Newsnight, the Today programme somewhat belatedly, and we've had the series of programmes by Niall Dickson coming down the country reporting on people's opinions. So there has been some movement, but it has been very little and very late. Still the anti-war movement has been more or less excluded from the major television news broadcasts -- the 6 o'clock and the 10 o'clock.
There have been a number of edicts that have given rise to this sort of mind-set. There is a memorandum to senior BBC editorial staff from Richard Sambrook, head of BBC news, who complains that BBC programmes have been inundated by the more "extreme" anti-war views: "Those motivated to call in or email are frequently from the more extreme end".
I don't know what extreme means in this context. Today the father of the house of commons, Tam Dayell, has called the prime minister a war criminal. and called for him to be arraigned before the Hague tribunal. So our own group is relatively moderate by comparison. Mr Samrook says: "We may sometimes unwittingly be nobbled by anti-war campaigners. I heard exactly the same question phrased the same way in 5 programmes on one day." No resemblance to New Labour there, then.
This is clearly a signal of how uncomfortable the BBC is with the drift of a large proportion of public opinion in this country, and with it finding public expression.
I have to mention also the announcement made before the February 15 demonstration in which between 1 and 2 million people marched in London, in which a large range of designated BBC staff should not take part in it. I don't know whether this is a departure from previous policy, but it is certainly a departure for this to be announced publicly in such a high-profile way, giving away the fact that here is a movement that the BBC is unhappy with.
I'd also like to mention the events on the day war broke out. By our estimates roughly 1 million people took part in some form of protest action, whether it was school students, people at work, people in their communities and so on, in almost every corner of the country -- a vast mosaic of small protests, entirely unprecedented in Britain's history. No war in which this country has actually been engaged has been greeted with such an upsurge of opposition. And those are the people that, amongst others, the BBC is here to serve.
The BBC's broadcasts barely began to reflect the scale of that action. Instead we had hour after hour of talking heads speculating whether Saddam Hussein was alive or dead, was it really him, what did they hit. At this point the war amounts to nothing more that a botched assassination attempt in which a few cruise missiles were fired a buildings in Baghdad. But this completely overwhelmed any consideration of what the British people were doing in a quite unprecedented way on that day.
That leads on the coverage of the war itself. A number of important issues have already arisen. One which requires a look backwards at coverage arises from what has been clearly the most surprising aspect of the conflict so far: the extent of armed resistance by the Iraqi armed forced to the invasion and the absence of the anticipated warm welcome for the invading forced from the ordinary people of Iraq. From the reports one reads, this clearly surprised the British and American forces on the ground, but nothing in the BBC's broadcasts -- or in those of other broadcasters -- in any way challenged the naive assumptions of government, propaganda assumptions, that this would be a rapid and easy war of liberation in which the Iraqi army would fold up almost straight away and the troops would be welcomed throughout the country. That is the first analytical failure: the acceptance of the government line that is going to be a one-sided, easy war, more like a triumphal parade.
Also there is a question of use of language. For example, there is now speculation that whatever may happen in the main military battles, there will be continuing guerrilla warfare against the invading armies by regular or irregular Iraqi formations for some time. Yet on Newsnight I heard Gavin Esler refering to this as "terrorism" -- that is Iraqi people, at war, lawfully fighting in their own country against an invasion seen by the great majority of international authorities as unlawful would be terrorists. This is a complete internalisation of the language of the aggressors.
On 5 Live I heard a discussion in which the presenters were refering to the "liberation" of villages and towns in Iraq. Now if a government or army source chooses to say that, it is up to them. But for the BBC to be internalising the language of "liberation" again shows an internalisation of the government's agenda.
There is clear evidence that military sources are lying or at least being misleading, and that these lies are not being adequately challenged by journalists. First example, it was announced on Thursday evening that the port of Um Qasr had fallen to coalition forces. But fighting continued there for many days afterwards. The script called for an early victory, and it was announced, whether or not it was true, and it was not challenged.
Secondly, it was reported on Friday night that the Iraqi 51st division, about 8,000 soldiers, had surrendered before Basra. I became a bit puzzled over the weekend when the total number of Iraqi POW's taken from all engagements approached 2000. What had happened to the 8,000 who had surrendered? On the Monday I read a report from a Russian military research centre saying this was complete nonsense -- there had been no such surrender. Yet this was not challenged on the BBC until yesterday, which found that the 51st division had actually withdrawn into Basra rather than surrender. The script called for an early surrender by a major Iraqi unit and this was announced, whether it was true or not. It was not challenged by any journalists out there.
Third it was reported last night that 150 tanks had broken out of Basra and were heading south-east and were being engaged by British forces. Today we are told that the number of tanks was 3. Never has the proverbial fog of war seemed so dense.
Fourth there was the Basra "uprising". As general Wesley Clarke put it, "unfortunately they had not uprisen". The BBC reported the American military, while Al-Jazeera in Basra was saying that actually there was little or no sign of this. It was because the script called for an early uprising and it was announced, whether or not it was happening, and it was not challenged by the journalists.
Of course, the BBC bears no responsibility for the lies or misinformation put out by the military, but it does bear responsibility for their uncritical repetition as fact.
This raises another question. The BBC has many distinguished journalists in the war zone. What is there task? What is their journalistic mission? Are they briefed to challenge war propaganda, to question what they are told, make such efforts as a possible and prudent to verify statements by the military and to tell the public what is going on. Because there are other outlets, including Al-Jazeera, who are doing in my view a better job at this at the moment.
Are the BBC journalists so "embedded" that, however skilled they may be, they cannot properly discharge their responsibilities to the public by exercising their faculties of independent and critical journalists because they are dependent on the army not just for their basic survival but because they are embedded within the operations, outlook and perspectives of the units they are attached to.
I also want to touch on the issue of images. There must be a concern that the BBC is hiding behind legitimate concerns about upsetting the viewer to shield the British public from the brutal reality of this war. Of course sensitive judgements have to be made. Civilians have been killed, British soldiers have been killed, those images are being broadcast elsewhere in the world, but very little has been shown on the BBC -- instead the war is being reduced to a sort of abstract firework display. The script calls for a swift, sanitised war, and when it is not happening we are being denied images that bring home graphically the horror of what is being done, including in some cases the horror of what is being done by British armed forces, the horror of what is being done in our name. If this is a professional judgement by the BBC, it is one that corresponds all too closely to the needs of the government itself.
A couple of concluding points. The BBC doesn't operate in a vacuum. It is an ideologically competitive market, and it clearly doesn't exist as a broadcast monopoly. There are other sources of news who are offering a competing and in many ways more critical coverage of this war.
In the last few days Al-Jazeera has suffered a hacking attack on all its systems of unprecedented complexity and sophistication. One can hear the vitriol that is being poured on their operation -- not because of being biased towards the Iraqi government, of which there is no evidence whatsoever, but simply for presenting a balanced and very detailed on the ground report of what's going on. It is a fact that the US government has leant very heavily on companies supplying al-Jazeera with services and goods to cease those contracts, so it must be clear that media pluralism will not be a major part of the New World Order that is to be imposed on the Middle East.
This is not just an issue of information, it is ultimately an issue of world view. The BBC presents an image of Britain and presents an image of how Britain should be seen to the British people itself. It presents a liberal -- with a small L -- image of our country. The BBC of course can accept that our government and the military can make mistakes, but not that they are engaged in a fundamentally criminal exercise. Yet that is how very many people around the world see what is being done, and the fact that they see it because of a greater access to a diversity of media sources means that many people here understand that is happening. We see ourselves as other see us and it is not a comfortable BBC point of view.
The idea that this country is inescapably on the side of right is now challenged by people in almost every part of this world. For example, if you were to say that this war marks a re-birth of British colonialism and imperialism that would scarcely be controversial in very large areas of this world, yet it is marginalised from public debate here.
How many people know that Iraq was a British colony well within living memory and that Iraq was where chemical weapons were used by the RAF bombing Iraqi villages in the 1920s. Yet it is increasingly dawning on the British people that this finds no reflection in the analytical favour of the BBC. And it raises the fundamental concluding point. If the BBC is a public service broadcaster, it should be in the service of the public that is overwhelmingly sceptical and largely opposed to this war. It should not oppose the government but it should reflect that scepticism in its treatment of the war and realise that the viewing public challenge the government's rationale for entering this war and that they recognise the possibility of continuing deceit as to its course and conduct.
Or is the BBC a state broadcaster inextricably tied into a state that is now engaged in aggression against international law, aggression against the Iraqi people, a state that is blowing off the backs of children's heads in Basra
To be in the service of that state now would be to write a deeply degrading chapter in the history of a great institution.
LINKSwww.mwaw.org
Last modified: Thursday, April 10, 2003
Previous war reporting stories
IFJ says attacks on journalists in Iraq are "Crimes of War" that must be punished
Amnesty International questions attacks on Palestine Hotel and Al-Jazeera
ATTACKS ON JOURNALISTS ARE "WAR CRIMES" SAYS NUJ
MTV Europe heads tells station not to broadcast videos of war
Kucinich Takes to The House Floor To Call For An End to The War
Radio Vatican spreads pope's anti-war message around the world
US Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV
We Work for Peace and Justice
WHILE OTHERS STOOD SILENT...
War Update from www.rense.com
24/7 Journalism Exposed
Bitter Rice - an Israeli looks at the war
Leaked BBC memo explains negative attitude to coverage of dissent.
PENTAGON THREATENS TO KILL INDEPENDENT REPORTERS IN IRAQ
Reporting War on Iraq: The Challenge for Public Service Broadcasting
MEDIA ACTIVISM (continued)
WAR SPIN
ACTIVISM PAYS OFF (II)
Times, NPR Change Their Take on DC Protests
ACTIVISM PAYS OFF (I)
BUSH'S "BLUEPRINT FOR US GLOBAL DOMINATION"
SELLING THE WAR
WAGING WAR ON IRAQ TO WIN THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS
WAR TALK
Not in My Name: A Cutting-Edge Film-Documentary
The Axis of Spin
WITHOUT COMMENT
CENSORSHIP & DISINFORMATION - The War of Minds
New Video Documentary: "NOT IN MY NAME"
WITHOUT COMMENT
THE OTHERS
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Notices
Events & Announcements
World Press Freedom Day
More reporters are currently imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country in the world. Only a matter of weeks ago lawyers failed to persuade a Turkish court to release a 76-year-old journalist from a Turkish internet news station.
World Press Freedom Day on Friday May 3, 2013 is being marked in Britain by a rally to highlight the dangers facing journalists in Turkey and in this podcast, Nicholas Jones speaks to Barry White, Organiser at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and Sam Bamford, the TUC's policy officer for Eastern Europe and Africa about the importance of a campaign to highlight international press freedom.
The World Press Freedom Day rally is being staged by the National Union of Journalists at the NUJ head office, Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1 on Thursday May 2, 6pm-8pm.
DATELINE: 27/4/13
UK launch of EU media campaign
DATELINE: 13/3/13
The UK launch of a 'European Citizens' Initiative' calling for EU rules against concentration of media power will take place on Thursday March 21 from 11:00am – 12:30pm in Committee Room 4A at the House of Lords, London. Guest speakers will include actor and activist Hugh Grant (pictured), media consultant Claire Enders, Professor Steven Barnett, Barry McCall (President of the NUJ) and Marc Gruber (Director of the European Federation of Journalists).
A European Citizens' Initiative is an official petition, like a Downing Street petition. If it succeeds in gathering a million signatures across the EU, the Commission is obliged to respond.
This petition calls for the EU to act to protect media pluralism and press freedom.
CPBF Annual General Meeting
DATELINE: 1/3/13
Make a note in your diary
Saturday 13 July 2013 from 10.00am
NUJ HQ, 308/312 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1.
Leveson, media ownership, CPBF future work.
DOWNLOAD FREEPRESS NOW
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Download Freepress in PDF, ePub or mobi format. Issue 194 now available.
MEDIA FOR ALL CONFERENCE
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Papers from the Media for All Conference
MEDIA MANIFESTO
DATELINE: 26/3/10
The media’s job is to inform and entertain us but we rely on them too to tell us what our rulers and representatives are up to. In the run-up to the Iraq war the government used spin and disinformation in the media to create panic and mislead people. The truth is coming out now, but we need stronger, more independent media to be able to scrutinise governments and make informed choices.
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Previous stories
War Reporting
IFJ says attacks on journalists in Iraq are "Crimes of War" that must be punished
Amnesty International questions attacks on Palestine Hotel and Al-Jazeera
ATTACKS ON JOURNALISTS ARE "WAR CRIMES" SAYS NUJ
MTV Europe heads tells station not to broadcast videos of war
Kucinich Takes to The House Floor To Call For An End to The War
Radio Vatican spreads pope's anti-war message around the world
US Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV
We Work for Peace and Justice
WHILE OTHERS STOOD SILENT...
War Update from www.rense.com
24/7 Journalism Exposed
Bitter Rice - an Israeli looks at the war
Leaked BBC memo explains negative attitude to coverage of dissent.
PENTAGON THREATENS TO KILL INDEPENDENT REPORTERS IN IRAQ
Reporting War on Iraq: The Challenge for Public Service Broadcasting
MEDIA ACTIVISM (continued)
WAR SPIN
ACTIVISM PAYS OFF (II)
Times, NPR Change Their Take on DC Protests
ACTIVISM PAYS OFF (I)
BUSH'S "BLUEPRINT FOR US GLOBAL DOMINATION"
SELLING THE WAR
WAGING WAR ON IRAQ TO WIN THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS
WAR TALK
Not in My Name: A Cutting-Edge Film-Documentary
The Axis of Spin
WITHOUT COMMENT
CENSORSHIP & DISINFORMATION - The War of Minds
New Video Documentary: "NOT IN MY NAME"
WITHOUT COMMENT
THE OTHERS
