by John Pilger
Understanding this concept, in war and peace, is one of the aims of this book. As Herman pointed out: ‘Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on “normalisation” . . . There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.’9
Of course, ‘normalising’ can only be successful once ‘distance’ has been established. General Schwarzkopf’s video game show during the Gulf War, which television dutifully transmitted at peak viewing times, was an outstanding example of this. Like the pilots who dropped the ‘smart’ bombs, politicians, journalists, bureaucrats and the public, all of us, were kept at a distance. In East Timor, the Suharto regime’s murder of two television crews, its sealing of the country, and the collusive silence of Western governments, kept us all at a distance. What we could not see did not happen.
My own experience as a journalist, much of it spent in wartime and at places of upheaval, has taught me rudely about this process. The first time I saw and touched a victim of Napalm – her smouldering skin came away and stuck to my hand – I also saw the aircraft that had dropped the Napalm bomb on a village path. When, a few days later, I stood up at a press conference and asked an American briefer, a pleasant man just doing his job, if he had ever seen a victim of Napalm, he stared blankly at me, a beacon of incredulity. Earlier he had used the term ‘collateral damage’. I asked him what this meant. He stared some more. Surely, I knew my ‘ABC’. He finally asked me to ‘rephrase’ the question. I repeated it, twice, until he said the word ‘people’. When I asked him if this meant ‘civilian people’, his affirmation was barely audible.
No doubt because I was young, this and other encounters of striking similarity left an impression upon me. I formed the view that journalism ought not to be a process that separated people from their actions, or itself an act of complicity. I became especially interested in the decision-making of those of apparently impeccable respectability, whose measured demeanour and ‘greyness’ contained not a hint of totalitarianism and yet who, at great remove in physical and cultural distance, executed and maimed people, destroying and dislocating their communities on a scale comparable with the accredited monsters of our time.
In the Cambodia and East Timor chapters I have described this synthesis – in Cambodia, between Nixon and Kissinger on the one hand and Pol Pot and his gang on the other. What the former began from afar, the latter completed. Only the method varied. To understand that is to begin to understand the true nature of the crime perpetrated in Cambodia and where the responsibility for it lies. And it helps to explain why every conceivable moral and intellectual contortion is currently being attempted to protect those who, in the ‘division of labour’, share the culpability either as accessories or apologists.
In the East Timor section I have drawn together my own experience as a reporter going undercover, with interviews conducted around the world with those who played a part in the cataclysmic events that have consumed that country beyond the reach of the TV camera and the satellite dish. In this way, with hillsides of crosses and faces of unsmiling, courageous people fresh in our memory, David Munro and I were able to reconstruct a largely forgotten history and lay before its culpable participants the enduring evidence of their work. For me, the brutal death of 200,000 East Timorese, a third of the population, says much about how the modern world is ordered and how most of us are pressed to believe otherwise.
The long ‘silence’ over the genocide in East Timor is indicative of how much of the modern media is ordered. In recent years a new version of an old ethos has arisen in the so-called ‘free’ media in the west. It was expressed succinctly in May 1992 by the director of programmes of the new British network television company, Carlton, which replaced Thames following the infamous auction of commercial franchises instigated by former prime minister Thatcher. Current affairs programmes ‘that don’t deliver’, he said, ‘will not survive in the new ITV’. To ‘earn their way’, they have to attract viewing audiences of at least six to eight million people, regardless of the subject matter. ‘We have to be hard-headed and realistic,’ he said.10
The departing editor of Thames’s This Week series – which died with Thames – analysed this ‘hard-headedness’ and apparent failure to ‘deliver’. He pointed out that the two ITV current affairs flag carriers, This Week and World in Action, represented ‘the only area in commercial television that had not only maintained its popular audience, but improved it’; that current affairs audiences had increased by 60 per cent; and that World in Action with its thirty-five-year tradition of controversial, award-winning broadcast journalism, was set to average eight million viewers per programme. Moreover, current affairs drew larger audiences than even some ‘light entertainment’.11 Following the late-night screening of Death of a Nation, my film on East Timor, British Telecom reported calls to the advertised ITV ‘helpline’ number running at 4,000 a minute.
None of this ought to be surprising. What the public wants is so often not what the editor of the Daily Beast says they want. Year after year surveys of television trends demonstrate people’s preference for strong, hard-hitting factual programmes. This and quality drama remain the strengths of British television while its listings show more and more anodyne sitcoms, the worst of Hollywood and soaps. In April 1994 Granada Television announced that it was dropping World in Action for two months to make way for a ‘bumper episode’ of Coronation Street. This will be the series’ longest absence from the screen in its history.
Official truths are often powerful illusions, such as that of ‘choice’ in the media society. One of the principal arbiters of this is Rupert Murdoch. Having swallowed Times Newspapers and British Satellite Broadcasting with the help of his friend, Margaret Thatcher, Murdoch in 1992 added the television coverage of Britain’s most popular game, football. In secret collusion with the BBC, Murdoch’s BSkyB bought the rights to live coverage of all premier league games. As its cut of the deal, the BBC shows the highlights. Even those who already own a Murdoch satellite dish will almost certainly have to pay a monthly football charge, or be excluded from what millions regard as the high point of their week.
This is ‘choice’ at its most Orwellian, denying people not only programmes that are politically unpalatable but also their time-honoured pleasures. Murdoch’s next ‘buys’ are reported to be the television coverage of the Grand National and the rugby union final. One wonders what the purpose is of such voracity. Profit, of course; and power of an explicit kind.
In an article entitled ‘Britain’s class war in a satellite dish’, the London correspondent of Murdoch’s Australian, Nicholas Rothwell, described Murdoch as a free-market Karl Marx. ‘Murdoch’s empire has always shared one thing with the Marxist enterprise,’ he wrote, ‘it turns ideas into social and economic experiments . . . If BSkyB’s swoop to seize control of televised soccer marks the climax of News Corporation’s long-term plan for a self-reinforcing media system, it is also the culminating event in a social . . . and even ideological . . . transformation of Britain in the image of a radical philosophy: one which places the media corporation, as a promoter of information to the ordinary consumer, in direct opposition to the established elites’.12
This is presumably what Murdoch himself believes. As a principal backer of Thatcherism’s ‘radical philosophy’, he can claim to have shaken the old order, helping to abolish the humanist wing of the Tory Party and to damage the royal family. As his London man implies, he intends to replace this with a Murdoch-approved elite which ‘places the media corporation . . . in direct competition to the established elites’. In other words, so powerful are Murdoch and his fellow media corporatists that they hardly
need governments any more.
For many people, this struggle between the elites means an accelerated erosion of real freedom. Under the old system the bias of the state operated through a ‘consensus’ that was broadly acceptable to the established order. Controversial television programmes could be kept off the air, or watered down, merely by applying arbitrary ‘guidelines’ that were accompanied by ritualistic nods and winks. In this way, The War Game, a brilliant dramatisation of the effects of a nuclear attack on Britain, was suppressed by the BBC for twenty years;13 and during the same period more than fifty programmes critical of the war in Ireland were banned, delayed or doctored.14
As the influence of television has surpassed that of the press, perhaps in no other country has broadcasting held such a privileged position as an opinion leader. Possessing highly professional talent, and the illusion of impartiality (a venerable official truth, with its lexicon of ‘balance’, etc.), as well as occasionally dissenting programmes, ‘public service broadcasting’ developed into a finely crafted instrument of state propaganda. Witness the BBC’s coverage of the Cold War, the wars in the Falklands and the Gulf, and the 1984–5 miners’ strike.
One wonders why Thatcher wanted to change it. Of course paternalism and false consensus were not her way, neither was dissent in any effective form, albeit token. Thus, she never forgave Thames Television for showing Death on the Rock and exposing the activities of an SAS death squad in Gibraltar.
As for the BBC, most of its voices of dissent have long fallen silent. They are the broadcasters and producers who opposed the slaughter in the Gulf and the way it was represented to the British people, but who remained anonymous. Even before the last British election campaign had got under way, the BBC’s principal current affairs programme, Panorama, felt the need to suppress a report that had made a few mildly critical observations of seasonal Tory back-stabbing over economic policy.15
Today BBC current affairs is seldom controversial as it is secured within a pyramid of ‘directorates’ that have little to do with free journalism and are designed to control: to shore up assumptions, not to challenge them. In any case, silence is no longer optional in the increasingly centralised, undemocratic state that is the other side of the media society. As the market has been ‘freed’ from state controls (i.e. nineteenth-century laissez-faire nostrums have been re-imposed), so information has been subjected to draconian new controls.
I have touched upon these restrictions in several chapters, believing that many people may be unaware that, behind the supermarket façade, certain state controls are now reminiscent of those in the old Soviet Union. As you drive south across Vauxhall Bridge in London you pass the most striking new building in the capital; it houses the domestic secret intelligence service, MI5, now expanding its role as a police and domestic surveillance force, its anonymity and unaccountability guaranteed by Parliament. How ironic that is, now that the KGB is no more. While John Major professes ‘open government’ and theatrically names Stella Rimington as the head of MI5, the secret state grows more powerful than ever.
As Tim Gopsill has pointed out, Britain is the only country in the world with a statutory bar on an elected member of Parliament addressing his constituents through the broadcast media.16 There are now more than 100 laws in Britain that make disclosure of information a crime. Under the ‘reformed’ Official Secrets Act – ‘reformed’ being officialspeak for even more restriction – all the major revelations of official lying and venality in the 1980s would now be illegal. The Sunday Telegraph once likened investigative journalism to an offence against the state; it has become just that.17
Two examples: the 1981 Contempt of Court Act empowers judges and magistrates to ban the reporting of trials. Thus, hundreds of trials take place in secret every year, some of them deeply sensitive to the state. Under the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, broadcasters and journalists must surrender film and source material to the police; and an order against one media organisation automatically applies to the others.
In 1991 Central Television and I encountered the full sanction of government secrecy and intervention in the courts in a libel action brought against my film Cambodia: The Betrayal. ‘Public Interest Immunity Certificates’ – gagging orders – were used successfully against us before they were exposed in the Matrix Churchill trial. I have described this in the chapter ‘Through the Looking Glass’. Britain has the most restrictive libel laws in the democratic world – a fact which Robert Maxwell exploited until the day he drowned.
The Director of Public Prosecutions has used the Prevention of Terrorism Act to force Channel 4 and an independent programme maker to reveal the identity of an informant whose life could be at risk. The case concerned a documentary film, The Committee, which alleged widespread collusion between members of the British security services, Loyalist paramilitaries and senior members of Northern Ireland’s business community in a secret terrorist campaign dedicated to sectarian and political assassination.18
This, and similar cases, receive scant attention compared with the sex lives of establishment politicians, and the marriage difficulties of the royal family. There are the perennial calls for protection of privacy legislation, but this has little to do with protecting the rights of ordinary people, and everything to do with protecting the reputations of establishment figures. There is no real desire to intervene in ‘tabloid scandal-mongering’ – which is duly reported in depth by the ‘quality’ press. The scandal mongers, after all, are important people. They can witchhunt dissenters when required; and every five years most of them can be relied upon to help elect a Tory government. For this, the Queen is instructed to honour their editors: a fine irony. The lost issue is the need to protect the public from the state, not the press.
I have devoted the final chapters to Australia, which in many ways offers a model for the future. In the 1960s Australians could boast the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. Since then the redistribution of wealth has been spectacular as the world’s first Thatcherite Labor government has ‘reformed’ the fragile Australian economy and given it over to the world ‘free market’. Bob Hawke’s ‘big mates’ – the likes of Murdoch, Kerry Packer and Alan Bond – were able to borrow what they liked and pay minimal income tax.19 In 1989 Bond’s borrowing accounted for 10 per cent of the Australian national debt.20 Today, Bond’s empire has collapsed, Bond himself has been in and out of prison; unemployment is as high as 15 per cent and the rate of child poverty is the second highest in the developed world.21 And Australia can now claim the most monopolised press in the Western world.
Of twelve metropolitan dailies, Murdoch controls seven and the Canadian Conrad Black three. Of ten Sunday papers Murdoch has seven, Black two. In Adelaide Murdoch has a complete monopoly. He owns all the daily, Sunday and local papers, and all the printing presses and printing premises. In Brisbane he owns all but a few suburban papers. He controls more than 66 per cent of daily newspapers in the capital cities, where the great majority of the population lives. He owns almost 75 per cent of all Sunday papers. And Black controls most of the rest.22
Both are conservative ideologues. Another arch conservative, Kerry Packer, owns most of the magazines Australians read and the only truly national commercial TV network. None of this could have happened without government collusion: the bending of regulations and legislation advantageous to a few ‘big mates’.23 In the East Timor section I have documented how the interests of the Keating government and its principal media ‘mate’ converge in the promotion of the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia as ‘stable’ and ‘moderate’ while the truth of the regime’s genocide in East Timor is suppressed and obfuscated.
This presents good journalists in Australia and all over the world with an increasingly familiar dilemma. How can they pursue their craft without serving such concentrated power? And once having enlisted and taken on the day-to-day constraints of career and mortgage, how do they remain true to a distant notion of an ‘independent’
press?
Some journalists try their hardest, maintaining high standards in mostly uncontroversial fields. Others believe they can change the system from within, and are forced out. Others are unaware of their own malleability (I was), or they become profoundly cynical about their craft. Echoing the fellow travellers of Stalin’s communist party, they insist, as one Murdoch editor once told me, ‘I can honestly say I have never been told what to put in the paper and what to take out of it’.24 The point was that no one had to tell him, and his paper reflected the unshakeable set of assumptions that underpin Western power and prejudice, including those that would lead us, to quote Nicholas Rothwell, into ‘a social and even ideological transformation . . . in the image of a radical philosophy’.
I have attempted throughout the book, to show how closely censorship in the old communist world compares with that in the West today and that only the methods of enforcement differ. I am reminded of a story recounted by the writer Simon Louvish. A group of Russians touring the United States before the age of glasnost were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that all the opinions on the vital issues were the same. ‘In our country’, they said, ‘to get that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what’s your secret – how do you do it?’25
In the section ‘Tributes’ I express my admiration for Noam Chomsky, whose formidable analysis has helped many of us to identify how they do it. It was Chomsky who understood the nature of the ‘delusional system’ of one-doctrine democracy and the sophisticated manipulation of public opinion, using the ‘free’ media.
The results of this manipulation are often historic. When President Kennedy declared in the early 1960s that there was a ‘missile gap’ with the Soviet Union, his message was carried without question by the Western media, and the nuclear arms race accelerated. In fact, the opposite was true: America was well ahead in missile development.26 When President Johnson unleashed American bombers on North Vietnam in 1964, he did so after the media had helped him sell to Congress a story that communist gunboats had ‘attacked’ US warships in the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’. There was no attack, no ‘incident’. ‘Hell,’ Johnson is reported to have said in private, ‘those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.’27 Thereafter the American invasion was legitimised, millions of people were killed and a once bountiful land was petrified.