Why Murdoch And The BBC
Are On The Same Side
by John Pilger
Britain
is
said to be approaching its Berlusconi Moment. That is to say, if Rupert
Murdoch wins control of Sky he will command half the television and
newspaper market and threaten what is known as public service
broadcasting. Although the alarm is ringing, it is unlikely that any
government will stop him while his court is packed with politicians of
all parties.
The problem with this and other Murdoch scares is
that, while one cannot doubt their gravity, they deflect from an
unrecognised and more insidious threat to honest information. For all
his power, Murdoch’s media is not respectable.
Take the current colonial
wars. In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox Television is almost
cartoon-like in its warmongering.
It is the august, tombstone New York
Times, “the greatest newspaper in the world”, and others such as the
once-celebrated Washington Post, that have given respectability to the
lies and moral contortions of the “war on terror”, now recast as
“perpetual war”.
In Britain, the liberal Observer performed this
task in making respectable Tony Blair’s deceptions on Iraq. More
importantly, so did the BBC, whose reputation is its power. In spite of
one maverick reporter’s attempt to expose the so-called dodgy dossier,
the BBC took Blair’s sophistry and lies on Iraq at face value.
This was made clear in studies by Cardiff
University and the German-based Media Tenor. The BBC’s coverage, said
the Cardiff study, was overwhelmingly “sympathetic to the government’s
case”. According to Media Tenor, a mere two per cent of BBC news in the
build-up to the invasion permitted anti-war voices to be heard. Compared
with the main American networks, only CBS was more pro-war.
So when the BBC director-general Mark Thompson
used the recent Edinburgh Television Festival to attack Murdoch, his
hypocrisy was like a presence. Thompson is the embodiment of a
taxpayer-funded managerial elite, for whom political reaction have long
replaced public service. He has even laid into his own corporation,
Murdoch-style, as “massively left-wing”. He was referring to the era of
his 1960s predecessor Hugh Greene, who allowed artistic and journalistic
freedom to flower at the BBC.
Thompson is the opposite of Greene; and
his aspersion on the past is in keeping with the BBC’s modern corporate
role, reflected in the rewards demanded by those at the top. Thompson
was paid £834,000 last year out of public funds and his 50 senior
executives earn more than the prime minister, along with enriched
journalists like Jeremy Paxman and Fiona Bruce.
Murdoch and the BBC share this corporatism. Blair,
for example, was their quintessential politician. Prior to his election
in 1997, Blair and his wife were flown first-class by Murdoch to Hayman
Island in Australia where he stood at the Newscorp lectern and, in
effect, pledged an obedient Labour administration. His coded message on
media cross-ownership and de-regulation was that a way would be found
for Murdoch to achieve the supremacy that now beckons.
Blair was embraced by the new BBC corporate class,
which regards itself as meretorious and non-ideological: the natural
leaders in a managerial Britain in which class is unspoken. Few did more
to enunciate Blair’s “vision” than Andrew Marr, then a leading
newspaper journalist and today the BBC’s ubiquitous voice of
middle-class Britain. Just as Murdoch’s Sun declared in 1995 it shared
the rising Blair’s “high moral values” so Marr, writing the Observer in
1999, lauded the new prime minister’s “substantial moral courage” and
the “clear distinction in his mind between prudently protecting his
power base and rashly using his power for high moral purpose”. What
impressed Marr was Blair’s “utter lack of cynicism” along with his
bombing of Yugoslavia which would “save lives”.
By March 2003, Marr was the BBC’s political
editor. Standing in Downing Street on the night of the “shock and awe”
assault on Iraq, he rejoiced at the vindication of Blair who, he said,
had promised “to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in end the
Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been
proved conclusively right” and as a result “tonight he stands as a
larger man”. In fact, the criminal conquest of Iraq smashed a society,
killing up to a million people, driving four million from their homes,
contaminating cities like Fallujah with cancer-causing poisons and
leaving a majority of young children malnourished in a country once
described by Unicef as a “model”.
So it was entirely appropriate that Blair, in
hawking his self-serving book, should select Marr for his “exclusive TV
interview” on the BBC. The headline across the Observer’s review of the
interview read, “Look who’s having the last laugh.” Beneath this was a
picture of a beaming Blair sharing a laugh with Marr.
The interview produced not a single challenge that
stopped Blair in his precocious, mendacious tracks. He was allowed to
say that “absolutely clearly and unequivocally, the reason for toppling
[Saddam Hussein] was his breach of resolutions over WMD, right?” No,
wrong. A wealth of evidence, not least the infamous Downing Street Memo,
makes clear that Blair secretly colluded with George W Bush to attack
Iraq. This was not mentioned. At no point did Marr say to him, “You
failed to persuade the UN Security Council to go along with the
invasion. You and Bush went alone. Most of the world was outraged.
Weren’t you aware that you were about to commit a monumental war crime?”
Instead, Blair used the convivial encounter to
deceive, yet again, even to promote an attack on Iran, an outrage.
Murdoch’s Fox would have differed in style only. The British public
deserves better.
www.johnpilger.com
