Martin Moore

Was the failure of newspapers to report Iraq’s lack of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) not a reporting failure but a failure of imagination?

That was what John F Burns, multi award winning New York Times journalist and Iraq bureau chief in the years leading up to 2003, argued in a debate at the Foreign Press Association last week.

Saddam Hussein did everything he could to convince journalists he had WMD, Burns said. He flouted UN resolutions, prevented weapons inspectors and journalists from visiting suspected sites, and conspicuously failed to deny he was developing weapons. He gave the impression, in other words, of someone who genuinely had something to hide.

He cemented this impression by going to enormous lengths to mislead reporters. He played, said Burns, a sort of cat-and-mouse game in which journalists constantly tried to elude their secret service minders so they could pursue leads about supposed weapons facilities.

Our failure, said Burns, was not that we did not report what we saw, but that we failed to realise this was all a charade. Saddam wanted us to believe he was developing weapons for the very reason that he thought this would make him more powerful (as per North Korea).

Yet Nick Davies, also on the panel along with John Lloyd (FT & Reuters Institute) and myself, would not accept Burns’ explanation. There were, Davies said, people able and willing to tell reporters the truth. Scott Ritter, for example, UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq from 1991-98, expressed his belief publicly that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed since 1998 (as Davies describes in his book, Flat Earth News).

Davies is right to point to the sceptics and criticise mainstream media – particularly in the US – for not paying more attention to them. But it’s also fascinating to listen to journalists like John F Burns, someone who has enormous experience of disengenuous authoritarian regimes – in the ex-USSR, ex-Yugoslavia, China and Afghanistan, to understand how even the most dogged reporters can still be fooled.

Gerard Baker has generated a lengthy bash-the-BBC discussion on the Times website with his article, ‘Great capital city, shame about the awful BBC’. More than 40 people have commented, mostly to agree with Baker’s attack: ‘You really do have to leave the country’ he writes ‘to appreciate fully how pernicious the BBC’s grasp of the nation’s cultural and political soul has become. The groupthink and assumptions implicit in almost everything broadcast by BBC News,’ he continues ‘and even less explicitly by much else of the corporation’s output, lie like a suffocating blanket over the national consciousness.’ Ouch.
But if Baker is to make such swingeing criticisms he at least needs to back them up with some evidence. He says he was motivated to write his article because the New York Times ran a piece in its op-ed page accusing the BBC of bias: ‘When the editorial pages of The New York Times accuse the BBC of anti-Western bias’ Baker writes, ‘it is worth taking notice’. Yet the article (‘The Biased Broadcasting Corporation’) was not a broad attack on BBC bias, it was a very specific criticism of BBC’s World Service Arabic language programming.
Baker also cites an interview with Helen Mirren in which the BBC interviewer apparently asked Mirren what it was like to play an ‘unsympathetic character’ like the queen (I have to write apparently because Baker does not name or link to any sources). This is hardly evidence of systematic bias across the Corporation.
The BBC clearly has its faults but it is not entirely unaware of them. Last year it held a lengthy, open, mea culpa inquiry into its institutional bias and what it could do about it (incorrectly reported as secret sessions by the Mail and the Telegraph). One can’t imagine many commercial organisations, not least News International, doing the same.

Three stories in the last 24 hours indicate how little the news media now respects national boundaries. The Daily Mail’s front page lead – ‘The rice with human genes’ – is a scare story presumably intended to elicit responses like that from Maggie in Bournemouth: “When they fed animal parts to cattle we got BSE. Isn’t this a step towards turning us into cannibals?”. But Maggie is in a minority. Hers is one of 10 comments from the UK (at the time of writing), there are another 26 from the US, and one each from Japan, Canada and Ireland.
Yesterday Roy Greenslade reported that US editors may be taking a lead from the Sun’s website and integrating sexier content to drive readership.
And in the Media Guardian today we learn that three reporters are leaving The Times – one for the think tank Policy Exchange, but two for US newspapers – Stephen Farrell to go to the New York Times and Ned Parker to the LA Times.
If readers, editors and journalists are becoming this global it can’t be long before we see this reflected in the media’s content and approach. The Mail and the Times might want to start thinking about what they can learn from the FT and the Economist.

Is the media a pliant cipher in Bush’s Iran strategy? That is a suggestion forwarded by Andrew Stephen in his piece for the New Statesman (‘This, Mr President, is how wars start‘). Stephen cites a Washington source who believes the aggressive rhetoric of the Bush camp is designed to ‘to intimidate Iran into scaling back its operations inside Iraq’, and that this is being helpfully conveyed by the world’s media. But even if this is true it is, as Stephen’s notes, a high risk strategy. Given the situation in Iraq there is a significant chance of an accidental confrontation which, in the context of Bush’s rhetoric, could easily escalate. This is particularly true in the Straits of Hormuz where the US will soon have two carrier battle groups. Harpers magazine has four fascinating pieces by former CIA officials assessing the situation and outlining how such such an accident could happen.
Anyway, if the media is fixating on the Bush administration’s rhetoric about Iran it is entirely understandable. Not only is armed conflict with Iran a terrifying prospect, the media (particularly in the US) has to recover its reputation. Its attention to detail is much greater as a result – thank goodness – and so is its level of scepticism about government statements (e.g. see reports earlier this week in the New York Times). Long may it continue.