John Pilger’s The War You Don’t See: An indictment of news reporting as state propaganda
By Paul Mitchell
4 January 2011
This film is 1 hour 35 mins.
JOHN PILGER has reported on six wars, beginning in Vietnam in 1967, and produced more than 55 documentaries. His new film, The War You Don’t See, examines the media’s role in war and asks whether it has become part of the propaganda machine of the state. The documentary focuses in particular on the practice of “embedding” journalists in military units, which has helped virtually destroy independent war reporting.
The War You Don’t See opens with the sickening video clip released by WikiLeaks earlier this year, in which US troops in an Apache gunship revel in their indiscriminate slaughter of innocent bystanders in Iraq. Pilger asks, “Why do so many journalists beat the drums of war, regardless of the lies of government, and how are crimes of war justified?”
Pilger traces the growing integration of the state and media back to World War One. In the US, the secretive Committee on Public Information was set up in 1917 by US President Woodrow Wilson to “sell the war to the masses”. One of its most influential members was public relations-propaganda pioneer Edward Bernays. “The intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in this country”, Bernays wrote. The “hide the facts and manipulate emotions to scare the hell out of people” philosophy lay behind First World War posters such as “Destroy this Mad Brute” (1917).
Pilger fast-forwards to 2003 and the Iraq war. The creation of illusions, he says, has come a long way since Bernays’s time. Today, the Pentagon spends $1 billion a year on such activities. US Assistant Secretary of Defence Bryan Whitman describes how the Iraq war introduced the practice of embedding and saw some 700 journalists attached to army units. He says it was necessary because the US was up against an enemy, Saddam Hussein, who was “masterful at misinformation…disinformation”.
A former CIA analyst implies it is the US that is the master of manipulation, saying that 80-90 percent of news is officially inspired and anyone who crosses the Pentagon is likely to have his or her access and sources removed.
Pilger is best when he probes top journalists, news schedulers and government officials. They hesitate and squirm as they seek to justify their capitulation to and collaboration with the lies about the Iraq war. Some show remorse. Others say, more or less, “Let’s learn the lessons and make sure it never happens again.”
Dan Rather—for more than two decades an anchorman with CBS News—admits that journalists act more often than not as mere “stenographers”, repeating uncritically what government officials say.
Rather, who once confronted Nixon in 1974 over Watergate and the elder George Bush over the Iran-Contra scandal, turned in a despicable performance on the late-night David Letterman show following 9/11. Pilger reminds him of his words, “George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions. And as an American wherever he wants me to line up, tell me where and he’ll make the call”. Rather explains this episode on camera by arguing that there is “fear in every newsroom in the country…fear of losing one’s job, being labeled unpatriotic”.
An interview with BBC World Affairs Correspondent Rageh Omaar proceeds along similar lines. Pilger questions Omaar about his role as an embedded journalist in the British advance on Basra during the invasion of Iraq. How, wonders Pilger, was it possible for BBC news reports to declare that Basra had “fallen” 17 times to the British armed forces?
Omaar replies that there is enormous pressure with 24-hour news coverage to present a story as though it is new. He makes similar remarks about the false picture given of the “liberation” of Baghdad and the phony toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue. Omaar confesses, “I didn’t really do my job properly. I think I’d hold my hands up. One didn’t press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough”.
Omaar speaks as well about the US attacks on the offices of Al-Jazeera in Kabul in 2001 and Baghdad in 2003. The Qatar-based media outlet was viewed by the Pentagon as broadcasting reports somewhat independent of the US-UK version of events. Omaar says the attacks were “without doubt and categorically a direct targeting to shut them [Al-Jazeera] up and possibly kill them”.
The War You Don’t See contains footage of several top British journalists—Andrew Marr, Nicholas Witchell and Mark Mardell—applauding the capture of Baghdad in virtually the same euphoric language. Reading like an official press release from the ministry of defence, Bush and Blair’s strategy, the journalists claimed, had been “vindicated”. Just as the two leaders had predicted, they continued, there had been no bloodbath and everywhere Iraqis were celebrating.
Pilger counterposes such statements to the fact that, as a result of the war, 740,000 women have been made widows and 4.5 million people forced from their homes. Hardly any of this is reported on.
Pilger criticises erstwhile liberal newspapers such as the New York Times and the Observer for their uncritical acceptance of the “proof” that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), presented by US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s during his notorious appearance at the United Nations in February 2003. The Observer’s David Rose said he was “nauseated, angry and ashamed” about his articles, but blamed them on the “pack of lies fed to me by a fairly sophisticated disinformation campaign”.
Pilger questions BBC Head of Newsgathering Fran Unsworth and Editor-in-Chief of ITV News David Mannion about their acceptance of the WMD claims and suggests that by their actions they helped contribute to the war drive. Unsworth tries to say she “didn’t realise until later”, but Pilger points that United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter was saying as early as 1998 that all chemical, biological and nuclear facilities in Iraq had been sealed up and the only UN-sanctioned research was on missiles of less than 150 kilometres range.
Both Unsworth and Mannion are probed about their biased reporting towards Israel. Why, Pilger asks, do news reports rarely call the military occupation in Palestine by its proper name and give chief propagandist Mark Regev full vent to put forward Israel’s version of events? Why did the BBC and ITV broadcast the blatantly doctored Israeli video of the storming of the Gaza flotilla in May 2010, which sought to blame the aid workers for the violence that ensued? Why did they virtually ignore the UN report six months later that noted the “unnecessary and incredible violence” inflicted by Israeli troops and the shooting of six on the ship at point-blank range?
In a feeble reply, Unsworth argues it is not the BBC’s fault that Israel has a sophisticated public relations machine and the Palestinians have no one to match Regev. Mannion replies it is not “the job of journalism to change the world”.
Former senior British foreign office official Carne Ross tells Pilger that journalists “more or less accepted our version of events,” surrounding the Iraq war, and that those who backed the official line were treated with “favouritism”, while those who didn’t were “punished”. Ross describes to Pilger his “guilt and shame” at being involved in the “major deception” used to justify the Iraq war. There were “great falsehoods, but the perpetrators are still running around”.
Pilger also presents the story of journalists who have attempted to remain independent. There is Dahr Jamail, for example, who reported on the destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, where thousands were killed, over 70 percent of houses destroyed and white phosphorus bombs used against civilians (a fact denied for months by US officials). None of Jamail’s reports appeared in the mainstream American media.
And Pilger recalls Australian-born left journalist Wilfred Burchett, who refused to attend the stage-managed Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri at the end of World War Two and set off for the bombed city of Hiroshima. There he exposed the full horror of its destruction by nuclear bombing, along with official claims that nuclear radiation was harmless.
In his excellent film, Pilger also interviews Phil Shiner, a lawyer representing victims of abuse by British soldiers, and the co-founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who blames the “vast sprawling industrial estate” that is becoming more secretive and uncontrolled.
PAUL MITCHELL writes frequently for the World Socialist Web Site.
In Assange, the fight for justice by means of transparency confronts the greatest and most practiced assembly of sordid criminality and hypocrisy the world has ever seen By John Pilger | _______________________________________________________ RIGHT: Oxford educated mediacrat Bennett. She previously worked for the Guardian (UK). RIGHT: Scottish TV news presenter K. Wark. A Labour-leaning mediacrat, she, like Rachel Maddow in the US, seems eager to bludgeon Assange with feminist smears. [2][3] Since his early years as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Pilger has been a trenchant critic of the foreign policy of the West. He is particularly opposed to many aspects of United States foreign policy, which he regards as being driven by a largely imperialist agenda. CROSSPOSTED WITH http://www.truth-out.org/the-war-wikileaks-john-pilgers-investigation-and-interview-with-julian-assange66847 NOTE: ALL IMAGES AND CAPTIONS COURTESY OF TGP EDITORSJohn Pilger's Investigation Into the War on WikiLeaks and His Interview With Julian Assange
14 January 2011 | [print_link]
The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell-hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.
In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the First World War, or one of the “war on terror” conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice. Judicial experts describe the jury as a “deliberate set up,” pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and other pillars of American power.
“This is not good news,” Assange told me when we spoke this past week, his voice dark and concerned. He says he can have “bad days – but I recover.” When we met in London last year, I said, “You are making some very serious enemies, not least of all the most powerful government engaged in two wars. How do you deal with that sense of danger?” His reply was characteristically analytical. “It’s not that fear is absent. But courage is really the intellectual mastery over fear – by an understanding of what the risks are and how to navigate a path through them.”
Regardless of the threats to his freedom and safety, he says the US is not WikiLeaks’ main “technological enemy.” “China is the worst offender. China has aggressive, sophisticated interception technology that places itself between every reader inside China and every information source outside China. We’ve been fighting a running battle to make sure we can get information through, and there are now all sorts of ways Chinese readers can get on to our site.”
It was in this spirit of “getting information through” that WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, but with a moral dimension. “The goal is justice,” wrote Assange on the homepage, “the method is transparency.” Contrary to a current media mantra, WikiLeaks material is not “dumped.” Less than one percent of the 251,000 US embassy cables have been released. As Assange points out, the task of interpreting material and editing that which might harm innocent individuals demands “standards [befitting] higher levels of information and primary sources.” To secretive power, this is journalism at its most dangerous.
On 18 March 2008, a war on WikiLeaks was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch.” US intelligence, it said, intended to destroy the feeling of “trust,” which is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity.” It planned to do this with threats to “exposure [and] criminal prosecution.” Silencing and criminalizing this rare source of independent journalism was the aim: smear the method. Hell hath no fury like imperial Mafiosi scorned.
Others, also scorned, have lately played a supporting part, intentionally or not, in the hounding of Assange, some for reasons of petty jealousy. Sordid and shabby describe their behavior, which serves only to highlight the injustice against a man who has courageously revealed what we have a right to know.
As the US Justice Department, in its hunt for Assange, subpoenas the Twitter and email accounts, banking and credit card records of people around the world – as if we are all subjects of the United States – much of the “free” media on both sides of the Atlantic direct their indignation at the hunted.
In response to Bennett, the editor of the online Nordic News Network in Sweden, Al Burke, wrote to the Observer explaining, “plausible answers to Catherine Bennett’s tendentious question” were both critically important and freely available. Assange had remained in Sweden for more than five weeks after the rape allegation was made – and subsequently dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm – and that repeated attempts by him and his Swedish lawyer to meet a second prosecutor, who reopened the case following the intervention of a government politician, had failed. And yet, as Burke pointed out, this prosecutor had granted him permission to fly to London where “he also offered to be interviewed – a normal practice in such cases.” So, it seems odd, at the very least, that the prosecutor then issued a European arrest warrant. The Observer did not publish Burke’s letter.
This record straightening is crucial because it describes the perfidious behavior of the Swedish authorities – a bizarre sequence confirmed to me by other journalists in Stockholm and by Assange’s Swedish lawyer Bjorn Hurtig. Not only that, Burke cataloged the unforeseen danger Assange faces should he be extradited to Sweden. “Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England,” he wrote, “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is ample reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”
These documents have been virtually ignored in Britain. They show that the Swedish political class has moved far from the perceived neutrality of a generation ago and that the country’s military and intelligence apparatus is all but absorbed into Washington’s matrix around NATO. In a 2007 cable, the US Embassy in Stockholm lauds the Swedish government dominated by the conservative Moderate Party of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt as coming “from a new political generation and not bound by [anti-US] traditions [and] in practice a pragmatic and strong partner with NATO, having troops under NATO command in Kosovo and Afghanistan.”
The cable reveals how foreign policy is largely controlled by Carl Bildt, the current foreign minister, whose career has been based on a loyalty to the United States that goes back to the Vietnam War when he attacked Swedish public television for broadcasting evidence that the US was bombing civilian targets. Bildt played a leading role in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a lobby group with close ties to the White House of George W. Bush, the CIA and the far right of the Republican Party.
“The significance of all this for the Assange case,” notes Burke in a recent study, “is that it will be Carl Bildt and perhaps other members of the Reinfeldt government who will decide – openly or, more likely, furtively behind a façade of legal formality – on whether or not to approve the anticipated US request for extradition. Everything in their past clearly indicates that such a request will be granted.” 
In Britain, this trial has welcomed yet more eager prosecutors, with the BBC to the fore. There was no presumption of innocence in Kirsty Wark‘s “Newsnight” court in December. “Why don’t you just apologise to the women?” she demanded of Assange, followed by: “Do we have your word of honour that you won’t abscond?” 
£ 150,000 a year, perhaps moderate compensation for the preposterous salaries of American media figures, but substantial for British standards. Like most self-made men (Humphrys barely finished high school), and operating in a terribly snobbish society, Humprhys is in the vanguard defending the status quo.
The Kidnapping of Haiti
By John Pilger
January 27, 2010 • [print_link]
THE THEFT OF HAITI has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.
The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration.
The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about the “violence” and need for “security”. In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens’ groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American general’s assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten.” Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. “There’s no doubt,” reported Frei in the aftermath of America’s bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, “that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East … is now increasingly tied up with military power.”
In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has an American president subordinated his government to the military establishment of his discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done. In pursuing George W. Bush’s policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700 billion. He has become, in effect, the spokesman for a military coup
For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque. With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed George W. Bush to the “relief effort”: a parody surely lifted from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, set in Papa Doc’s Haiti. As president, Bush’s relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic cleansing of many of New Orleans’ black population. In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratically-elected prime minister of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and exiled him in Africa. The popular Aristide had had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for those who toil in Haiti’s sweatshops.
When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.
Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN’s man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as “Mr. Nice Guy … bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land”, Clinton is Haiti’s most notorious privateer, demanding de-regulation of the economy for the benefit of the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed “tourist playground”.
Not for tourists is the US building its fifth biggest embassy in Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s “rollback” plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes.
The first rollback success came last year with the coup against President Jose Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the rich pay tax. Obama’s secret support for the illegal regime carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in central America. Last October, the regime in Colombia, long bankrolled by Washington and supported by death squads, handed the US seven military bases to, according to US air force documents, “combat anti-US governments in the region”.
Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama’s next war. On 14 December, researchers at the University of West England published first findings of a ten-year study of the BBC’s reporting of Venezuela. Of 304 BBC reports, only three mentioned any of the historic reforms of the Chavez government, while the majority denigrated Chavez’s extraordinary democratic record, at one point comparing him to Hitler.
Such distortion and its attendant servitude to western power are rife across the Anglo-American corporate media. People who struggle for a better life, or for life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti, deserve our support.
www.johnpilger.com
THOUGHT CONTROL AND 'PROFESSIONAL' JOURNALISM – Part 1
A Media Lens analysis [print_link]
The pretense of ideological impartiality is the fundamental lie of all bourgeois journalism, best exemplified by multimillionaire media celebrities. The world pays an enormous price for the betrayal of mainstream journalists, and for their transparent careerism, but, given the way corporate media operate, and the values they honor, no other type of individual can flourish in that environment.
Early last century, industrial technology allowed business interests to produce mass media at a cost that outclassed the capacity of non-corporate media to compete. As a result, radical publishers were marginalised and media diversity rapidly narrowed.
To counter claims that society was being, in effect, brainwashed by this media monopoly, corporate publishers promoted the idea of “professional journalism”. For the first time, reporters would be trained in special “schools of journalism” to master the arts of objective, balanced reporting. Big business moguls would be in control but, as good democrats, they would see to it that their journalists were scrupulously fair.
In reality, powerful biases were built into this new media “professionalism” – key among them a presumption about who should be the primary source of news.
American media analyst Robert McChesney explains that the new, professional press, “regarded anything done by official sources, for example, government officials and prominent public figures, as the basis for legitimate news”. (McChesney, in Kristina Borjesson ed., Into The Buzzsaw, Prometheus Books, 2002, p.367)
This reliance on official sources naturally “gave those in political office (and to a lesser extent, business) considerable power to set the news agenda by what they spoke about and what they kept quiet about”.
Thus the Telegraph’s environment editor, Charles Clover, wrote to a Media Lens reader:
“I am a reporter. Reporters report what other people say. Generally we report important, influential people, but only when they say something new, because what important people say is of most interest to others, and they are the ones who shape our world.” (Email forwarded to Media Lens, September 8, 2005)
In the Times, the then ITV News (now BBC) political editor, Nick Robinson, wrote of the 2003 invasion of Iraq:
“It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… That is all someone in my sort of job can do. We are not investigative reporters.” (Robinson, ‘”Remember the last time you shouted like that?” I asked the spin doctor’, The Times, July 16, 2004)
To the extent that a media system accepts that its ‘professional’ role is to report a news agenda set by officialdom, it must largely renounce the task of challenging that agenda. If the government, for example, rejects as hopelessly flawed a report on civilian casualties in Iraq – who are professional news journalists to disagree?
For a news journalist to continue promoting the credibility of the officially rejected report – something professional news reporters are not supposed to be.
If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider this response from Ed Pilkington, foreign editor of the Guardian:
“We are not in the business of editorialising our news reports.” (Pilkington to Media Lens, November 15, 2002)
In translation, this means: ‘We don’t express personal opinions in our news reports.’
After all, if professional news reporting is about covering the thoughts and actions of officials
When we asked the BBC’s World Affairs correspondent, Paul Reynolds, if he thought George Bush hoped to create a genuine democracy in Iraq, he replied: “I cannot get into a direct argument about his policies myself! Sorry.” (Email to Media Lens, September 5, 2005) Reynolds explained to one of our readers: “You are asking for my opinion about the war in Iraq yet BBC correspondents are not allowed to have opinions!” (Forwarded to Media Lens, October 22, 2005) The point being that if journalists are not even supposed to express personal opinion in reporting officialdom, then they are certainly not supposed to express personal opinion by promoting a news agenda against the wishes of officialdom. It would, for example, be professional suicide for a reporter to continue raising the issue of the Lancet report, or the lure of oil in Iraq, in press conference after press conference, or via news reports in the Guardian, against the flow of the official news agenda. All it needs is for the government, or an editor, to apply the label ‘crusading’ and a journalist can become “radioactive”. Thus we find that not one mainstream UK news reporter has attempted to challenge government claims in response to the Lancet report. In her book, Into The Buzzsaw, award-winning former CNN producer and CBS reporter Kristina Borjesson, writes: “The buzzsaw is a powerful system of censorship in this country that is revealed to those reporting on extremely sensitive stories, usually having to do with high-level government and/or corporate malfeasance. It often has a fatal effect on one’s career. I don’t want to mix metaphors here, but a journalist who has been through the buzzsaw is usually described as ‘radioactive,’ which is another word for unemployable.” (Borjesson, op., cit, p.12) In fact some “radioactive” journalists are tolerated by the media “Two decades ago, in a history of Lebanon’s civil war, he [Fisk] argued that the job of the journalist was to write a first draft of history. Since then, he appears to have changed his mind. In the preface of this book he endorses the view of an Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, that the proper vocation of the reporter is to ‘monitor the centres of power’.” (‘Bigger problems – The Middle East,’ The Economist, October 15, 2005) Predictably Fisk is therefore attacked for delivering “Old Testament rants against the wickedness of Israel and America” and a “dogged, powerful and often infuriating polemic against the West”. (Ibid) The word “polemic” is journalistic code flagging ‘unprofessional’ journalism (usefully, the word also indicates an angry – ie emotional and irrational – attack). Rory Carroll wrote of Gore Vidal in the Guardian: “For over half a century Vidal has been a factory of polemic and prose raging against Pax Americana.” (Carroll, ‘For 50 years he has been the scourge of the US Oliver Robinson wrote in the Observer: “Since 11 September, 2001, the appetite for Noam Chomsky’s polemics has rocketed.” (Robinson, The Observer, May 23, 2004) In a Guardian article, Jason Deans wrote of Carlton TV: “Carlton’s output… has included the award-winning documentary Kelly and Her Sisters [and] John Pilger’s controversial polemic Palestine is Still the Issue.” (Deans, ‘Hewlett quits Carlton,’ The Guardian, January 8, 2004) Roy Greenslade wrote in the Guardian of the late Paul Foot: “He did not try to be objective or balanced. His polemics were laced with sarcasm.” (Greenslade, ‘A fond farewell,’ The Guardian, July 26, 2004) In the New York Times, Frank Rich discussed Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11: “Of course, Mr Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he’s a polemicist, not a journalist.” (Rich, New York Times, May 23, 2004) Interestingly, the charge of crusading, polemical bias is generally reserved for +critics+ of powerful interests. Old Testament rants by journalists +for+ the virtue of Israel and America go unnoticed by the eagle-eyed guardians of professional virtue. A BBC online report in September stated: “BBC chairman Michael Grade has ordered a report into claims that Today presenter John Humphrys mocked politicians in an after-dinner speech.” (‘BBC’s Grade wants Humphrys report,’ September 3, 2005; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4212016.stm) No report was ordered when Andrew Marr said of Blair on the BBC evening news of April 9, 2003: “He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.” (Marr, BBC 1, News At Ten, April 9, 2003) In reviewing his book, My Trade, the Daily Telegraph noted that Marr “comes across in this book as he does in newsprint and on television Or consider Matt Frei’s comment from Washington for BBC TV News: “There’s no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East… is now increasingly tied up with military power.” (Frei, BBC1 Panorama, April 13, 2003) Was this an Old Testament rant? Apparently not. Or consider this from Frei speaking from the United States: “The war with terror may have moved from these shores to Iraq. But for how long?” (Frei, BBC News At Ten, September 10, 2003) Was this scrupulously neutral, professional journalism? In fact, both of these statements communicated deeply controversial, personal opinions, but were not at all criticised as biased or unprofessional. Imagine if Frei had said: “There’s no doubt that the desire to exploit the Third World, to project US corporate power in the world, and especially now in the Middle East… is now increasingly tied up with military power.” And: “The war for control of Third World resources has moved to Iraq. But for how long?” There is no doubt that Frei would have been sacked. The reason? He would have breached the BBC’s hallowed code of professional ethics: ‘Thou Shalt Not Express Personal Bias.’ This is how the most important group of journalists Part 2 is here ******