Sometimes I just want to bang my head on the wall with the sheer jaw-dropping, mind-numbing hypocrisy of it all.
The Guardian’s Jackie Ashley writes this morning about the New York Times April ‘expose’ of Rumsfeld’s paid media sockpuupets, already exposed by many, many progressive bloggers; and in the light of the Times own trumpeting of the White House line and Judith Regan’s fake reports, it’s frankly a bit of a joke.
Ashley purports to be horrified at what the NYT reveals about the revolving door between the media, defence industry, government, military and lobbyists and about US media figures’ personal complicity in building a false case for an illegal war.
So what are the darker messages for us from this American scandal? I was struck by the way in which the deal between the analysts, the TV bosses, the Pentagon and – behind them all – the military contractors, never needed to be explicit. The Pentagon didn’t need to offer cash, or lean on anyone. The TV networks did not ask too much about their experts’ sources of information, or their outside interests.
That this comes as a surprise to her makes me wonder where this woman, who’s paid well to be plugged into politics and world affairs, has been for the past few years. Has she not met the internet? The central narrative of progressive blogs since 2000 has been the complicity of mainstream journalists in pushing the right-wing, pro-Israel, militarist neoliberal line and parroting the White House’s fake war rhetoric.
It;s not as though she’s shown herself unaware of the Murdoch press’ in particular’s role in making the case for war; this is what she said in 2003 during the David Kelly/BBC/Gilligan affair:
Those papers have been intertwined with New Labour ever since it became clear that Blair would be in Downing Street. Blair wooed them, and from the first Murdoch, sensing a winner, responded.
Sun and Times journalists were courted and favoured with leaks, which they could promote as scoops; Murdoch editors were treated as visiting royalty when they were entertained at No 10 and Chequers. It is shameless, unabashed, and was driven both by Blair and by that high-minded socialist and critic of journalistic standards, Alastair Campbell.
Why do they do it? Because the deal is frank, and even on its own terms, honest. Murdoch wants media power and Blair wants reliable media support. So long as nobody takes journalistic principle or the public interest too seriously, then there is a deal to be done. One day, if Murdoch gets his way, he will be in a position of terrifying influence over any future government. So this is a dangerous time for the BBC. In some ways it has been here before. In the wake of the Falklands war, when Alasdair Milne was director general, Margaret Thatcher berated him about BBC funding and journalism in terms almost identical to those we hear from Labour now. John Birt had his rows too
Yet this is the woman who professes to be horrified at the way the system in which she works works.
It was all nods and winks. Does this begin to sound familiar? It wasn’t cash for peerages. It was propaganda for access. But isn’t the underlying structure – you do me a favour, I’ll see you right, while neither of us says a word – just the same?
Why yes, it is just the same.
Has it never, ever occurred to Ashley – New Labour’s cheerleader-in-chief this past decade at New Labour’s favourite newspaper – that she’s had privileged access to the PM and cabinet ministers and their aides because, funnily enough, she repeated their lies, supported the party and no matter what her disclaimers, as a result was objectively in favour of the Iraq war ?
Apparently she thinks all that access and tips and cosy invitations and the like came because they like her. Nothing to do with the fact her partner is also a chief political bigwig for the BBC either, oh no. It was all for the sake of her beaux yeux.
Surely no well-educated, observant opinion writer for a major modern newspaper could be either so naive – or so disingenuous – as to truly think that the British punditerati are less compromised than those in the US, could they?
We see the cost of not having an honest, open argument, whether about Pentagon strategy or about how the banking system really works, and the media feel embarrassed: “How did we miss that?” In Washington, and elsewhere, the answers are often the same. It comes down to unspoken deals between powerful people, and smiling faces telling fairytales.
“How did we miss that”? I’ll tell her how she missed that; you never see the dirt you’re sitting in.