![[The First Casualty]](pix/Wartitle.gif)
Speech given by Media Workers Against the War activist at an anti-war meeting in Hackney on 27 May.
All governments lie during wartime (and much of the rest of the time too)
But over the past 150 years most governments have learned that it is best to avoid really blatant lies unless you are confident you won't be found out for the duration of the war.
It's better to sow confusion, to mix in the bad news with the good, to promise to provide details as soon as they become available (which regrettably won't be today), and to use the natural right-wing bias of the owners and controllers of the press (and often the egotism of a few sad journalists whom ministers can give privileges to).
During the Vietnam war, the US government and army relied mainly on the papers' and broadcasters' strong support for the war, backed up with spoon-fed briefings to lazy reporters in Saigon, so they didn't really make great efforts to stop journalists wandering over the countryside - until it was too late, and the American public was turning against the war...
All governments have learned from the American army's laxity during the Vietnam war, but the British government has been more secretive and obsessed with control than most.
During the Falklands war the MoD had very overt censorship - to the point where even the pro-war papers complained about the lack of information and pictures, and the delay in their dispatches being approved by the censor.
The MoD was also vindictive. It didn't like the Guardian's less-than-wholehearted support for the war, so it stuck the paper's correspondent on an ammunition ship moored in San Carlos Bay - so if it was bombed it would at least take one of the enemy with it...
Although Vietnam was the first TV war, the war against Iraq was the first almost-live TV war. It was also a very heavily spun war, with very tight control of the thousands of journalists in Saudi Arabia. Trusted British reporters were assigned to military units, presented with picture opportunities and interviewees, while the rest of the pack were stuck at headquarters watching the daily video-game briefings, regurgitating what they were told.
It shows how little diversity there is in our media that this was the most reported war in history yet almost all the media missed the real story: the slaughter of 200,000 Iraqis in the course of a few weeks and the 828,000 children - verified by UNICEF - who have died since, through sanctions.
The continuing war against Iraq shows just how little questioning is allowed by those who run our media.
Remember the World Cup qualifier that the Iraqi team lost, and the reports in the Observer that they had been severely tortured as punishment? Reliable security service sources said so.
Strangely, the team played fine the following week; no scars, no splints or bandages. But the editor decided not to apologise for being so naive as to believe everything MI6 told him. The story was dropped.
There was silence also after the American bombing of the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Even the CIA now admits - quietly - that "there is little evidence that the plant was anything other than what the Sudanese said it was".
Equally little evidence of compensation being paid by America, either.
In December last year, George Robertson announced that one of Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces, where he has been building and storing all sorts of nasty chemical and biological weapons, is bigger than Greater Paris - which is why it is so difficult to search.
This was reported word for word in the papers. Actually it is much the same size as Windsor Castle... but George doesn't want to talk about it any longer.
Not long before that, Robin Cook told the Labour Party NEC the heart-rending story of an Iraqi boy who was imprisoned when he was five just for throwing a stone at a portrait of Saddam Hussein, and the boy is now 16... 11 years rotting in jail: that's why we can't drop sanctions.
Two Labour MPs, Tam Dalyell and George Galloway, asked what his name was, and for a few details. Cook stalled and delayed for a few weeks and finally admitted he'd been told the story by George Robertson... who also stalled and delayed and finally admitted he'd been told the story by Lord Gilbert, who refused to explain how he came by the story, except that it was from a "reliable source".
When we come to the Kosovan war, we are inundated with lies like these.
Remember the 100,000 Kosovan men who were missing, feared dead in the second week of the bombing. As of last week, NATO reckoned the deathtoll might be 4,000 Albanians (though without providing evidence for this). Which is not good compared with NATO's own figures for the whole year before its intervention, when it suggests 2,000 Albanians died.
Remember also the Kosovan leaders, such as Ibrahim Rogova, who were known to have been executed -- only to turn up on TV a few days later.
Or Robin Cook's announcement that 20 Albanian teachers had been massacred in the village school at Goden in front of their kids.
It should have occurred to reporters with a knowledge of the area, first, that no Albanian village is big enough to support three teachers, never mind 20. And second, that this sounds so familiar to a well-known, real massacre that took place in Goden - at the end of WW II.
Or the ludicrous suggestion that Serbs climbed up tall buildings in Pristina to drop bombs on the streets and then blame NATO for the craters.
What is more worrying than editors' ability to be fooled by transparent lies, is their apparent blindness to the Minister for War admitting to a major change in war aims.
George Robertson said at the beginning of the bombing that "We went in to avert a humanitarian catastrophe". We all remember that. But then, three weeks ago on Radio 4, he said: "We didn't resort to bombing for humanitarian reasons, we went in to degrade Milosovic's killing machine." Which is a very different war aim.
Typically the Guardian failed to run this story even though reporters had written it in to the main story - it got squeezed out at the editing stage.
I know a number of people who no longer buy the Guardian because they are sick of its enthusiastic support for the war and the way it all but ignores the opposition to it.
But it is not the case that all its journalist have become laptop bombardiers or audio-typists working for NATO.
In fact there a battle going on in the newsroom there. The majority of journalists on the paper are opposed to the war and even more of them are worried at the one sidedness of the reporting.
What the war reporting shows is something that goes on in every media organisation, just in a more extreme form. Our bosses and owners are not in favour of good journalism:
They are opposed to union organisation;
They are opposed to paying for sufficient staff;
They are opposed to paying for decent training;
They are opposed to anyone who questions their right to promote and publish views that mesh with those of the rest of their class;
They are opposed, most of all, to their control being questioned.
They can live with unions, if they are forced to.
They can reluctantly part with money for better resources, but what they cannot concede is ownership. Something they have in common with all other bosses.
In one sense the media industry is an industry like any other, and a very profitable one, but it is also one of the ways that working people are kept in their place.
Not, by and large, by outright lies, but the media always emphasises the things that divide workers - such as nationalism - and at the same time ignores dissenting voices, the kind that you hear at meetings like this -
that say there is another way society could be ordered, that
there is an alternative to wars, to hunger, to unemployment...
What Media Workers Against the War is all about is contesting control of the newsroom. We recognise that as workers we do not have the same interests as our bosses, and that if we are to stop this war we need to combine as workers and rebuild our union organisation.
But we also recognise that we cannot do it on our own. The bigger the demonstrations and pickets on the streets, the bigger the confidence of workers inside media companies.
And we need that confidence to organise against the warmongering editors and managers, to encourage colleagues who are reporters to ask the embarrassing questions, to encourage production staff to resist the censorship and to demand the time and resources to check unsubstantiated claims by ministers and generals.
We want to stop the lie machine. It won't happen overnight - to succeed we need more and bigger demonstrations to give media workers the confidence to - to use that awful military metaphor - degrade the lie machine bit by bit, building on the successes, and wresting some of the control out of the hands of the bloody-handed bosses.
You can contact Media Workers Against the War