Thought some of you might be interested in this. It's circulating around now due to Power Line having picked it up. Like they and others have said, it's a good article. Applies to USA's MSM also.
The paragraphs worth quoting (for those interested but are not willing to read the PDF's 17 pages):
At a recording of the BBC radio panel show Any Questions, in the solid Conservative heartland of Wokingham in Berkshire, an overwhelmingly conservative audience applauded and cheered the veteran far left activist Tariq Ali when he said that that America was the fount of world terror, that George Bush was more of a danger to the world than Saddam Hussein, and that if any country was a menace to world peace through its weapons of mass destruction it was not Iraq but Israel.
How has Middle Britain come to applaud the view â?? hitherto confined to the most extreme left-wing circles -- that the President of the United States is more of a danger than an unbalanced dictator with a terrorist history? How have such solid citizens come to view a democracy â?? Israel â?? that has been under attack since its foundation as the greatest threat to world peace? And how has the ancient libel of sinister global Jewish power been allowed to rear its head so openly once again?
Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three, however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient prejudices.
This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they donâ??t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would harm them.
Yet that is what is happening. Public debate in Britain is now marked by a collapse of objectivity, truth, fairness and balance. Logic and morality have been stood on their heads. Victims are portrayed as oppressors, while mass murderers have to be understood and sympathized with. The outcome is an ugly and dangerous climate in which prejudice and lies have achieved the status of unchallengeable fact; a climate which is now being eagerly manipulated by terrorists who know that if they ratchet up their barbarism and distribute the video the result will merely be an ever greater public clamour for Tony Blair to split away from President Bush and shatter the coalition in defense of the free world.
The public has been grossly misled by the British media, and falsehoods have become accepted as fact, so much so that any statement of actual facts which undermine this mindset are excised from the debate altogether.
(Conclusion)
The outcome is a society which no longer understands how to distinguish truth from lies, no longer understands or accepts the desirability of objectivity and no longer is capable of rational debate based on facts and logic. Instead, all evidence is filtered through prism of prior political prejudice and emotion to which it is wrenched to fit. It replaces evidence by propaganda, rationality by gullibility.
And it is perhaps the single greatest incitement to terror. Terrorism is designed to achieve maximum publicity and to manipulate public revulsion so that pressure is put on the leaders of the democracies to surrender. It cannot be said too often that what drives al Qaeda is not the exercise of disproportionate force by the west but the perception of its weakness and incapacity or unwillingness to fight in its own defence. But even al Qaeda must surely have been taken aback by the craven willingness of the British media to fall into line by abusing and persecuting their own leaders at a time of war. These terrorists know that the more barbaric their acts, the more hysteria and pressure the British media will direct at Blair and Bush. So al Qaeda has every incentive to ratchet up the atrocities. Thatâ??s why the hostage Kenneth Bigley was videoed sobbing for his life in a cage; and the media duly do what the terrorists want and put it on their front pages and news bulletins, and the pressure on Blair to split from America becomes more and more intolerable.
The appalling result of all this is that, if a terrorist outrage in London were to claim the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, the reaction of many Britons might not be a revival of the spirit of the Blitz and an iron determination to defeat fascism and tyranny. It might be instead to turn on Tony Blair and blame him directly for bringing about the slaughter. And that, of course, is precisely what makes such a terrible outcome more likely. There can be little doubt that al Qaeda, such a shrewd judge of western decadence and the differences in moral fibre between the countries of the west, will have noted the fact that in Britain, the worse the terrorist outrage that is committed, the more the public will turn on Tony Blair. Every single defeatist, distorted or dishonest article about Iraq, Israel and the war on terror makes another barbaric atrocity more likely.
It is this weakness and moral confusion that comprise the great goal of terrorist strategy; it is this that has characterised the westâ??s response to Islamic terror for many decades; it is this that has brought us to where we are today. In the war that has been declared upon the free world, the western mediaâ??s abuse of power is perhaps the most lethal weapon of all.
Article wrote:The outcome is a society which no longer understands how to distinguish truth from lies, no longer understands or accepts the desirability of objectivity and no longer is capable of rational debate based on facts and logic. Instead, all evidence is filtered through prism of prior political prejudice and emotion to which it is wrenched to fit. It replaces evidence by propaganda, rationality by gullibility.
I think we're already there captain. The brits aren't the only ones. You can look around just this forum to see it.
FC, I would have expected a different response considering the author is a Brit and anti-Israel sentiment in Britain was the impetus for her article on the ways the media fans prejudices.
ok i'll bite on the quoted text (well... i'll nibble).
this is saying that the views held by those british conservatives are wrong, and anyone who agrees with them is wrong, and any media who agrees with them is therefore reporting wrong information.
if you agree with what she said there, then i'm sure you'll agree with the article. no problem.
but it's a bad practice to start an article off like that however, assuming rights and wrongs of things which ARE currently in public debate and are hardly decided in the public's eye.
is the article willing to back up it's assumptions of right and wrong? or is it just stroking everyone who already holds the views.
in otherwords, will I, as someone who disagrees with the initial assumptions of right and wrong made clear in the first few quoted paragraphs, will I be able to get anything from this article? will it be able to adjust my polar opposite assumptions (relative) at all?
another point i wish to make, is that i find the accusation of anti-israeli racism that it is elluding to annoying.
do people actually take that accusation seriously? i thought it was only the last resort of debate to pull a "you can't say anything about me, or i'll scream racism/sexism".
well great, i guess that means the debate is over *rollseyes*.
last point would be that just because your enemy wants something, doesn't mean you have to do the exact opposite. that's letting your enemy control you. time for dinner
[quote="Entire Article"]The reporting of Iraq and Israel: an abuse of media power
Talk at Limmud conference, 27 December 2004
Iâ??d like to start with three short anecdotes.
A friend went into Blackwells university bookshop in Oxford and asked the counter clerk:
â??Do you have a copy of Alan Dershowitzâ??s The Case for Israel?â?? â??There is no case for Israelâ??,
the counter clerk replied.
A distinguished and influential military figure confided to me that Rupert Murdoch had
given a personal order that articles in The Times against the Iraq war should be drastically
limited â?? and that he had done so, â??on the instruction of the Jewish lobby in Americaâ??.
Furthermore, George Bush had invaded Iraq because â??he had Ariel Sharonâ??s hand up his
backâ??.
At a recording of the BBC radio panel show Any Questions, in the solid Conservative
heartland of Wokingham in Berkshire, an overwhelmingly conservative audience
applauded and cheered the veteran far-left activist Tariq Ali when he said that that
America was the fount of world terror, that George Bush was more of a danger to the
world than Saddam Hussein, and that if any country was a menace to world peace
through its weapons of mass destruction it was not Iraq but Israel.
How has Middle Britain come to applaud the view â?? hitherto confined to the most
extreme left-wing circles â?? that the President of the United States is more of a danger
than an unbalanced dictator with a terrorist history? How have such solid citizens come to
view a democracy â?? Israel â?? that has been under attack since its foundation as the
greatest threat to world peace? And how has the ancient libel of sinister global Jewish
power been allowed to rear its head so openly once again?
Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over
the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three,
however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is
because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented
through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient
prejudices.
This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the
ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces
from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they donâ??t understand the
nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders
while sanitising those who would harm them.
Yet that is what is happening. Public debate in Britain is now marked by a collapse of
objectivity, truth, fairness and balance. Logic and morality have been stood on their heads.
Victims are portrayed as oppressors, while mass murderers have to be understood and
sympathised with. The outcome is an ugly and dangerous climate in which prejudice and
lies have achieved the status of unchallengeable fact; a climate which is now being eagerly
manipulated by terrorists who know that if they ratchet up their barbarism and distribute
the video the result will merely be an ever greater public clamour for Tony Blair to split
away from President Bush and shatter the coalition in defence of the free world.
The public has been grossly misled by the British media, and falsehoods have become
accepted as fact, so much so that any statement of actual facts which undermine this
mindset are excised from the debate altogether.
In this talk, I will first of all look at the twisting of the reporting, then suggest why this has
happened and then finally discuss the effect it is having.
The reporting of Iraq is not actually about Iraq at all. From the start, there has been very
little attempt to produce a balanced picture of a highly complex situation. Instead, the
media has viewed everything that has happened through a prism of opposition based on
the certainty that Bush and Blair took their countries to war on a lie.
Of course, some media organisations supported the war in Iraq. But the anti-war mindset
quickly came to dominate the debate, in my view largely because of the BBC, whose
influence over the country â?? particularly over conservatively-minded people who tend to
regard the Beeb as their secular church-cannot be over-estimated. The nature of that
influence could be gauged very early on by the reaction during the war of the crew of the
flagship Royal Navy carrier Ark Royal, whose crew turned off the BBC because of its
relentless defeatism and negatively skewed reporting â?? which was so outrageous it even
drew a protest from its own correspondent in the war zone.
For the BBC and other media, there was always one story about Iraq â?? that the war was a
criminal folly. Their original predictions that Saddam would not be toppled, of mass
uprisings all over the Arab world, of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis turned into refugees
proved wrong. So they kept shifting the goalposts and rewrote history to prove that Bush
and Blair were malign or stupid or both. When no WMD were found, they seized on this
to claim that the war was only fought because we were told there were WMD stockpiles.
What started as argument about how to contain the menace of Saddam has now turned
into the assertion that Saddam posed no threat at all.
As Sir Max Hastings wrote in the Guardian:
â??Yet it bears stating again and again that we went to war, launching thousands of British
soldiers into Iraq, on a pretext now conclusively exposed as falseâ??. (Max Hastings,
Guardian, September 20 2004)
But it was not the pretext for war that was false but arguments of people like Hastings and
countless other prominent journalists who have rewritten history. It is just not true that
we went to war on account of the stockpiles.
If you read the actual speeches and written statements by Tony Blair or Jack Straw, it is
clear that the overwhelming emphasis was on Saddamâ??s refusal to obey the binding UN
resolutions, his resulting failure to prove that he had destroyed his WMD programmes
and renounced his intention to continue developing WMD, and the dangers posed by the
axis of rogue states, WMD and terrorism. Yes, the existence of the stockpiles was inferred
from the fact that the weapons inspectors had repeatedly itemised all the WMD that
Saddam was known to have had and which was still unaccounted for. But they were not
the reason for war.
In any event, it is a leap of logic to state that because no WMD have been found, none ever
existed in the first place. This doesnâ??t follow at all. Absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence. Several explanations for what happened to the missing WMD are eminently
plausible. Saddam could have destroyed them in the immediate run-up to war. He could
have transported them to a neighbouring country: indeed the former head of the Iraq
Survey group Dr David Kay said some of it was hidden in Syria, an observation not
reported by the British media. Or they could still be buried somewhere in Iraq: it would
all fit into a double garage, and Iraq is a huge country. Given Saddamâ??s history, the
conclusions of the weapons inspectors during the 1990s that they were being obstructed
and lied to, and the intelligence the world believed when it signed up to UN resolution
1441 in 2002 which stated Saddam had WMD, any or all of these explanations would be
rational. But instead, the media decided irrationally that absence of evidence of WMD was
evidence they never existed.
The final report of the Iraq Survey Group told us that Saddam destroyed his WMD stocks
in 1991 and didnâ??t produce any significant amount after that. There was much crowing by
anti-war commentators that this proved there were never any WMD in Iraq after all, and
renewed calls for the Prime Minister to apologise for misleading the country. But that
report also said that Saddam was using the money he had siphoned off from the oil-forfood
programme to buy WMD material; and that he had re-started a ballistic missile
programme forbidden by the UN. These findings alone showed that Saddam had been in
breach of the UN resolutions, the legal basis for war. Moreover, the report also said that
Saddam had destroyed his WMD stocks in 1991 â?? in order to conceal Iraqâ??s WMD
capabilitiesâ??; and also that in 1998, the weapons inspectors had detected VX-related
compounds on ballistic missile warhead fragments, and had discovered a document
describing the use of â??special weaponsâ?? by the Iraqi Air Force. All these things - along with
repeated references to Saddamâ??s intention to resume WMD production when the
sanctions that were falling apart finally ended - indicated that Saddam was still very
much in the WMD business. Yet none of them was paid any attention, or even in some
cases reported at all, by the British media.
Moreover, while commentators made much of the finding that the intelligence was
wrong, they also told us simultaneously that the government had lied about it. Well,
which was it? Either the government acted in good faith on what all available intelligence
was telling it, which is now said to have been wrong; or it misrepresented that intelligence
by distorting and exaggerating it. It canâ??t have been both. Yet commentators are indeed
claiming both - and blaming Bush and Blair for both.
Then there was the mediaâ??s obsession with the claim made in the governmentâ??s
September dossier that Saddam had WMD which could be fired within 45 minutes of the
order to deploy them. This one statement â?? which has now been withdrawn by MI6 â??
became inflated to ludicrous proportions, largely because the BBC Today programme
alleged that the government had made this claim, which it knew to be suspect, to â??sex upâ??
its case to the public - a titanic row which pitted the BBC against the government and led
to the death of the weapons inspector Dr David Kelly.
Day after day, week after week the 45-minute claim dominated the mediaâ??s Iraq coverage.
But the whole issue was yet another straw man. The suggestion that this one claim had
been instrumental in persuading the country of the case for war was demonstrably
ludicrous. In all the welter of speeches and documents about Iraq, this 45 minute claim
was mentioned five times â?? of which three were merely repetitions in summaries within
the same document. And in any event, the contention that it greatly amplified the danger
from Saddam is patently absurd. Why did the claim that he could deploy some of these
weapons in 45 minutes make him more dangerous? Would we all have relaxed if we had
been told it would take him four hours, or even four days to fire them after giving the
order to do so?
And now weâ??re being told that Saddam was no threat at all. That he had no link not just to
al Qaeda but to terror. But Saddamâ??s Iraq was a terrorist state. It financed, trained and
sheltered terrorists. So how can such a nonsensical statement be made without serious
challenge?
Every single development in the Iraq saga has been reported through a prism of prejudice.
The whole debate has been characterised by distortion, omission and misrepresentation.
The intended outcome is not just to discredit Tony Blair but to induce such cynicism and
fury about the Iraq war that Britain withdraws its troops, peels off from the US and
undermines the defence of the west.
Take the inquiry chaired by Lord Hutton into the row between the government and the
BBC over the claim by the Today programme that the government had deliberately overegged
the intelligence. The evidence to Hutton bore very little relation to the press reports
of those submissions.
The actual evidence showed quite clearly that the central BBC charge, that the
Government gave the country a false prospectus for war by exaggerating the threat from
Saddam against the opposition of the intelligence service, was false. But paper after paper
cherry-picked or spun that evidence to fit the prior agenda that Blair was a rogue and that
Gilliganâ??s story, although wrong, was actually right.
In due course, Lord Hutton duly cleared the government of all charges about the
intelligence. As a result, the media was beside itself with fury and contempt. Because
Hutton had failed to deliver the Prime Ministerâ??s head on a plate, he was transformed
overnight from being portrayed as an exemplary invigilator and tough forensic mind to a
government patsy and naïve dupe who had produced a whitewash.
To give one example of the way the press twisted the evidence. The Independent
newspaper published an article by Dr Brian Jones, a former Defence Intelligence expert
who claimed that not a single one of his colleagues backed the most contentious claims in
the government dossier. The headline over its front-page splash screamed:
â??Intelligence chiefâ??s bombshell: we were overruled on dossierâ??. (Independent, February 4
2004)
This implied that, contrary to the Hutton finding, the government did in fact overrule the
intelligence services to suggest a threat posed by Saddam that the spies did not believe. In
fact, as Dr Jones made abundantly clear, he was claiming that these analysts were
overruled within the Defence Intelligence Service itself by their own superiors. This was
in fact perfectly clear from Dr Jonesâ??s testimony to Hutton, as was his complaint that he
and the other DIS staff never actually saw the intelligence relating to the 45-minute claim
because it was so sensitive. He had been kept out of the loop. So what price his evaluation
of evidence he hadnâ??t seen?
What all this revealed, surely, was not government iniquity but that the intelligence world
disagreed profoundly within itself about Iraq - a fact that has been clear from all the
unattributable briefings and spinning from within the secret world, which the media have
nevertheless swallowed uncritically rather than treating them with the caution that would
normally be afforded sources with such likely axes to grind.
After Hutton let their quarry escape, the media moved the goalposts again to the missing
WMD. By happy coincidence for them, Dr David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey
Group, was blowing a fuse in America about gross intelligence errors. His remarks were
promptly misreported to support the charge that Saddam was no threat and we were led
to war on a lie. Certainly, Kay claimed there had been a major failure of intelligence. But
he was specifically referring to large weapons stockpiles. He was not saying Saddam was
therefore no threat on the WMD front. On the contrary, he said that â??right up to the endâ??
the Iraqis were trying to produce the deadly poison ricin. â??They were mostly researching
better methods for weaponisationâ??, he said.
Letâ??s remind ourselves of a few other things he said in his interim report:
â??We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts
of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that
began in late 2002â??. (Dr David Kay, ISG Interim Report)
Among the concealed weapons programme he found were:
â??A clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses within the Iraqi Intelligence
Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing
CBW research... New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean
Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not
declared to the UN... â??Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with
ranges up to at least 1000 km - well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN.â??
(Dr David Kay, ISG Interim Report)
In early 2004 he told Fox Television:
â??We know there were terrorist groups in state [Iraq] still seeking WMD capability. Iraq,
although I found no weapons, had tremendous capabilities in this area. A marketplace
phenomenon was about to occur, if it did not occur; sellers meeting buyers. And I think
that would have been dangerous if the war had not intervened.â?? (Dr David Kay, Fox
News, 2004)
Yet none of this was reported by the media, which merely trumpeted Kayâ??s blasts against
the faulty intelligence over weapons stockpiles to give the false impression that Kay was
against the war and that he thought Saddam had posed no threat from WMD.
Let me take you through an article published in the Spectator magazine last summer,
which repays study because the way it treats the facts about Tony Blair and Iraq is typical
of dozens of articles and broadcast reports. In it, Peter Oborne argued that Blair should be
impeached on the grounds that Saddam actually had posed no threat to us unless he was
attacked first, and that the grounds set out by Blair for war were now proved to have been
a lie.
Oborne wrote:
â??The discrepancy between the Prime Ministerâ??s version of events (â??we know he has
stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weaponsâ?
Flabby Chick wrote:Ahh it's Brit bashing time now. Oh goodie.
Too right. This topic has no hope here, the source has a hint of anti-american in it
However I'm not saying for one second that I agree with these people. Far from it in fact.
I don't know how you stand at the moment with the British government at the moment FC, but I think conservatives are totally backwards and traitorous. You could get any nation to drop a bomb on us and they'd still blame Tony Blair for it. It's like they have an overwhelming need to cut the legs off our own dignity.
You've got to understand that there is certainly debate in this country, but its nowhere near "irrationality, prejudice and hysteria" like this person seems to think. We're not crazy.
It's actually quite strange because I have seen the writer of that article on 'Question Time' once or twice, and she has always been for the Iraq war.
Question time lost it's street cred when Robin Day left the program. As to the UK government, i'm not really in the country that much to give an opinion any more. Sorry for ducking out.
Anyone here ever wonder what the world would be like today if instead of 9/11, the terrorist flew a plane into the Eiffel Tower on a crowded day and killed 3000 frenchmen in the process?
As to the media, everday we hear about the car bombings, yet no one reports the car bombs found and defused. If all you are blasted with are depressing events, do you think any positive sense will arise?
