A silence has reigned. Across the world, the extinction and suffering of countless human beings can be attributed to rampant American power, ‘But you wouldn’t know it,’ said Pinter. ‘It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.’
To its credit, the Guardian published every word of Pinter’s warning. To its shame, though unsurprising, the state television broadcaster ignored it. All that Newsnight flatulence about the arts, all that recycled preening for the cameras at Booker Prize-giving events, yet the BBC could not make room for Britain’s greatest living dramatist, so honoured, to tell the truth.
For the BBC, it simply never happened, just as the killing of half a million children by America’s medieval siege of Iraq during the 1990s never happened, just as the Dhafir and Padilla trials and the Senate vote banning freedom never happened. The political prisoners of Belmarsh barely exist; and a big, brave posse of Metropolitan police never swept away Maya Evans as she publicly grieved for British soldiers killed in the cause of nothing except rotten power.
Bereft of irony, but with a snigger, the newsreader Fiona Bruce introduced, as news, a Christmas propaganda film about Bush’s dogs. That happened. Now imagine Bruce reading the following: ‘Here is delayed news, just in. From 1945 to 2005, the United States attempted to overthrow 50 governments, many of them democracies, and to crush 30 popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, 25 countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more.’ (Thanks to William Blum’s Rogue State, published by Common Courage Press)
The icon of horror of Saddam Hussein’s rule is a 1988 film of petrified bodies of people in the Kurdish town of Halabja, killed in a chemical weapons attack. The attack has been referred to a great deal by Bush and Blair and the film shown a great deal by the BBC. At the time, as I know from personal experience, the Foreign Office tried to cover up the crime at Halabja. The Americans tried to blame it on Iran. Today, in an age of images, there are no images of the chemical weapons attack on Fallujah in November 2004. This allowed the Americans to deny it until they were caught out recently by investigators using the internet. For the BBC, American atrocities simply do not happen.
In 1999, while filming in Washington and Iraq, I learned the true scale of bombing in what the Americans and British then called Iraq’s ‘no-fly zones’. During the 18 months to 14 January 1999, US aircraft flew 24,000 combat missions over Iraq; almost every mission was bombing or strafing. ‘We’re down to the last outhouse,’ a US official protested. ‘There are still some things left [to bomb], but not many.’ That was seven years ago. In recent months, the air assault on Iraq has multiplied; the effect on the ground cannot be imagined. For the BBC, it has not happened.
The black farce extends to those pseudo-humanitarians in the media and elsewhere, who themselves have never seen the effects of cluster bombs and air-burst shells, yet continue to invoke the crimes of Saddam to justify the nightmare in Iraq and to protect a quisling prime minister who has sold out his country and made the world more dangerous. Curiously, some of them insist on describing themselves as ‘liberals’ and ‘left of centre’, even ‘anti-fascists’. They want some respectability, I suppose. This is understandable, given that the league table of carnage by Saddam Hussein was overtaken long ago by that of their hero in Downing Street, who will now support an attack on Iran.
This cannot change until we, in the west, look in the mirror and confront the true aims and narcissism of the power applied in our name, its extremes and terrorism. The usual double standard no longer works; there are now millions like Brian Haw, Maya Evans, John Catt and the man in the pinstriped suit, with his wreath. Looking in the mirror means understanding that a violent and undemocratic order is being imposed by those whose actions are little different from the actions of fascists. The difference used to be distance. Now they are bringing it home. John Pilger, article January 2006, ‘The Death of Freedom’
It seems that what we have now is a media echo-chamber that gives out broadly speaking the same news, the same opinions, the same message, while those who own and control the media are becoming fewer and their power greater all over the world. John Pilger, article ‘Breaking the Mirror: The Murdoch Effect’
In 1986 the equivalent of an earthquake hit Fleet Street. Rupert Murdoch had been secretly preparing to move his newspapers to a factory in Wapping in East London surrounded by guards and razor-wire. When he finally made his move he sacked more than five-thousand people. ibid.
They do have the power to act together. I think back to the time when Rupert Murdoch moved his operation in London to his fortress in East London called Wapping when everything changed. It was a sea-change. In the process he sacked five thousand people just like that. The journalists almost didn’t go. The vote was lost in the union ballots by about half a dozen. Now, had they voted not to go, I doubt whether that embodiment of everything that Murdoch stands for would ever have got off the ground. So journalists do have power. And it’s really up to them to organise that power. John Pilger, interview Melbourne 2009
It’s definitely got worse … The media is an extension of the established order … The great change has been the closing down of spaces. John Pilger, On the State of the UK Media, interview Mark Curtis, Youtube 56.43
They [Pentagon] don’t have the pay journalists now; the service is for free. ibid.
Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do The New York Times and the The Washington Post deceive their readers?
Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?
These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.
The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an ‘invisible government’s. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.
The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions. John Pilger, article December 2014, ‘War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda’
BBC: Its long-documented history of suppression, of doing the bidding of British governments, and of serving Western power. John Pilger, lecture 2018
The media’s long-time role as disseminators of state and vested interests’ propaganda. ibid.
Evidence is the root of real journalism. ibid.
One of the most important roles of the news media is to make sure the American public never sees the effects of war. Professor Robert Jensen
The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely to impose necessary illusions to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence democracy and freedom are more than values to treasure; they may be essential to survival. Professor Noam Chomsky
Qatar-based ‘Al-Jazeera’, the most important news channel in the Arab world, was harshly criticized by high US officials for having ‘emphasized civilian casualties’ during the destruction of Falluja. The problem of independent media was later resolved when the channel was kicked out of Iraq in preparation for free elections. Noam Chomsky
The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you’ve got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus. Noam Chomsky
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media. Noam Chomsky
The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly. Noam Chomsky
It’s basically an institutional analysis of the major media – what we call a Propaganda Model. We’re talking primarily about the national media, those media that set a general agenda that others adhere to ... The elite media are the agenda-setting media ... And they do this in all sorts of ways: by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis, by framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits, they determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict in order to serve the interests of dominant elite groups in society. Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
The US media are alone in that you must meet the condition of concision. You’ve got to say things between two commercials. Or in six hundred words. And that’s a very important fact. Because the beauty of concision – saying a couple of sentences between two commercials – the beauty of that is that you only repeat conventional thoughts. ibid.
The concept of democratising the media has no real meaning within the terms of political discourse in the United States; in fact the phrase has a paradoxical or even a vaguely subversive ring to it. Noam Chomsky, The Massey lecture 1988, ‘Necessary Illusions’; viz Youtube