Media studies

[webofevil]

Responsible reporting

Cast your mind back three years. The invasion of Iraq was on the menu, and we were being told that every other option was off. There was noticeable resistance to the idea, and the Government were having distinct trouble mobilising public opinion.

Suddenly you couldn’t turn round without bumping into a terrorist threat. We had a squadron of fighter planes on “emergency standby”, anti-radiation pills were being rushed in bulk to the nation’s hospitals, plans were leaked for “evacuating major cities and dealing with large numbers of contaminated corpses”, and scare stories about smallpox vaccines spread like, well, smallpox.

Curiously, though, throughout all this, the actual alert level, maintained and monitored by people in the know, remained at the redoubtable Bikini Black Lovely Special. This one detail reveals the scare stories for what they were: Government propaganda (all right, call it “spin”, though that’s propaganda of a sort in itself) carefully fed into the hysterical squealing media machine. It was designed to soften us up, help us believe the terrorists were heading straight for us, and imply the link between al Qaeda and Iraq, despite everyone’s certain knowledge that this last was utter fiction. (I say “everyone”; it appears that Tony B shares with George W the ability to “know” facts that no-one is ever able to verify. Surely this alone demonstrates these men’s divine calling.)

After September 11 we were prepared to believe anything, and rumours, whispers, half-truths, disputed intelligence and maybe even the odd fact were swirled into a potent cocktail of disinformation. Journalists don't need much prodding to set them barking at anything that moves (see Daily Mirror, above) and if you wanted to spread not a particular story but a general sense of fear and confusion, tipping the wink to the press that dirty bombs are ready to deploy, or that ricin could somehow work as a weapon of mass destruction, would be a pretty safe way of going about it. If your intention was to sow peace, rational debate and a relaxed atmosphere, though, it's safe to say you'd have a tougher job on your hands. We all know the media only feels it can thrive when things are getting worse.

In the event, a large proportion of the population remained resolutely unsoftened, and the campaign petered out (despite the initial success of “Ricin!”, it quickly fell out of favour, and critics were unkind to it on its revival). And when the attack did come, terrible though it was, it wasn’t the threatened chemical apocalypse talked up by bin Laden and MI5, but the old-fashioned brutality of high explosives in confined spaces.

A continuous and consistent message conveying a more realistic assessment of the likely threat would have been a more honest and honourable approach. Instead, partly due to mindless ingrained Whitehall habits of need-to-know, and partly because of an apparent all-consuming desire to play politics and manipulate public opinion on the part of our political “elite”, we were fed a steaming crock, again, and the likelihood that people will in the future believe a syllable that comes out of Westminster continues to evaporate, feeding the general cynicism Blair claims to detest.