Thursday, June 29, 2006
The Language of the Broad Centre
I’ve belatedly got around to reading the attack on Medialens by Peter Beaumont foreign affairs editor of the Observer. You can read it here. The day I looked at it – 27 June – it was accompanied by a flashing advert: WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD? A SPECIAL REPORT IN ASSOCIATION WITH SHELL, ironically underlining what Medialens has to say about the Observer's relationship with fossil fuel advertisers.
Beaumont’s intemperate piece reveals two things, I think. One is that the popularity and influence of Medialens is spreading, to the dismay of those top TV and print journalists who are its principal focus. Although Medialens works in the same twenty year old tradition as the Glasgow University Media Group it is far more threatening because its responses to journalism are much quicker and reach a wide audience on the net. In contrast, the detailed analyses of the Glasgow group only appeared about a year after the events they studied, in book form. Even more threateningly, Medialens invites its readers to communicate directly by email with named senior journalists, questioning their methodology.
Secondly, Beaumont reveals a wider anxiety about the nature and popularity of the internet. “There is something peculiar about the internet as a lens on our world, in the way it magnifies the extremes while distorting the broad centre,” he asserts.
What bothers him here, I think, is that on the internet a professional journalist has no more authority than a blogger. All voices are equal: it’s up to the reader to decide which one is worth listening to. What Beaumont fears is the loss of authority by the corporate media and the ideology of “the broad centre” which it represents, whether representing politics, culture, history or anything else.
When Beaumont says of Medialens, “It is a closed and distorting little world that selects and twists its facts to suit its arguments” the irony is palpable. It is a description which perfectly fits corporate journalism.
It is a little world - as in Beaumont’s I'm in very good company. John Simpson has been turned over, Jon Snow too, and my colleague Andrew Rawnsley. Actually pretty much everyone I know has been a target [of Medialens].
To distort is, in the words of the dictionary, to misrepresent (motives, facts, statements). It’s not difficult to think of examples.
Facts. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example, and the urgent, immediate threat they posed. There’s a “fact” which has melted like snow in August. It’s hard to recall that WMDs ever existed as a major daily news story which ran for weeks.
Motives. The behaviour and motives of Jean Charles de Menezes, for example. BBC Home affairs correspondent Margaret Gilmore said officers had challenged a known suspect they had been following. “He ran, they followed him”. (BBC News 22 July 2005) Except that he didn’t run and wasn’t challenged.
Statements.
Sir Ian Blair’s insistence that the Met is a spin-free zone puzzled many journalists. In the 48 hours after the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, many of them received a series of telephone calls from senior police officers. They gave detailed, off-the-record briefings about the events leading up to the shooting of the 27-year-old Brazilian… Officers claimed, as Sir Ian had done, that Mr de Menezes had been told to stop, but had refused to do so. He had, they said, vaulted the ticket barrier in an attempt to escape his police pursuers. They also claimed that he was wearing a "bulky, padded jacket", which looked as if it could have concealed a bomb. Stories containing those claims, appropriately credited to "police sources", duly appeared in The Sun and several other papers. But none of those claims was true.
(Alasdair Palmer, Daily Telegraph, 21 August 2005)
The language of what Beaumont calls “the broad centre” – sturdy, sensible, moderate, authoritative, objective, impartial - is entirely engaged with a particular angle of perception. As Medialens note, that angle is power - corporate power and state power.
The angle of perception permits a reporter on Radio 4 to say, as one did yesterday, that “anything that Hamas says has to be regarded with scepticism”.
This sturdy objectivity evaporates in other contexts. Houses and cars are bombed in Iraq; people are shot dead by US troops. There are allegations the victims were civilians. “What are they saying in Washington, Matt?” “Well, Nick, the Pentagon says the dead were all terrorists. But we have to treat this claim with scepticism, bearing in mind that they have lied repeatedly in the past and that US forces have a dreadful record of atrocities against civilians.”
A dialogue like that is simply unimaginable. Fawning credulity is the order of the day, whether or not the official spokesman is from the Pentagon, the Ministry of Defence (which used to be more accurately named The War Office), or the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
Some examples from the past 48 hours.
The angle of perception permits the use of massive military force in Gaza to be defined as “Israel’s determination to pile on the pressure” (ITN lunchtime News, June 28) – or as Katya Adler breathlessly put it, “Israel is flexing its military muscle” (BBC Lunchtime News, June 28). So, its tanks “roll in”, along with armoured bulldozers. Jets and helicopter gunships fill the skies. Julian Manyon blandly explained on last night’s 10.30 pm ITN news that this “signalled Israel’s determination to get the soldier back”.
Other angles will never be permitted; are, quite literally, unthinkable.
“In a surprise daylight raid on New York and Washington, al-Qaeda launched strikes against key financial and military targets, signalling the organisation’s determination to remove US troops from Saudi Arabia.”
No western journalist would ever have conceived of reporting 9/11 in the kind of language routinely used in reporting events in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The news agenda is set by the powerful, not the weak. The Israeli government announces that the capture of a single Israeli soldier from a tank is a “crisis”. The western media promptly agrees to this agenda and gives it lavish coverage (over 7 minutes on last night’s BBC TV main news bulletin). It is really just the movie Munich in another form. What happens to an Israeli is of major importance; what happens to a Palestinian Arab is of no importance whatsoever.
There is no “crisis” about the regular abduction and mistreatment of Palestinian children:
The plight of Palestinian children arrested by the Israeli army has long been one of the neglected aspects of Israeli occupation, involving some 600 minors a year since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000. Nearly all are held without access to legal support during questioning, often compelled to sign confessions in Hebrew, a language they don't understand, while subjected to intimidation and mistreatment as a matter of routine course. It starts with the arrest itself, which can take place during night-time incursions or mass arrest campaigns, or alternatively at the military checkpoints which have played such a part in curtailing the economic and social life of the West Bank. After a night or two behind bars, some minors are released without charge, while the unfortunate ones, around 300 a year, start their passage through the Israeli military justice system which stands as the rule of law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This system allows no special provisions for minors, despite the fact that Israel is a signatory of numerous international treaties which demand due consideration for age in the legal process, not least of which is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Those considerations are, by contrast, applied to Israeli minors, including those living cheek by jowl with the Palestinians in illegal West Bank settlements.
Life doesn't improve on the inside, with Palestinian children routinely reporting torture or mistreatment.
The brutalisation of Palestinian children is not news; 600 kidnappings a year is not a crisis. Contrast the absolute silence about the treatment of those children with that of the wall-to-wall coverage of the captured Israeli. The corporal’s youth is repeatedly stressed by reporters. We know his name. A variety of photographs of him (many in civilian dress) are repeatedly shown on TV. He is humanised. We hear from his father. We hear from a family friend. On breakfast TV the anchorwoman looks concerned as she plaintively refers to “this young man”. He is constructed as a victim. He is not represented as a member of an army notorious for its human rights abuses but as the victim of a “kidnap”. He is never identified as what he was – a tank gunner.
And while enormous emphasis is put on the soldier’s comparative youth, there is another striking fact never mentioned by news reporters. Almost half the population of Gaza is under 15 years old. Many of them are already traumatised by past Israeli brutalities. Earlier this month John Pilger described how
Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's community health project, told me, "The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma . . . 99.2 per cent had their homes bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or neighbours injured or killed."
So, Israel’s tanks “roll in”, along with armoured bulldozers. Jets and helicopter gunships fill the skies. Yesterday’s ITN lunchtime news described how at least nine missiles had destroyed Gaza’s only power station, destroying the region’s electricity supply. There was no military purpose to this. It was in fact a war crime. Electricity to most of Gaza has been cut, including hospitals and clinics. The main coastal road connecting north and south Gaza has been severed. Today we learn (but only on Channel 4 news) that oil supplies to Gaza have been cut. Fuel, water, electricity are now no longer available, or are fast running out, for an estimated 80 per cent of the population.
These are punitive crimes against a civilian population, but you will never hear the words “war crime” or “collective punishment” frame the telling of this news story.
Nor has a single TV or radio journalist that I’ve heard ever mentioned one of the most sadistic weapons in the Israeli state’s vast armoury – using jets to create sonic booms all through the night, to make the entire population of Gaza unable to sleep at night.
Today, the Israeli army “rounded up 64 Palestinian ministers and MPs” (BBC news). The language of the Israeli PR machine is cravenly imitated by BBC and ITN; only Jon Snow asserts that they were “kidnapped”.
Sixty four elected representatives seized and unlawfully imprisoned! Just imagine the hysteria if a single Labour MP, or a member of Congress, or a member of the Knesset – let alone 64 - was abducted by an Islamic group. Bush and Blair would rush to the microphone to denounce this savage attack on democracy. The cruise missile left would rage about Islamo-fascism and its contempt for democracy and western values. But where elected Hamas representatives are concerned there is total silence from the United Nations, Britain, the USA, France, and Germany – the same powers which have sponsored and indulged 58 years of Israel's existence.
And note the language – “rounded up”, as you might cattle or stray dogs. Palestinians are indeed the Untermenschen of our age.
Yes, “the battle lines are clearly drawn”. On one side are Palestinian civilians and some poorly armed resistance fighters, and on the other is an army of tanks, bulldozers, helicopter gunships and the most advanced weaponry in the world - an army whose previous actions in Gaza were witnessed by the US journalist Chris Hedges, who in an interview in 2001 described his revulsion at the sadistic savagery of Israeli soldiers:
Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered- death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo - but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
Well it’s not as if we don’t know what to expect in the next few days. BBC TV news reporter Katya Adler – she’s new and she’ll go far - spoke of Palestinian civilians fearful of being “caught in the crossfire”. (BBC Lunchtime News, June 28). As Robert Fisk has pointed out, that’s a favourite rhetorical device of the Israeli PR machine. And what it means is what Chris Hedges described:
indiscriminate killing of men, women and children; the systematic destruction of property; the cutting off of water supply; and the prevention of travel even for ambulances. It is a full-scale war against the entire population.
A full-scale war against an entire population. You’ll never find anyone in “the broad centre” of the British mass media ever using such disagreeable expressions.
Except, perhaps, when things get personal. The tone of Julian Manyon’s reportage changed dramatically on today’s lunchtime ITN broadcast. He described how he and a film crew were filming from the roof of a Palestinian house in Gaza near the northern border with Israel when Israeli gunners opened fire with a barrage of shells, perhaps as many as 50, lasting for two hours. Some of the shells landed “so close to the house that in fact bits of shrapnel flew up into the air and landed right at our feet, forcing us to beat a retreat down the stairwell of the home.”
Manyon seemed shaken by his experience. “You can imagine that the local people are terrorised by this,” he commented.
Palestinians terrorised by the Israeli army.
Careful, Julian. Too much of that sort of thing and you’ll be transferred to reporting on jumble sales in Swansea.
Beaumont’s intemperate piece reveals two things, I think. One is that the popularity and influence of Medialens is spreading, to the dismay of those top TV and print journalists who are its principal focus. Although Medialens works in the same twenty year old tradition as the Glasgow University Media Group it is far more threatening because its responses to journalism are much quicker and reach a wide audience on the net. In contrast, the detailed analyses of the Glasgow group only appeared about a year after the events they studied, in book form. Even more threateningly, Medialens invites its readers to communicate directly by email with named senior journalists, questioning their methodology.
Secondly, Beaumont reveals a wider anxiety about the nature and popularity of the internet. “There is something peculiar about the internet as a lens on our world, in the way it magnifies the extremes while distorting the broad centre,” he asserts.
What bothers him here, I think, is that on the internet a professional journalist has no more authority than a blogger. All voices are equal: it’s up to the reader to decide which one is worth listening to. What Beaumont fears is the loss of authority by the corporate media and the ideology of “the broad centre” which it represents, whether representing politics, culture, history or anything else.
When Beaumont says of Medialens, “It is a closed and distorting little world that selects and twists its facts to suit its arguments” the irony is palpable. It is a description which perfectly fits corporate journalism.
It is a little world - as in Beaumont’s I'm in very good company. John Simpson has been turned over, Jon Snow too, and my colleague Andrew Rawnsley. Actually pretty much everyone I know has been a target [of Medialens].
To distort is, in the words of the dictionary, to misrepresent (motives, facts, statements). It’s not difficult to think of examples.
Facts. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example, and the urgent, immediate threat they posed. There’s a “fact” which has melted like snow in August. It’s hard to recall that WMDs ever existed as a major daily news story which ran for weeks.
Motives. The behaviour and motives of Jean Charles de Menezes, for example. BBC Home affairs correspondent Margaret Gilmore said officers had challenged a known suspect they had been following. “He ran, they followed him”. (BBC News 22 July 2005) Except that he didn’t run and wasn’t challenged.
Statements.
Sir Ian Blair’s insistence that the Met is a spin-free zone puzzled many journalists. In the 48 hours after the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, many of them received a series of telephone calls from senior police officers. They gave detailed, off-the-record briefings about the events leading up to the shooting of the 27-year-old Brazilian… Officers claimed, as Sir Ian had done, that Mr de Menezes had been told to stop, but had refused to do so. He had, they said, vaulted the ticket barrier in an attempt to escape his police pursuers. They also claimed that he was wearing a "bulky, padded jacket", which looked as if it could have concealed a bomb. Stories containing those claims, appropriately credited to "police sources", duly appeared in The Sun and several other papers. But none of those claims was true.
(Alasdair Palmer, Daily Telegraph, 21 August 2005)
The language of what Beaumont calls “the broad centre” – sturdy, sensible, moderate, authoritative, objective, impartial - is entirely engaged with a particular angle of perception. As Medialens note, that angle is power - corporate power and state power.
The angle of perception permits a reporter on Radio 4 to say, as one did yesterday, that “anything that Hamas says has to be regarded with scepticism”.
This sturdy objectivity evaporates in other contexts. Houses and cars are bombed in Iraq; people are shot dead by US troops. There are allegations the victims were civilians. “What are they saying in Washington, Matt?” “Well, Nick, the Pentagon says the dead were all terrorists. But we have to treat this claim with scepticism, bearing in mind that they have lied repeatedly in the past and that US forces have a dreadful record of atrocities against civilians.”
A dialogue like that is simply unimaginable. Fawning credulity is the order of the day, whether or not the official spokesman is from the Pentagon, the Ministry of Defence (which used to be more accurately named The War Office), or the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
Some examples from the past 48 hours.
The angle of perception permits the use of massive military force in Gaza to be defined as “Israel’s determination to pile on the pressure” (ITN lunchtime News, June 28) – or as Katya Adler breathlessly put it, “Israel is flexing its military muscle” (BBC Lunchtime News, June 28). So, its tanks “roll in”, along with armoured bulldozers. Jets and helicopter gunships fill the skies. Julian Manyon blandly explained on last night’s 10.30 pm ITN news that this “signalled Israel’s determination to get the soldier back”.
Other angles will never be permitted; are, quite literally, unthinkable.
“In a surprise daylight raid on New York and Washington, al-Qaeda launched strikes against key financial and military targets, signalling the organisation’s determination to remove US troops from Saudi Arabia.”
No western journalist would ever have conceived of reporting 9/11 in the kind of language routinely used in reporting events in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The news agenda is set by the powerful, not the weak. The Israeli government announces that the capture of a single Israeli soldier from a tank is a “crisis”. The western media promptly agrees to this agenda and gives it lavish coverage (over 7 minutes on last night’s BBC TV main news bulletin). It is really just the movie Munich in another form. What happens to an Israeli is of major importance; what happens to a Palestinian Arab is of no importance whatsoever.
There is no “crisis” about the regular abduction and mistreatment of Palestinian children:
The plight of Palestinian children arrested by the Israeli army has long been one of the neglected aspects of Israeli occupation, involving some 600 minors a year since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000. Nearly all are held without access to legal support during questioning, often compelled to sign confessions in Hebrew, a language they don't understand, while subjected to intimidation and mistreatment as a matter of routine course. It starts with the arrest itself, which can take place during night-time incursions or mass arrest campaigns, or alternatively at the military checkpoints which have played such a part in curtailing the economic and social life of the West Bank. After a night or two behind bars, some minors are released without charge, while the unfortunate ones, around 300 a year, start their passage through the Israeli military justice system which stands as the rule of law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This system allows no special provisions for minors, despite the fact that Israel is a signatory of numerous international treaties which demand due consideration for age in the legal process, not least of which is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Those considerations are, by contrast, applied to Israeli minors, including those living cheek by jowl with the Palestinians in illegal West Bank settlements.
Life doesn't improve on the inside, with Palestinian children routinely reporting torture or mistreatment.
The brutalisation of Palestinian children is not news; 600 kidnappings a year is not a crisis. Contrast the absolute silence about the treatment of those children with that of the wall-to-wall coverage of the captured Israeli. The corporal’s youth is repeatedly stressed by reporters. We know his name. A variety of photographs of him (many in civilian dress) are repeatedly shown on TV. He is humanised. We hear from his father. We hear from a family friend. On breakfast TV the anchorwoman looks concerned as she plaintively refers to “this young man”. He is constructed as a victim. He is not represented as a member of an army notorious for its human rights abuses but as the victim of a “kidnap”. He is never identified as what he was – a tank gunner.
And while enormous emphasis is put on the soldier’s comparative youth, there is another striking fact never mentioned by news reporters. Almost half the population of Gaza is under 15 years old. Many of them are already traumatised by past Israeli brutalities. Earlier this month John Pilger described how
Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's community health project, told me, "The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma . . . 99.2 per cent had their homes bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or neighbours injured or killed."
So, Israel’s tanks “roll in”, along with armoured bulldozers. Jets and helicopter gunships fill the skies. Yesterday’s ITN lunchtime news described how at least nine missiles had destroyed Gaza’s only power station, destroying the region’s electricity supply. There was no military purpose to this. It was in fact a war crime. Electricity to most of Gaza has been cut, including hospitals and clinics. The main coastal road connecting north and south Gaza has been severed. Today we learn (but only on Channel 4 news) that oil supplies to Gaza have been cut. Fuel, water, electricity are now no longer available, or are fast running out, for an estimated 80 per cent of the population.
These are punitive crimes against a civilian population, but you will never hear the words “war crime” or “collective punishment” frame the telling of this news story.
Nor has a single TV or radio journalist that I’ve heard ever mentioned one of the most sadistic weapons in the Israeli state’s vast armoury – using jets to create sonic booms all through the night, to make the entire population of Gaza unable to sleep at night.
Today, the Israeli army “rounded up 64 Palestinian ministers and MPs” (BBC news). The language of the Israeli PR machine is cravenly imitated by BBC and ITN; only Jon Snow asserts that they were “kidnapped”.
Sixty four elected representatives seized and unlawfully imprisoned! Just imagine the hysteria if a single Labour MP, or a member of Congress, or a member of the Knesset – let alone 64 - was abducted by an Islamic group. Bush and Blair would rush to the microphone to denounce this savage attack on democracy. The cruise missile left would rage about Islamo-fascism and its contempt for democracy and western values. But where elected Hamas representatives are concerned there is total silence from the United Nations, Britain, the USA, France, and Germany – the same powers which have sponsored and indulged 58 years of Israel's existence.
And note the language – “rounded up”, as you might cattle or stray dogs. Palestinians are indeed the Untermenschen of our age.
Yes, “the battle lines are clearly drawn”. On one side are Palestinian civilians and some poorly armed resistance fighters, and on the other is an army of tanks, bulldozers, helicopter gunships and the most advanced weaponry in the world - an army whose previous actions in Gaza were witnessed by the US journalist Chris Hedges, who in an interview in 2001 described his revulsion at the sadistic savagery of Israeli soldiers:
Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered- death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo - but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
Well it’s not as if we don’t know what to expect in the next few days. BBC TV news reporter Katya Adler – she’s new and she’ll go far - spoke of Palestinian civilians fearful of being “caught in the crossfire”. (BBC Lunchtime News, June 28). As Robert Fisk has pointed out, that’s a favourite rhetorical device of the Israeli PR machine. And what it means is what Chris Hedges described:
indiscriminate killing of men, women and children; the systematic destruction of property; the cutting off of water supply; and the prevention of travel even for ambulances. It is a full-scale war against the entire population.
A full-scale war against an entire population. You’ll never find anyone in “the broad centre” of the British mass media ever using such disagreeable expressions.
Except, perhaps, when things get personal. The tone of Julian Manyon’s reportage changed dramatically on today’s lunchtime ITN broadcast. He described how he and a film crew were filming from the roof of a Palestinian house in Gaza near the northern border with Israel when Israeli gunners opened fire with a barrage of shells, perhaps as many as 50, lasting for two hours. Some of the shells landed “so close to the house that in fact bits of shrapnel flew up into the air and landed right at our feet, forcing us to beat a retreat down the stairwell of the home.”
Manyon seemed shaken by his experience. “You can imagine that the local people are terrorised by this,” he commented.
Palestinians terrorised by the Israeli army.
Careful, Julian. Too much of that sort of thing and you’ll be transferred to reporting on jumble sales in Swansea.
# posted by Ellis : 8:38 PM
