David Jardine, Contributor, Jakarta
Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media David Edwards & David Cromwell Media Lens, Pluto Press 2006 230 pp.
""As with the Lancet study released in 2004, the American corporate press has again resorted to burying and suppressing casualty figures that are embarrassing to the United States and occupation forces operating throughout Iraq.
The most recent study on Iraqi casualties first surfaced in the news this Wednesday, although most Americans probably wouldn't know it considering the poor to non-existent coverage throughout the mainstream media. The survey (released in the Lancet Medical Journal), undertaken by researchers at Johns Hopkins and MIT, and in coordination with Baghdad's Mustansiriya University School, measured Iraqi deaths throughout the American occupation, estimating that approximately 655,000 Iraqis had likely perished, mainly as a result of the escalating violence throughout the country.
The study approximated an average of about 3.2 deaths per 1,000 Iraqis in the year after the 2003 invasion, although that number rose to about 12 per 1,000 from June of 2005 to June of 2006.""
So writes Anthony DiMaggio on the website ZNet. He would readily find common cause with the authors of the 2006 book Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media. David Edwards and David Cromwell are the founders of the British website Media Lens, which has taken a consistently stringent stand against distortions and omissions appearing in the mainstream Western media, both print and television, over the past several years.
Theirs are not the usual targets such as Fox News (far too easy). Instead, Media Lens has concentrated fire on the icons of Western liberalism; The Washington Post, New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent and, perhaps surprisingly for many people, the BBC.
Do we get full value from the liberal media or are they constrained to some extent in the same way as the conservative media? Are they in effect also servants of the power nexus? This is what the authors of this timely book would like you to ponder. Many readers will already be aware of the abject way in which the Post and Times accepted the Bush administration's preparations for its illegal invasion of Iraq and the craven fashion in which these liberal papers were taken in by the raft of lies used by Washington and London; Niger uranium, 45-minute warning, WMD and all.
The subsequent groveling apology did little to erase the stain of complicity. This, at least, is what Edwards and Cromwell set out and it is difficult to argue otherwise.
The liberal media is guilty of burying stories embarrassing to the U.S. and British governments, full stop. Take President Bush's triumphal strut on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.
When a woman reporter from the Houston Chronicle reported that the ship had not in fact been somewhere in the Gulf when Bush announced that the (undeclared) war was over but off San Diego, California, the mainstream media dropped the story like a hot coal: too embarrassing. Then take the story of Saddam Hussein's capture. Was it really the Americans that found the man or was it, as reported elsewhere, the Kurds, who were told in no uncertain terms to keep their mouths shut? Again, the mainstream including the liberal media fell in with the official story.
Covering a range of issues from Kosovo to climate change, which, the authors say, is where the biggest liberal adaptation to the corporate nexus has taken place, Guardians of Power asks us to look at the way that corporate advertisers and backers dictate the content of newspapers and how these same forces make the press subservient to their needs. The authors allege that the vast majority of reporters in the western media internalize the rules of self-censorship thus generated and never really question the fact that they are in fact servants of power.
I wonder how true this is or whether canny journalists know how to bob and weave and bide their time for an opening. It has, after all, been easy enough to find on the Internet these past few years plenty of the Awkward Squad such as Eric Margolis of The Toronto Sun and Neil Mackay of The Herald (Glasgow) calling the real questions about U.S. foreign policy and what drives it. Both these papers can be construed as ""liberal"".
It appears to me, however, that they have a far better case with their criticisms of the BBC, which once venerable institution has been under enormous political pressure since Margaret Thatcher took the premiership in 1979. The ""Beeb"", which has moved more and more to a business model and way from its public service persona, which, whatever the cynics may say, was real and motivated many of those who worked for it, has fallen on hard times. When Fox News was running a ""War In Iraq"" ribbon on the bottom of the screen we might have expected the BBC to eschew the preposition ""in"", which clearly diverted attention away from the fact that it was a ""war ON Iraq"", but, no. Edwards' and Cromwell's critique of the BBC makes for sad reading: naught for your comfort.
Indonesian readers may be particularly interested in the material on East Timor and here the Jakarta-based correspondent of The Guardian, John Aglionby, comes in for criticism for not pointing out that it was the U.S. which gave Indonesia the green light for the invasion of the former Portuguese colony and which along with Britain and Australia subsequently turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the great suffering under occupation of the East Timorese people. Here, Aglionby seems to be accused of pulling his punches when it may well be that he believed that readers were already perfectly aware of the American role in this dark episode. The same might be said in defense of Ian Timberlake, a Canadian reporter with a long association with Indonesia.
The best service that Edwards and Cromwell offer is to challenge the comfortable even soporific notion that ""this is as good as it gets"", that the liberals are what we deserve. What the authors seek -- and on this level I am sure they are right -- is a press and a television media that speaks truth to power. For that I suggest we turn to the Net and sites such as Common Dreams, Znet, Alternet and the anti-war groups such as War Resisters International.
