by Bruce Page
Clearly it’s not a reporter’ role to resist a democratic choice for war, or seek to determine war’s outcomes (though editors may try to persuade). But resistance to fraudulent war – with strategy and tactics driven by hallucination – is not the same thing. War never suspends the duties of inquiry which give news media legitimacy: it just makes achieving the necessary perspective far more painful.
Perspective, however, wasn’t asked for when George Bush and Tony Blair launched the War on Terror – and as we’ve seen Newscorp galloped forth unanimously under the WOT banner.
Clattering along this warpath, foam-flecked chargers like the Sun and New York Post quite often attracted derision. And Fox News raised smiles by trying to ban Al Franken’s use of its ‘Fair and Balanced’ logo as subtitle to his bestseller Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. The lawsuit gave him a handy boost.
But a certain respect persists for up-market assets like the Australian, or The Times and Sunday Times: easier to see as normal papers, not propaganda sheets. Like Damon Runyon’s faro player, commentators hate to concede that the biggest (if not yet only) game in town may be fixed.
‘Normal’ is the clue: journalism’s proper subject isn’t normality. It’s visible in serious media, but only because seriousness must admit that real worlds incline to the orderly, with gross disruption rare. Tabloidism demands endless commotion, so fabrication is its typical sin. Respectable media sin by fancying that rare equals non-existent, so are tested by their response to abnormalities.
Democracy’s extreme abnormality is fraud in major issues of war, and prior to 2003 two genuine modern cases were consummated: Suez (1956), and the Tonkin Gulf (1964), which legalised the Vietnam war. Allegations about 1914 —about Korea, and the Falklands – have been made, but those conflicts weren’t essentially spurious. And even in Iraq potential existed for wars that some democratic coalition might have chosen. The war actually made, however, was a gruesome swindle.
Publications laid out more or less soberly can seem genuine when issues are less stark. But the media benchmark now should be performance in the third great post-1945 fraud, where WMD and WOT intertwined, with lethal consequences persisting.
Not all who bought and sold the swindle are guilty equally with its authors – and even their offences varied subtly by expertise, opportunity, and context. But Prospectus Part I, the September 2002 Dossier synthesised under Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee from factoid science and brazen rumour, avoided anything of subtlety. Claiming to refute Iraqi weaponry denials, it did so by assuming the truth of the matters actually placed in issue. Intelligence of bioweaponry, of remote-control WMD aircraft and ballistic missiles it simply ‘knew from intelligence’: circularity exploded by Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations some two millennia past.
Saddam Hussein was a famous liar. But the Dossier demonstrated only that Whitehall, wishing Iraq to seem lethal, would inflate into something like evidence anything it might truffle-up. Newscorp apologists assert that in 2002 everyone – the spooks of France, Russia, Germany included thought Iraq was hiding weapons. And it’s true: that Hussein was entirely truthful was too outlandish for any of us to believe.
But presence of a threat justifying pre-emptive war was not believed either. Such insistence was confined to President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and their acolytes. And among them none outdid Newscorp and its Boss for insistence.
Even the best newspeople bend somewhat to lawful governments: no matter how cruelly history shows otherwise, appearances always suggest they know something we don’t. Presented by a circus barker, Prospectus II – America’s UN presentation – would have visibly been absurd. But in Colin Powell’s hands that portfolio of speculative artworks became convincing.
Judith Miller of the New York Times, defending her recital of mass-destruction delusions, denied that investigative reporters ought to ‘assess’ the government’s information.
My job is to tell readers … what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal. Pressure for rallying so tamely to authority’s side is natural in daunting times and considerable efforts were made to compare the era with Appeasement in the 1930s – though the history was varied so far as to make a perfect reciprocal. Neville Chamberlain notoriously got media collaboration for tales about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (the very words). But those – based also on pseudointelligence – supposedly made resistance to the Nazis unthinkable.
However, the 1930s media also varied: the Daily Mirror, the (Manchester) Guardian, the Yorkshire Post, the BBC – resisted. And hindsight shows the variation was enough to enable the nation to confront what its government turned away from.
Variation, though declining since, existed still in 2002. The Independent was least impressed by the Dossier; in the Guardian credulity yielded to scepticism and, as time went on, in the Mail. Similarly the US media mainstream: eventually poor Ms Miller departed, and the New York Times, followed by the Washington Post have apologised for underperforming their standards in 9/11’s fearful aftermath. If none went beyond scepticism into investigation – and the official pressure against doing so was intense that was at least an improvement on enthusiasm.
But the Archipelago remains variation-free territory. Newscorp didn’t underperform its standards in the assault on Terror. It absolutely fulfilled them.
The great thing, said Col Allan, editor of the New York Post, was to prevent readers being ‘confused’, and confusion certainly got little quarter at Newscorp’s up-market end. The Times in March 2003 found the US and the UK frantically seeking evidence to swing a UN vote for war, and the paper pitched creatively in.
First, Hans Blix’s inspectors locate a drone aircraft in Iraq – but judge it insignificant. US officials disagree: it might well deliver WMD freight against America.
On 9 March, Fox News interviews Colin Powell, asserting that Blix, though a ‘decent, honest man’, has minimised the drone. Next day the State Department quite falsely adds that he has altogether hidden it.
James Bone of The Times reports this as suppression designed by Blix ‘to avoid triggering war’. But the vote, he says, has been shifting nonetheless. And just in time, here’s the ‘smoking gun’, which he calls ‘a biggie’. Britain and America will make Blix confess, and consequently win the vote.
This he follows up with a startling op-ed piece: BLIX SHOULD TURN THE ‘SMOKING GUN’ ON HIS OWN HEAD.
Having ‘betrayed the trust of … millions’, the inspector must quit. Afraid to be ‘the man who triggers war’ he is tricking the Security Council. In ‘the history of this tumultuous time … Dr Blix will be the man who tried to hide the “smoking gun”.’
While Bone concocts this item, other reporters in Baghdad inspect the device: balsa-wood wings; motor-bike engine; range 8 kilometres; payload, one videocam. No smoking gun, just smoke and mirrors. The vote did not proceed as The Times prophesied, and was as we know ignored.
Editorial independence was still an infant in 1914 when nationalist furies first engulfed mass newspapers and their readers. Resisting the official illusions of ‘total war’ was something reporters found hard, often impossible. And though much has been regained since that ‘golden age of lying’ – mostly in 1939-45 - notions persist that the state under pressure is owed some duty of untruth.
Keith Murdoch was significant for abandoning resistance altogether. As a politico-military agent under journalistic cover he diligently supported the Western Front killing machine, clothed in notions acquired simply from Lord Northcliffe and Billy Hughes, the grandest patrons he could hitch himself to. (See note at the end of Chapter 2.)
Sir Keith’s project for Second World War perished in authoritarian over-reach (as in ‘The Southcliffe Inheritance’ above, pp46-7). But no one familiar with the actual Murdoch family tradition was surprised when in 1982 Rupert’s papers joined the Falklands War as vigilante trumpeters for the official version: tuningup, as it were, for the War on Terror (p297).
A major difference
between Rupert Murdoch and Francesco Sforza is that a condottiero could exercise choice about going to war.
Newscorp does its regular business in the modern peacetime state – a structure which would have amazed Francesco by existing. There it maintains a congenial environment – especially in tax and competition affairs via bargains with authority which rivals cannot or will not emulate. Attachment to power is the ongoing requirement: peace allowing time for allegiances to be juggled, and understandings rather than contracts to be developed. (Medieval and Renaissance practitioners used a certain formality – condottiero has the same root as contract.)
Power for Newscorp is typically a government, but decayed or immature specimens must be avoided or dumped – and bad options have landed Murdoch sometimes in a scrape (as in ‘Mr Murdoch Changes Trains’).
There were however no options available in the Iraq case. Whoever now takes a nation to war necessarily commands its present force – the state, in Max Weber’s unsparing phrase, is ‘the monopoly of violence’ and this puts Newscorp automatically at its service. Condottieri furnished the Italian states with force, something they required in order to exist: choice therefore was on the supplier’s side (and often exercised – as Machiavelli complained in betrayal of a contract).
A state cannot exist in the modern world without sustaining its own suitable force. The present-day condottiero supplies words, not force. For that commodity Newscorp had been specifically suppliant, owing its life in 1986 to the state’s readiness to oblige.
Of course no media organisation – no denizen of the state – is finally independent of this force. But the modern state is also a creation of laws the monopoly, said Weber, concerns legitimate force. Consequently, space exists where reporters and editors can develop practical independence provided they have worked up the essential praxis before circumstances become extreme.
One essential is information-supplies which will function at a distance from official insiders. Journalism’s literature is too far in love with inside-story legends to offer many decent manuals: one of the few which can be usefully summarised comes actually from a military-intelligence expert, General Frank Kitson, in Low Intensity Operations. Kitson ranks organised volumes of low-level, quasi-public data as vital – and high-level inside sources as only potential bonus. Insiders gain high-level knowledge through organisational loyalty: disclosure to outsiders is a conditional bargain, to be hard-driven in times when pressure runs high.
Officials, simply, will blank-out journalists unless their reporting output fits the current needs of political office-holders. Every crisis shows this pattern, and the deeper the plainer: as in Appeasement, in Suez, or domestic contexts like Sir Bernard Ingham’s attempt to declare the Thatcher regime immortal (‘TINA’: There Is No Alternative’).
To keep functioning as a news source then requires a strong, self-confident reporting team (not celebrity-hunters or sting-experts): something Murdoch has never developed, only acquired via take-over, and subsequently degraded. Newscorp house-style routinely disdains reporters other than intrusion maestros at the Sun, the Post and (formerly) the News of the Screws. But when reporting the actions of government such people need spoon-feeding by the government itself.
Difficulty of working without that aid lessens with a realisation that modern societies are built on information which governments cannot wholly suppress without making their own environment unmanageable. Virtually all the scientific knowledge needed to dismantle the September Dossier was low-level under Kitson’s rules: data routinely available to sustain manufacturing, agriculture and academic research. In a related way, no investigator as ready to expend shoeleather as Tony Bevins did in undoing TINA – after walking out on Murdoch – need worry about exclusion from official briefings.
Challenge to the state is usually possible for media teams who do not require its current affection. But application of Michael Oakeshott’s great conservative rule that ‘citizens are not lovers’ is usually a tougher experience for reporters than for the other side: assorted dangers are always possible. All the same, while the state doesn’t perfectly keep its promises, only very rarely does it trash its framework of legal obligations altogether.
Journalists traditionally assume the style of a scofflaw, but in serious operators it is an ironic pose (redress for the minor status of demotic profession). They know their work relies intimately on law’s protection: a lesson reinforced in anyone who comes out on the right side of a few tricky actions for libel or contempt of court.
Patient combat with an adversary but lawful state delineates the space where journalism produces much – or most – which has lasting value, and one where Newscorp rarely appears. But then Newscorp actually is a dedicated corporate scofflaw, in substance as well as style. Its existence rests on avoiding, shaking loose, redefining and sidestepping laws and regulations likely to safeguard independent media operation; even libel is an exercise Newscorp rarely undertakes except in the farcical MacKenzie form (usually settling), although to be sure it is foremost in the campaign to secure tabloid rights for invasion of personal privacy.
Britain is in no sense one of the hardest places in which to sustain processes of investigation and publication. But undertaken anywhere it is stressful simply because it never ends. A natural patriotism makes a better basis for the work than global convenience can provide.
The pizzazz content of the British Dossier wasn’t in its mass of low-level facts
– individually true, in context adding up to nothing. And that was the main bulk of the document.
The excitement was generated in a late introduction which suggested that Saddam Hussein could have high-tech missiles of some type – ill-defined but menacing – ready to fire with 45 minutes of his decision. This fitted with nothing else in the Dossier, and still less with common military estimates that deploying an old-tech tank squadron inside 45 minutes would overstretch Saddam Hussein’s run-down military. This material was drafted under the Prime Minister’s supervision, with inputs from MI6: a classic product of heady interaction between mandarin spooks, political chiefains and their spin doctors. Its authors must have known it was catnip for tabloid minds.
Dr Brian Jones, head of scientific research at the defence staff, resisted its addition to the publication. He was, he says,‘finessed’: the MI6 contributors said the source was too secret for his expert ears.
He consented to its publication (while insisting on a secret record of his dissent) because he expected the media – indeed Parliament – and politicians to be trenchantly sceptical. This he has since called a misjudgment. He did not realise how much media scepticism had wilted under the combined impact of Alastair Campbell and Newscorp.
The hyper-secret source is now known as Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, holder of a shaky chemical engineering degree from Baghdad: one still unused by 1995, when financial misfortune led him to depart Iraq. He persuaded German security agents to give him asylum and the codename ‘Curveball’ – but could never persuade them he was truthful. Passed around between German, US and British officials, his story finally caught fire as the hunger for WMD-data escalated in 2002. He provided busily, including the mobile launchers Colin Powell used at the UN. This February he told the Guardian it was all lies.
Few disciplines are as arduous as scientific intelligence. Still, complex analysis is a thing humans can do remarkably well: witness the breaking of the Nazis’ Enigma, and Russia’s Venona cryptograms. But the faculty exists close-alongside propensities to hallucination. A celebrated experiment shows that if a man in a gorilla suit walks through a room where complex games are being played, half those present won’t notice (and often deny their error).
Scientific method can reduce delusion by joining free intuition with seamless oversight: zero secrecy within the investigating group allows feedback to damp out error. But ‘finessing’ practices will recreate secrecy, and intuition untested can swiftly amplify feedback. When audio circuits loop their output into their input i
nsane howling results: similarly, when docile media recycle official fancies back to their origin. The notorious smoking gun/mushroom cloud was imagined to the US media by the Bush speechmaker Michael Gerson; politicians then quoted the media, and media Newscorp con brio – requoted them to themselves.
Gathered around Alastair Campbell as they refined their presentation of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent arsenal, the Blair publicity team asked themselves: ‘What do we want the headlines to say?’
The Sun came up with exactly their desire: rockets in graphic flight, with equally dramatic typography.
HE’S GOT ‘EM LET’S GET HIM
The gorilla had walked.
Views might differ on whether the WMD casus belli outdoes the Suez and Vietnam examples. It is certainly in the same class. In the Suez conspiracy Britain and France ‘intervened’ to halt an Israeli assault on Egypt which they had themselves devised. That secret was known in detail four days beforehand to The Times, which chose not to publish, letting disaster march ahead. Comparison with the Sun neatly illustrates the suggestio falsi–suppressio veri equality.
As to the third case: US experts long knew that Vietnamese nationalism was real, probably invincible, and solidly immune to Soviet or Chinese rule. Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir Secrets reveals Washington insiders (himself included) making ‘morons’ of themselves, by burying this reality under ‘domino effect’ fabrications, then feeding the package to journalists with a kind of glee. War powers were then justified by fictional accounts of naval conflict in the Tonkin Gulf.
When the Pentagon Papers dissolved the veil, savage defences of power’s right to lie led to the Watergate crisis. It may seem harsh to upbraid Newscorp – just a fledgling in world affairs? – for a limp response to Nixon’s assault on American democracy.