WHICH COMES FIRST - THE STORY OR THE FACTS?

A radio station in Adelaide, South Australia, invited listeners who fancied themselves the ultimate eligible bachelor or ideal bride to be assessed for mutual compatibility. According to a computer dating programme, twenty-seven-year-olds Thomas Balacco and Helen Boyer were the perfect match. The deal was, SA-FM would pay for the pair to have a luxury holiday in Bali on condition that, at the end of the week, they marry.

But this episode of Two Strangers and a Wedding soon began to go wrong. The tropical paradise became a private hell for Balacco as he was frozen out in favour of a third party. Boyer, it turned out, preferred the company of another man - a journalist sent to cover the story for Channel Seven Television and its flagship current affairs programme, Today Tonight.

Assignment became assignation for Christopher Hill, as he and Boyer drew close, Balacco returning home early in disillusion. Today Tonight producer Graham Archer was quick to distance himself from his errant reporter, saying Hill was “just a freelance. We were merely observers, nothing more,” he continued. “The couple didn’t get on; that’s the story, that’s all there is.”

The tale is, on one level, an amusing piece of ephemera, typical of the flotsam and jetsam found within the froth of commercial broadcasting, driven to ever greater lengths of ingenuity and intrusiveness in the search for audiences. It works, and not just once - months later, copycat episodes involving programme makers hustling for impact in the deregulated world of British television got some free publicity on the front pages of popular newspapers.

These, though, are murky waters. The claim that Today Tonight were “merely observers” was, in this context, a gem of rare silliness, and one which evidently delighted media correspondents covering the story (1). But our news is full of stories where such a claim would be equally difficult to sustain.

BATTLING BUREAUCRACY

There was the curious tale, conveniently arriving on a quiet August day in London, of the dyslexic child who could barely write, being offered a place at Cambridge University on the strength of essays he’d dictated into a tape recorder. The family of 15-year-old Alexander Faludy made the front pages when they took their local education authority to court for refusing to provide him with a special-needs grant from council coffers. A “fact” which proved on closer examination to have arisen as the result of a carefully planned and executed media strategy.

After two high-profile days of evidence, the judge turned down the family’s legally-aided application for judicial review, expressing puzzlement that the case had ever come before him - especially since they were entitled, as of right, to help from a central government fund, the Disabled Students’ Allowance, specifically set up for such cases and affording ample support. Portsmouth Council advised them to apply for it six months earlier, it subsequently emerged, but they did not actually do so until the middle of the court case.

The ruling came and a Portsmouth spokesman outside the court gave the council’s side of the story to waiting reporters. The family, however, did not. They were saving their account for a five-figure deal with a newspaper, themed - My Struggle, by Boy, 15, Defying Disability and Battling Bureaucracy. Not a story which could have been told if they had taken the council’s earlier advice and settled the matter without going to law: a point which, when put to the Faludys’ solicitor, brought her impromptu news conference, on the steps of London’s High Court, to a hasty conclusion. The strategy worked - most newspaper accounts of the story reported the Faludys’ version at face value, and their exclusive thus retained its saleability.

Human interest stories are supposed to offer a whiff of authenticity, an antidote to the tired, formulaic battle for the news agenda which dominates politics and public affairs in the Age of Spin. Instead, as these and an avalanche of other examples suggest, today they merely prove how far the public have caught up with politicians in harnessing the news to their own ends.

THEATRICAL EXITS

Public and politicians leapfrogged each other in providing facts for journalists to report at a crucial stage of the peace process in Northern Ireland, as the Ulster Unionist Executive met to consider the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Reporters shivering outside the meeting were treated to one of history’s great stormings-out.

West Tyrone MP Willie Thompson emerged to give dire warnings of a deep rift within his party and to reiterate his opposition to the proposals. As the thicket of microphones converged on him, it was impossible to miss the fact that their very presence had conditioned the story. Theatrical exits, by definition, require an audience.

Lunchtime bulletins featured this and a demonstration by a knot of Agreement supporters - whereupon a knot of Agreement opponents gathered, determined to counter the impression, in time for the evening bulletins, that the word on the street was all in favour. “I don’t need to read it,” one declared, as he ripped his copy of the document in two and waiting cameras panned down to follow it falling to the floor. The divisions claimed by Mr Thompson were becoming more “real” before our very eyes, acquiring as emotive a symbol as he could have wished for and one ushered into being by and for the news crews covering the meeting.

These, it could be argued, are fairly innocuous examples. Many will remember the anecdote recounted by reporter-turned MP Martin Bell, which he hoped was apocryphal, about the Sarajevo sniper (2). A correspondent thought it would be a good idea to file an account of life on the front line as seen through the sights of a sniper’s rifle, and duly made arrangements to spend the day with one. A little after he joined his subject, a couple walked through the line of fire and the sniper turned to him and said: “OK, which one do you want me to shoot? When the horrified reporter protested that he couldn’t possibly make such a call, the sniper promptly shot them both, with the rejoinder: “That was a pity. You could have saved one of their lives.”

Bosnia was the theatre of journalism’s darkest dreams, with the still looming shadow of the Sarajevo market massacre hanging over its pretensions to objectivity. Could media strategy actually have prompted one side - the Bosnian government - to fire on its own civilians as they queued for basic necessities, in order to be reported as a Serbian atrocity and draw Nato intervention to their cause? How much responsibility do we bear for this? Or indeed if soldiers in, say, Sudan, on a ‘facility’ on offer to journalists at any time by the SPLA, fire their weapons in front of our cameras at the enemy’s “front line”? If it is not really the front line, the “facts” are a fiction; if it is, what happens when shells, shot for our benefit, hit their target?

Many a correspondent assigned to Belfast has been approached by small children with the offer: “Go on, Mister, interview me. I’ll give you a soundbite.” Few political correspondents, fed a constant diet of semantic rows, synthetic “initiatives” and “launches” which are not new and conference votes which change nothing, can have remained immune to the occasional reflection that they are, in the words of one senior editor at Westminster, “conniving in our own manipulation” (3). A reflection which has become a veritable hall of mirrors as journalists absorb the implications of the Monica Lewinsky saga, snaring the twice-elected incumbent of the most powerful office in the world in an impenetrable tangle of media strategising and reporters’ connivance in the creation of “facts” for them to report.

Newsmakers, whether political big-shots with their legions of spin doctors or members of the public hungry for their fifteen minutes of fame, are basing their behaviour on calculations of what’s in it for them when the media show up. For some, a free holiday and a bit of attention is evidently a fair trade-off for marrying someone you’ve known for seven days. This was not the only couple brought together by SA-FM, and at least one guinea pig, Leif Bunyan, went on to reap further benefits, fleeing what she presented as “a nightmare marriage” then cashing in by posing nude for Playboy and selling her story to a rival network, Channel Nine.

Reporters are supposed to report the facts, but experience at the newsface shows us that facts, far from being accomplished independently before we arrive to cover them, are increasingly created for us to cover, serving an agenda far removed from quaint notions of informing the public.

There is no role as “merely observers” left - we are always already participants whether we like it or not. In Bali, these contradictions came amusingly - though not for Mr Balacco - to light. In many others, there is a growing sense of beleaguerment as established methods and techniques are stretched ever thinner in attempting to uphold whatever illusion of objectivity remains.

UPHOLDING THE ILLUSION OF OBJECTIVITY

Any intelligent reader of newspapers, listener to radio or viewer of television news will be struck, in the end, by the narrow range of views included, or at least treated seriously. Even where heterodox perspectives and opinions are treated seriously they appear as an aberration from a “norm.” Where did/do these norms come from? Is there something about news itself which predisposes it to be more receptive to certain ways of seeing the world than to others? To explanations for events which conceal the process of constructing them, a process in which news itself is deeply implicated?

Journalists are brought up to “tell it how it is”. If the story is how it is because it’s an expression or reflection of previously existing facts, then it makes intuitive sense for news to greet events in our economic lives, for example, as expressing previously existing factors like “market forces,” or in our social lives as reflecting “human nature.”

Hence the striking receptiveness of news to the rhetorical strategy of economic neo-liberalism. Management had to be “set free to manage”; consumers “freed to spend more of their own money;” the private sector, animated by the profit motive and therefore automatically more dynamic and efficient than the public, cut loose from “restrictive practices” and allowed to take over state industries and services. Anything else was “special pleading.”

Behaving as though a story expresses or reflects the facts conceals the constructedness of both the story and the facts. The notion that empowering employers, enriching better-off taxpayers and providing financial institutions with easy profits from privatisations simply allows the freer expression of “market forces,” obscures the role of these particular changes in helping to construct market forces. The suggestion that the profit motive is the only authentic expression of human nature obscures the constructedness of that particular idea of human nature.

HOW IT WORKS

At around the time SA-FM’s ill-starred trio were in Bali, their Indonesian hosts were enduring the consequences of a sharp transition, as represented by Western reporters, from “Asian economic miracle” to “Asian financial crisis.”

The Doctrine of News made it make sense to portray both as expressing or reflecting “Asian values.” On the upswing, this was taken to be a sensible reluctance to encumber hard work and self-reliance with tiresome regulations on business or a sentimental Western-style attachment to excessive democracy and decent welfare standards.

In 1993, here was the World Bank (Chief Economist, Larry Summers) in its famous report, East Asian Miracle: “In each high performing Asian economy, a technocratic elite insulated to a degree from excessive political pressure supervised macroeconomic management... All protected essentially conservative macroeconomic policies by limiting the scope for politicians and interest groups to derail those policies.”

News organisations themselves had invested heavily in business coverage of Asia as the perception spread that it was the place to invest - each feeding off the other as news’ established linear notions of causality became, instead, a feedback loop. The region’s business publications became valuable prizes, with Dow Jones purchasing Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia-Week becoming part of the Time-Warner empire, and CNN, CNBC and Star TV all setting up, with much of their programming devoted to business news.

According to one of the most important critics of this version of events, Walden Bello, these became “critical interpreters of the news in Asia to investors all over the world” (4). They “highlighted the boom, glorified the high growth rates and reported uncritically on so-called success stories, mainly because their own success was tied to the perpetuation of the psychology of boom.” In other words, the success story was one which news needed to tell, in pursuit of its own economic interest. The influence of that interest as a factor in cultivating and perpetuating “the psychology of boom” made news prefer to explain it as an “Asian economic miracle,” expressing innate “Asian values.” This was more congenial than the alternative, enquiring into how “Asian values” were being constructed, since that would bring into focus how the story was coming before (at least some of) the facts - inimical to the Doctrine of News.

Five years later, after the meltdown in former favourites such as Indonesia and Malaysia, US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (Deputy, Larry Summers) was blaming the lack of a culture of political accountability for the burnt fingers of Western investors: “There are obstacles to getting good information about economic and financial matters. One is the temptation - in the private sector and in government - to avoid disclosing problems... In many cases, lack of data meant that no-one had a true understanding of this build-up or of these economies’ vulnerabilities” (5).

This time, Summers himself suggested that an Asian tendency to “cronyism” lay “at the heart of the crisis.” Another explanation which news found so congenial as to elevate it to an orthodoxy. Why?

For journalism to have to greet the rapid replacement of boom with slump as expressing shortcomings inherent all along was embarrassing enough without considering how those shortcomings may have been constructed or perpetuated, let alone its own role in that process. Bello recalls that Dorinda Elliott of Newsweek had done more than anyone to “sanctify” the status of his own country, the Philippines, as “Asia’s newest tiger” while covering the Subic APEC summit of November 1996 - “a status that lasted less than eight months, until the collapse of the peso in July 1997.”

Neither was the embarrassment confined to news. What passed as journalism had become a matter of stringing together quotes from “experts” - presented, therefore, as disinterested, but actually analysts employed by banks, investment and brokerage houses, mutual and hedge funds, whose own positions depended on a continuing perception by their masters that all was well in Asia.

One such “expert,” Neil Saker of Singapore-based SocGen Crosby Securities, was able to “transform himself from the prophet of permanent boom to the prophet of doom,” Bello says, so he could carry on being quoted by the likes of the Economist, Far Eastern Economic Review, Financial Times, Reuters and Asian Wall Street Journal even after his earlier diagnosis proved antithetical to the truth.

Actually, given the role of Western investment institutions, egged on by the World Bank and IMF, it becomes clear that the very phrase, “Asian Financial Crisis” is a misnomer - a classic rhetorical strategy of the Doctrine of News which places an essentialist explanation for how things are squarely across any pathway of inquiry into how they come to be. (In the same way the phrase, “An Iraqi Supergun” excluded the more accurate one: “A British Supergun, sold to Iraq.”)

In the Asian case, undiscriminating inward capital flows to the region, hyped by Western or Western-owned news organisations, inflated a souffle of bank lending against soaring property values. This, along with Western speculation against fixed currencies, pegged to the US dollar as a way for Asian countries to develop economies within the Western created global system they confronted, were the very factors which fuelled the boom and also transformed downturn into collapse.

Examined for how things come to be rather than how they are, it appears, if anything, a Western Financial Crisis with Asian victims. A reflection which subsequently occurred to many in the countries concerned, as IMF ‘rescue’ packages seemed to cut government spending and send local businesses to the wall while ensuring that unwise lending by Western banks was repaid in full. This made sense because “crony capitalists” were being punished for their inherent shortcomings. The remedy in future, according to the IMF, was to remove any remaining obstacles to the free play of market forces, opening currency and capital markets to unregulated speculative flows.

OBSCURING THE WIDER CONFLICT

Slogans like “an Iraqi supergun” and “Asian Financial Crisis” tell us “how it is” but stand foursquare across any pathway of inquiry into how it comes to be. They are not the only ones. Western countries have a “deterrent”; countries they disapprove of have “weapons of mass destruction”; Palestinians are “terrorists” and Muslims “fundamentalists.” Explanations intuitively favoured by the Doctrine of News suggest that the behaviour of such folk expresses their essential nature, quite different from “ours.” In reporting conflicts, this impedes consideration of how violent acts might be socially and politically constructed, and what it would take to address and remove the grievances which perpetuate that conflict. Especially when there is a suggestion that for “them” to stop misbehaving themselves, “we” would have to change our own behaviour.

Robert Fisk of London’s Independent Newspaper is among the foremost journalistic chroniclers of what he calls “lop-sided” reporting of West Asian/Middle Eastern affairs. Arabs who kill civilians are routinely referred to as “terrorists.... But when an Israeli slaughtered 29 innocent Palestinian worshippers in a Hebron mosque, the US media called the murderer a fanatic, an extremist, or, in a new and popular word found increasingly in the American press, a zealot. Even the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin - a Jewish student - was never called a terrorist.” (6)

The same circular self-reinforcing logic which bolstered the status of “experts” on Asia’s financial prospects also operates here. Colonel Mike Dewar, a former military man later associated with the London think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, is routinely presented as a “terrorism expert,” on hand to validate distinctions between “our” actions and motivations and those of the “terrorists.”

Sky News in London invited him on as the studio guest for an audience phone-in programme, Your Call, scheduled on Monday afternoons over a few weeks in 1998. The inaugural episode was serendipitously timed just after the bombing of the two American embassies in Africa, which gave viewers a hot news topic to discuss with the studio presenter, correspondents standing by on live links from Washington and Dar es Salaam, one of the stricken capitals, as well as Col Dewar.

Manzoor from Luton in Bedfordshire, wanted to know “Why is that Americans are picked by the so-called Middle East terrorist groups?” He suggested the answer lay in the double standards which ignored injustice and suffering elsewhere: “The world is saying, this is a sad occasion and we should condemn it. But look at Kashmir. There are thousands of people being burnt alive, gang-raped, you name it, and virtually nothing has come out at all.”

Marie from Dublin was next on the line: “This was the first shot across the bows of the good ship, Multi-national.” She went on to draw attention to the role of supermarkets like Sainsburys’ and Tesco in keeping a million people in “the slums of Nairobi” by causing rivers to be diverted to produce “carrots and mange-touts” for Western consumption, making land less fertile for indigenous people and building up a legacy of grievance and resentment towards the West. Multi nationals had replaced “the crowned heads of Europe who once dangled the countries of the world at their fingertips.”

This was just after it emerged that a US plane had airlifted Americans injured in the bombings to a modern hospital in South Africa, leaving the local hospitals in Nairobi to cope as best they could with the influx of hundreds of injured Kenyans. John, a secondary school pupil watching in the Kenyan capital itself, emailed the programme to protest about Washington’s advice to US tourists to steer clear of the affected countries and to call for compensation for the effect on local livelihoods - a demand echoed by Bill from Yemen, Alan from Dundee and emailer Mark Williamson.

Mahmood from Cardiff, a doctor with 13 years’ experience, he said, working for Saudi Arabian airlines, said the Americans had only themselves to blame and that the “ordinary Saudi in the street” resented Washington’s “unnecessary interference and Big Brother attitude” - something that had crystallised since the 1991 Gulf War.

At this, Col Dewar was invited to comment on the measures which could be taken to prevent a recurrence of such attacks. In a contribution of nearly three minutes in length, he began by commenting on the “unhealthy and peculiar” reluctance by all the callers to express unalloyed sympathy with the United States as “the victim.” The solution was to “cooperate and use our muscle” to gather intelligence and strike against armed groups. “We haven’t really talked about candidates but I’m afraid we must,” he went on. Libya, Iran and Sudan were “so-called terrorist states” upon whom the finger of suspicion must rest. There needed to be “much, much, much more money” spent on sophisticated surveillance and anti-terrorism technology and expertise. There was no mention of grievances in the wider conflict arena or resentment over Washington’s policies in the Middle East.

Unlike Col Dewar, Sky News viewers, almost without exception, were prepared to understand the embassy bombings, not as an expression of essential evil but as constructed by a process which includes injustices elsewhere in the region, primarily the continuing expansionism of Israel into Arab territory, unpunished by the West, and the contrast with the treatment meted out to Iraq for its single act of expansionism into Arab territory in Kuwait. The United States as complicit in these injustices was an inevitable target for attack.

Elsewhere, Robert Fisk recounts his investigations into how America “arms Israel to the teeth” and how Caspar Weinberger, US Defense Secretary under President Reagan, called the Jewish state “America’s unsinkable battleship in the Middle East.” Nowadays Washington is more circumspect, at least in public - Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in giving news conferences on the peace process, has almost worn out the phrase, “The United States, as a mediator in the conflict...” And yet Fisk discovered, well into her term of office, that Israel had requested a shipment of 155,000 artillery shells which were supplied straight away, “no questions asked, as a routine military transfer” from Washington. On another occasion, Fisk saw shell cases from Israeli guns after an attack on civilians in Southern Lebanon with the name of the US manufacturer clearly marked.

*CALL PEOPLE AND GROUPS BY THE NAMES THEY GIVE THEMSELVES

As a minimum, first step, a new, radical practice in news would reject sloganising which reproduces binary oppositions, thereby concealing complicity in perpetuating conflicts. Instead it would insist on calling people and groups by the names they give themselves.

No-one calls himself a “terrorist;” “fundamentalist” or “extremist.” Saddam Hussein no more writes an entry in his diary, “note to self - be more tyrannical,” than officials at, say, the British Ministry of Defence remark over breakfast: “Just one more day as a running-dog of American Imperialism, dear. Then it’s the weekend.”

Does Col Dewar’s adherence to an analysis far more simplistic than that of Sky News viewers qualify him to be called a “Western Fundamentalist”? Or is British Prime Minister Tony Blair, facing down a majority in his party and his Cabinet over taxation and public spending, fit to be denounced as a “neo-liberal extremist”?

Occasionally, unease surfaces over the reproduction of acts of Symbolic Warfare in journalism. This triggers the instinct, deeply embedded in the Doctrine of News, to conceal its own complicity in events. The same bulletins which brought us news of the “Iraqi supergun” eventually began referring to a “so-called Iraqi supergun” (by whom, please, was it “so-called” before?!)

An exquisite sleight-of-hand which also crops up now journalists have begun to mistrust the approving term “reforms” as shorthand for the scorched-earth neo-liberal economic policies which have impoverished millions in the former Soviet bloc and helped to reduce the corrupt, creaking Communist order to chaos. Now it’s “so-called reforms.”

THE POWER OF BINARY OPPOSITIONS

Why is news so receptive to binary oppositions and why are they such an effective form of propaganda? Not because journalists are corrupt pawns - or even naive dupes - of the system, but because they perform an essential task for news itself. They find a ready reception in news precisely because they divert us from looking at the story and encourage us to believe we are looking through it to independently accomplished facts above, beyond or behind it - the central contention of the Doctrine of News.

In Western cultures, attentive to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, a pervasive hidden narrative is at work. Professor Johan Galtung, speaking at the 1998 Taplow Conflict and Peace Journalism Forum, described this narrative as reproducing a sense of “the ineffable two-ishness of things.”

Westerners are accustomed to dividing that world into two - Left and Right, Black and White, Heaven and Hell, Mind and Matter, the inner and outer life. The final act of the Christian drama is Armageddon - the Last Battle of Good and Evil.

So an appeal to this “two-ishness” resonates with explanations which the mainstream in Western consciousness takes for granted as common sense. A rhetorical strategy based on reproducing binary oppositions therefore puts us off our guard and reinforces the most basic underlying statement of the Doctrine of News - that a story merely expresses or reflects the facts.

By offering such deeply familiar explanations for things, it encourages us to believe we are looking through the story to a previously existing reality, not at “the story” - that shorthand term for a tangle of overlapping interests - and the process it is carrying out in selecting and framing the reality or even causing (some of) it to occur.

CAMOUFLAGING PERSPECTIVE

At the same forum, an international gathering of forty journalists, editors, programme-makers and analysts carried out a close textual analysis of coverage, by the Times and Sunday Times of London of the entire African embassy bombing episode of 1998, from reports of the initial blasts in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam to the American missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan.

It proved a case study in time-honoured techniques of the Doctrine of News, which have the effect of camouflaging favoured perspectives and making them seem, not perspectives active in selecting and framing reality but common sense expressions of previously accomplished fact.

“Revealed,” the Sunday Times intoned. “Arab terror chief’s London network.” The centrepiece of this account was a claim, sourced to the terror chief’s “former bagman” Sidi Tayyib, now languishing in a Saudi jail, that transfers had taken place from bank accounts held in Pakistan and Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden, Washington’s chief suspect, to accounts in Britain. The claim had been “confirmed by Western security sources,” the paper said - casting them in the now familiar role of “experts,” a characterisation which automatically excludes consideration of the complicity of Western powers in the wider conflict which, in turn, constructs the conditions for bombings such as those now blamed on bin Laden.

Tayyib was “said to have” come up with this information; bin Laden was “thought to have” established London connections while studying there for an engineering degree. He was now “believed to be” worth up to £150m. The Times, later that week, reported that two suspects in the embassy bombings had been flown to New York for trial. One, Muhammad Sadiq Howaida, had, according to the report, “confessed” to authorities holding him in Pakistan and was now being held in Kenya. (Evidence obtained under interrogation in these countries, viewed as automatically suspect by many London newsrooms when either Britons or internal dissidents are questioned, now apparently proved reliable.) Howaida was “described as” being the man who oversaw the making of the bomb which detonated with such devastating effect in Nairobi.

By never specifying who says, thinks, describes or believes, these weasel phrases carry a built-in interpretation that the story is merely reflecting or expressing a previously existing reality. The effect is to suggest that events have been definitively characterised for us - read for us - by some anterior, unquestionable, validating authority. There is only one permitted construction of events, made by this rhetorical strategy to seem natural and obvious. This in turn diverts attention from the constructedness of the story itself in selecting and framing facts to present to us.

The same analysis noticed that, after sufficient repetiton of unattributed speculation, it tended to elide into statements of fact. Bin Laden was “a terror chief” - the Sunday Times. “America has struck at terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan” - the verbatim opening line of the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News which neatly begged the most important question. These techniques organise all subsequent binary oppositions into subdivisions of the most important one - the ‘Other’ and the ‘Self.’ They apply a readymade framework of understanding to subsequent events, simultaneously concealing the constructedness of that framework by camouflaging ‘Our’ perspective.

THE THREAT

The most powerful and anchoring binary opposition is one of identity and alterity. The “Other” is that which not only excludes and defines, but actually threatens, the “Self.” The Doctrine of News is receptive to this tactic since it reinforces the deep sense of “two-ishness” which helps to obscure constructedness. Rather than camouflaging perspective behind rhetorical techniques like the unattributed speculative phrase, a new, radical practice in news could set out to equip the audience to interrogate the perspective from which the threat is suggested, thus focussing on the constructedness of the binary oppositions, above all by seeking traces and origins of the “Other” in the “Self.”

Of all Western rhetoric over the Iraq weapons inspection crisis, the most important is that which builds this sense of a threat - that we could, somehow, be menaced at any time in our beds by “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Hence, in January 1998, UN Chief Weapons Inspector Richard Butler told a conference of American Jewish organisations that Iraq possessed “enough anthrax or botulin toxin to blow away Tel Aviv” (7), while failing to mention that Israel possesses more than enough nuclear weaponry to blow away Baghdad many times over, and has made it abundantly clear it would use them in response to any biological attack.

In London, during the same phase of the crisis, Downing Street Press Secretary Alastair Campbell, growing worried about the difficulty of convincing the public of the need for violent intervention, ordered civil servants to prepare diagrams to hand out to correspondents, superimposing Saddam Hussein’s “Presidential Palaces” over maps of British cities such as Birmingham and Edinburgh. In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard said: “There can be no doubt that allowing Iraq to flout its obligations will increase the risks for the rest of the world including Austraralia” (8).

These suggestions were prepared for release to correspondents conveniently standing by in Washington, Westminster and Canberra respectively. In response, the Sydney Morning Herald adorned, with the logo of the Australian SAS, a special front page with a picture of Mr Howard, “phoning President Clinton to offer Australia’s support” as its main feature. A note of scepticism supervened, however, when the PM was interviewed later that day by public broadcaster ABC, on its afternoon radio current affairs show. Asked how exactly Iraq’s stocks of biological and chemical weapons affected Australia, Mr Howard replied to the effect that, if there was something in the nature of these weapons that prevented them from crossing national boundaries, then he might view the situation differently. As it was, the opposite was the case, and such arms could, indeed, be deployed from the air.

The means which “intelligence sources” had identified, during the first phase of the crisis months earlier, as carrying the airborne threat was the now infamous “drone aircraft” which even obviated the need for a pilot to disperse the deadly spores or bacteria. This supposed “threat” is fully discussed in The Peace Journalism Option, the precursor to the present account (9), but suffice it to say here that, after fairly rudimentary enquiries, it turned out that the particular aircraft mentioned, adapted from a Polish crop-sprayer, would need to stop for refuelling at least twenty times en route from Baghdad before it reached Sydney. (And - of the countries within the true range of the drone or indeed of Iraq’s other known delivery system, Scud missiles - Iran, actual victim of Iraqi chemical weapons during the 1980s Gulf War, led calls for restraint by Washington throughout. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia swung from downright unenthusiastic to merely lukewarm; Israel refused to be drawn.)

None of which stopped the same paper, the Herald, from returning to the theme months later, in December 1998, as Operation Desert Fox was underway. Under a headline, “Missing Element that Could Destroy Sydney,” the paper said: “There are two tonnes of missing [growth] media - enough to make up to 20,000 litres of weapons-grade anthrax. This represents enough bacteria to kill all the people of a large city like Sydney” (10).

In London, a flurry of headlines in response to Campbell’s briefings was exemplified by the Express, which appointed itself the most bellicose on the newsstand throughout the affair. Just as, months before, it brought us the front page headline, “We’re Ready For War,” it now excitedly served up the banner: “Enough to Kill Off The World - Scale of Saddam’s Deadly Stockpile Revealed.” The paper continued: “Saddam Hussein has built up enough weapons to wipe out the world’s population, it was revealed yesterday. Intelligence experts believe the Iraqi leader has been stockpiling nerve gas despite seven years of inspections by the UN.” Closer inspection of reports on inside pages revealed, however, that even our old friend Colonel Mike Dewar believed “Saddam does not have the means to spread chemical weapons” (11).

*FOR THE “OTHER,” LOOK IN THE “SELF”

In the same phase of the crisis, in early 1998, Bill Clinton was pressed over how a country rapidly being reduced to third-world status by UN sanctions could pose an authentic threat to the world’s only superpower. The President pointed to the Aum Shinrikyo Sarin Gas incident which, in 1995, had come perilously close to killing thousands of commuters on the Tokyo Underground system.

There is, of course, one significant problem with this analogy. Sure, it points up how nasty chemical weapons can be in small quantities. But, far from being menaced by evil Iraqis, our friends the Japanese were, on this occasion, being menaced by their fellow Japanese. Likewise, a very useful episode of the Analysis programme on BBC Radio was broadcast shortly after Clinton’s remarks. Programme-makers found that, of 200-odd incidents on FBI files where chemical or biological weapons were either detected or suspected, those investigated for links with them were all Americans.

As with the Oklahoma bombing, a week after the Tokyo attack, where calls to identify and punish the state responsible were stopped in their tracks when it emerged that the state in question was not in the Middle East but the Mid-West, the “Other” visibly surfaces as residing within the “Self.”

One UN weapons inspector, Rod Barton, told the Sydney Morning Herald that Iraq had loaded biological warheads on to Scud missiles to use “as a last resort” against Israel or Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War - the threat to Tel Aviv which his boss Richard Butler mentioned to US Jewish leaders. How many American and British missile attacks are necessary to push Iraq to “the last resort?” Would this be made more or less likely by continuing with UN sanctions, chief authors - Britain and the US?

And if the pounding with missiles and the sanctions do not offer a clear strategy for either unseating Saddam Hussein or persuading Iraq to stop developing “weapons of mass destruction,” what are they for? If “the last resort” arrives and biological weapons are used, where will this atrocity have originated - in Saddam’s alterity, his deepseated evil nature of which this is merely an expression, or in the actions of the Americans and British - the “Self”?

This series of questions would certainly be considered in trying to assess the impact of violence on structure and culture, in terms of relations with and between the countries inflicting and sustaining the violence, and indeed beyond to new conflict arenas like African countries with US embassies, and the Yemen. (There, the kidnapping of a group of Westerners ended in a fatal shoot-out over Christmas1998. According to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, “bearded terrorist Abu Hassan and his evil associates” were caught plotting to blow up Western targets “as revenge for the pre-Christmas air strikes against Iraq” (12).)

In the demonisation of Osama bin Laden, meanwhile, the distinctions of identity and alterity became more difficult to sustain when a British engineer who had worked at the stricken Khartoum factory came forward to say it could not possibly have performed any military function, not least because of the low level of security he saw there. Despite claims in Washington and London to have “strong and compelling” evidence, none was given publicly, though Pentagon and intelligence sources nuanced their briefings to the effect that the plant was producing, not “chemical weapons” but “precursors,” disguised by the production of medicines under the same roof.

At this, a Professor of Organic Chemistry at Oxford University wrote to London’s Independent newspaper pointing out this could mean virtually anything. A moment’s scrutiny of the list of goods banned for export to Iraq by the UN supports this suggestion. Intended to prevent Baghdad using them to develop “weapons of mass destruction,” they include dishes and doorknobs, napkins and notebooks as well as medical gear such as ambulances and thermometers. This remains as the logic distinguishing “terrorist” embassy bombings from missile strikes which destroyed a factory producing a high proportion of available medical supplies in a grindingly poor African country.

Among the other distinctions in the Times coverage which offered to betray themselves under pressure - the story sometimes appeared as driving the occurrence of the facts. Osama bin Laden’s name first cropped up “before formal investigations began.” There was concern, after a number of arrests in Dar es Salaam, that “a routine round-up of nationals of countries traditionally associated with Islamic fundamentalism” had taken place.

*WHO IS THE “SELF” ANYWAY? FLESH OUT THE SENSE OF IDENTITY BY CONSTRUCTING IT FROM MANY PERSPECTIVES, NOT LIMITED TO POLITICIANS OR MILITARY/ STRATEGIC EXPERTS

A new, radical practice in news would seek to interrogate the perspective inscribed in definitions of the “Self,” with its underlying binary opposition between civilised “us” and barbarous “them.” Perhaps even by consulting and interviewing “experts” like Dennis Halliday, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq who resigned, in 1998, pronouncing himself appalled at witnessing “the destruction of an entire society” and “four to five thousand children dying each month due to sanctions.” Is this civilised or barbarous? Who, indeed, is qualified to comment on the wisdom of such a policy, or of further violent options to resolve the conflict? Put it another way - who is not qualified, if the issue is removing a “threat” which could menace all of us in our beds?

As the planes started flying in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the BBC pulled War Films from its schedule because, despite being set in other conflicts, “they might cause offence” to the families of air crews. But what is a more appropriate time to screen them, particularly features in the strong British tradition (Oh What a Lovely War, Bridge on the River Kwai) which raise serious and enduring questions about war, its purpose and the way it is conducted? Why should the body of insight and opinion about war represented by, say, art and literature not be consulted as well, given that the issues at hand affect the whole of society? What makes teachers and trade unionists unqualified to be heard from on such occasions? Is the “Self” to be taken, in news and at the most important times of crisis, as a monochrome entity consisting entirely of military, strategic and political “experts”?

BEYOND THE DOCTRINE OF NEWS

To recap - participants in stories alter their behaviour to provide facts for journalists to report. The deployment of news resources always already conditions the occurrence, emergence, selection and presentation of those facts. The reproduction of hidden narratives resting on binary oppositions makes journalism receptive to propaganda, especially as time-honoured rhetorical techniques, central to the Doctrine of News itself, have the effect of camouflaging perspective. The illusion of objectivity is over - it is time for journalism to take responsibility for its influence on events. How would news discharge that responsibility, while remaining news?

“Just reporting the facts” amounts to an undeclared theory of journalism which no longer fits the evidence about how it actually works. The Peace Journalism Option elaborated on a suggestion by Professor Galtung that constructing binary oppositions in reporting conflicts, “mapping a conflict as a zero-sum game between two parties,” was the chief symptom of a condition he diagnosed as War Journalism. (His original table, setting out the tasks of War Journalism and those of Peace Journalism, is given as an appendix to that volume.)

The significance of the Peace Journalism Option is as a “work of the break.” This was that rarity - a systematic attempt to offer suggestions for journalistic practice based on an avowedly theorised approach, in a discipline fiercely resistant to acknowledging its own theory. (Neslihan Ozgunes and Georgios Terzis, in Chapter 4, Part 2, analyse the way reporting of the Greece/Turkey conflict internalises and perpetuates Symbolic Warfare, and suggest ways, inspired by the Peace Journalism Option, for reporters to take responsibility for helping to transform the conflict.)

War journalism focusses on violence as its own cause - explained as expressing atavistic urges. At the BBC some years ago, there was a certain Middle East Correspondent whose reports, according to wags in the London newsroom, could be aired with the same informative content and much less running time expended, by reducing them to a simple formula: “Arabs and Jews hate each other’s guts. They always have. They always will. [Correspondent’s name], BBC News, in the Middle East.” In advocating a focus on the underlying causes of violence, peace journalism does not seek excuses for it, but to replace this species of explanation, as the expression of innate and unalterable enmities, with a mission to identify and commentate upon processes which perpetuate the culture of violence.

In place of “strategic” assessments of military options, as proffered when violence is on the agenda by the likes of former army “experts” in the world’s television studios, peace journalism urges a consideration of the likely damage to structure and culture if violence is adopted as a means of settling disputes. Invariably this means evaluating the long term deterioration of relations and taking this into account when judging whether violence is a wise course. How far does the incipient cold war with the Islamic world have to go before we reach a new view on the wisdom of Operation Desert Storm in 1991? How might it affect our assessment of follow-ups like Operation Desert Fox in 1998?

Perhaps the most important recommendation of the Peace Journalism Option, and certainly the most resonant for this broader discussion of today’s newsgathering milieu and its special demands, is to develop techniques for outflanking the client relationship of news with the Official Sources industry.

REAL POLITICAL REPORTING

Political reporting must be political reporting because it’s reporting, and it’s about politicians. Correct? not really. As synthetic controversies rage in Washington, Westminster and the rest, electors are living through a period of change which manifests itself in daily battles with profound implications for how they live their lives. One such battle, over several hundred jobs at a Japanese-owned electronics factory in the constituency of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, brought him to speak to a lunchtime meeting of workers. He told them: “I can’t change the way the market works”; logic they had heard years earlier from then Conservative Premier Margaret Thatcher who declared: “You can’t buck the markets.” Presto - at a stroke, the chief concern in the daily lives of millions, in a world of increased insecurity in the workplace, had dropped out of the range of official politics. With a fresh approach, political reporting could connect with prospects for changing the outcome of these battles and, if necessary, itself dramatise their entry into the discourse of ‘official’ politics. How would it do this?

An editorial policy of all the Monica, all the time failed to halt the exodus of what US TV executives learned, in the early 1990s, to call “the vanished” - the masses who have simply stopped watching network news services. Twenty years ago, eighty percent of Americans passed part of their evenings in the company of ABC, CBS or NBC newsreaders - now, it’s forty percent. By late 1998 the Newslab of New York’s Columbia School of Journalism had detected the start of a drop in audiences for local news, hitherto seemingly immune.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s approval ratings remained utterly impervious to the nightly predictions of his impending doom - one correspondent, ABC’s Sam Donaldson, going so far as to predict: “Mr Clinton, if he’s not telling the truth, and the evidence shows that, will resign, perhaps this week.” This was in January 1998.

Perhaps if anyone had tried to impeach the President for failing to push through a system of public health care or for cutting welfare to the poor - or, especially, for failing to insulate Americans against the doctrines of neo-liberalism which have brought job insecurity and wage stagnation, neglecting to regulate business at home or world currency and capital flows, it might have struck more of a chord with his electorate.

If the 87% of Americans who favour nuclear disarmament realised that, during Mr Clinton’s incumbency, the US had embarked on a hi-tech nuclear rearmament programme, they might have switched their evening news back on. Maybe an audience who couldn’t care less about their Commander-in-Chief’s marriage vows would find him more culpable for causing their country to violate both the spirit and the letter of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty she signed just three years ago. Instead the affair has provided the strongest evidence of the growing gap between mainstream political discourse, exchanged by Official Information Sources and bureaucratised news, and audience perceptions of the forces at work in shaping their own lives - what Americans have learned to call “the disconnect.”

PUBLIC SERVICE

In Britain, this led to a palpable disquiet among TV executives which came to a head when viewing figures nosedived during coverage of the 1997 General Election, and was voiced with characteristic cogency and eloquence by Tim Gardam. A former editor of the BBC’s flagships, Panorama and Newsnight, Gardam was, at that time, head of news and current affairs for the fledgling Channel Five, and, at the time of writing, in charge of revitalising Channel Four’s factual output.

The findings of studies he commissioned while setting up the new channel could not fail to disturb a senior programme-maker steeped in the BBC’s public service tradition: “The public now see journalists as part of an insider class, handing information down about a self important world,” he declared. Journalists risked “making the preoccupations of the powerful seem remote” to an audience whose interest was particularly difficult to engage in anything resembling politics (14).

Could the pervasive unease engendered by such findings begin to unravel the logic identified by Noam Chomsky, originator and chief proponent of the Propaganda Model of news, which he believes leads to orthodoxies being internalised by individual journalists: “Conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs..?” (15). There is now an increasingly obtrusive tension between conformity, which is boring and loses readers and viewers, and dissidence, which may prove more exciting but requires new techniques and approaches to bring into news as anything more than an occasional novelty.

This tension constantly crops up in frontline reporting experience, seldom more poignantly than at the Luxembourg Summit meeting of European Heads of Government, in December 1997. In covering the event for Sky News, along with colleagues from other services, I laboured to decode the arcania of Euro-summitry into terms accessible for a lay audience. A task even more difficult than is customary on these occasions, since the central question, for the first couple of days at least, concerned the establishment of a Euro-X committee to oversee a nebulous bundle of matters relating to operations of the European Single Currency.

The stage was set for a suitably low-key conclusion to an unusually opaque and baffling Summit, when suddenly, at the closing Presidency Press Conference given by the Luxembourg hosts, pandemonium broke out in front of the continent’s TV cameras. A small knot of demonstrators, who had succeeded in infiltrating the news conference, marched to the front and unfurled a large banner. One started to read a prepared statement, protesting against developments at the meeting which had taken place, up to then, entirely in secret. In an unheralded session between officials, the EU had taken a further step towards endorsing a Multilateral Agreement on Investment proposed by the World Trade Organisation.

The demonstrators were bundled away, with the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg Prime Minister, ringing in their ears: “You get yourself elected, then you can come and speak here.” This, in a nutshell, is the rationale for the official-sources, bureaucratised version of political news - that change, if it is necessary and desirable, will inevitably be reflected or expressed in the measures taken by elected occupants of official decision-making structures.

The problem, M Juncker, comes when you and your colleagues fail to address issues of genuine concern to the electorate. If the prospects for significant change are no longer visibly located within those structures, then is it surprising when audiences grow weary of the “grey-suits” news agenda?

WHAT IS NEWSWORTHY ANYWAY?

Why should the Multilateral Agreement on Investment be considered more newsworthy than the EU setting up a Euro-X Committee? An indigestible mouthful of polysyllables, the MAI is (intended to be?) an unpromising starting point for creating accessible news reports on matters of genuine importance.

As a story, the Euro-X committee had kindling of its own for the Union’s slow-burning debate over how to insert some form of democratic checks and balances into the “Bankers’ Europe” which has taken shape since the monetarist Maastricht agreement preparing the ground for Euro. But so far as the coverage was concerned, this was doused by the deluge of verbiage generated once the issue became a snub to Britain, disqualified from Euro-X membership because of its decision not to join the first wave of the currency. In any case, this was a mere brushfire compared with the roaring blaze of controls kept sedulously out of sight round the corner - the MAI.

This was an attempt to roll back all legal barriers to foreign investment everywhere. Renato Ruggiero, President of the WTO and architect of the proposed agreement, once said: “We are writing the constitution of the single global economy.” Every step in doing so has been accompanied by the familiar neo-liberal rhetoric about liberating value and freeing managements to manage. Under such an agreement, public health and environmental protection, safeguards for trade union rights, health and safety at work legislation, state subsidy and protection for national and local industries would all be construed as barriers to investment.

Any nation tempted to erect such barriers would be liable for a flurry of multimillion dollar law suits, with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) the blueprint. In the most infamous of many cases, in July 1998, the Government of Canada settled a NAFTA claim brought by the Ethyl Corporation of America, the company which gave the world leaded petrol. Ottawa had imposed a ban on a fuel additive called MMT, manufactured solely by Ethyl. MMT, which makes engines run more quietly, contains manganese, a neurotoxin responsible for symptoms including attention deficit and memory loss in children.

Under NAFTA, the Ethyl Corporation said it had been mistreated, so a three-member arbitration panel of law professors and trade lawyers, who rule on NAFTA disputes, were obliged to examine the claim.

The panel’s discussions are held behind closed doors, its decision is final and not subject to appeal, and its records are not disclosed.

The Canadian government, realising its chances of winning were nil, decided to settle with Ethyl for $13 million, allowed them to resume sales and announced that “MMT poses no health risk.”

Why should this be considered newsworthy? As editors are increasingly driven to consider how they can serve up news with sufficiently obvious relevancy to keep their viewers awake, definitions of “significant change,” as the very touchstone of news, have been formulated, where before they could be left unspoken to seep through the walls of the morning planning meeting and out on to the road.

One of these, the mantra of ABC executive Av Westin during the “vanishing” years of the early 1990s, as network viewing figures plummeted, posed three key criteria of newsworthiness:

1. 1. Is my world safe?
2. 2. Are my city and home safe?
3. 3. If my spouse, children and loved ones are safe, what happened in the past 24 hours to shock them, amuse them or make them better off?

This has been correctly greeted, by Danny Schechter, as a highly conservative theory of journalism: “These questions frame their own responses and produce television that is titillating but ultimately pacifying, even numbing” (16). Notice, though, that even on this definition, the example given above, from the NAFTA catalogue of horrors, would be newsworthy - if stockpiles of biological weapons held in Iraq can menace Americans in their beds, then pollutants entering the air or water systems of their own continent should hit the right buttons, as should the prospect of global governance on the same principles via the MAI.

NEWS RECAPITULATES POLITICS

Journalism, made restless by evidence that its intimacy with the Official Sources Industry might be turning off its audiences, is now recapitulating debates which raged within the dominant arm of that industry - institutional politics - a generation ago. Again, the central crisis is one of representation - in one case, of the world to the public, and in the other, of the public to the world. How might it be resolved? Now, the priority is to restore relevancy and viewer appeal; then, it was “participation.”

Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, two economics journalists on London’s Guardian, recall an attack on “participation” by Colin Welch in the right-wing Spectator magazine: “...many people find participation a frightful bore and would rather cultivate their own gardens than argue ceaselessly with hordes of busybodies. He [David Owen, former Labour Foreign Secretary and, later, a leading figure in the Social Democratic Party] favours participation for our own good... But democratic participation is not freedom; nor can eager participators alone be regarded as wholly human. Gardeners are human too” (17).

Elliott and Atkinson identify this as a sign of the times. In 1982, when Welch was writing, the hegemonic project of neo-liberalism was in the ascendant. “In this view,” they comment, “the only true form of participation was the restoration of the individual as the fundamental decision-making unit.”

After a further seventeen years of changes carried out in the name of restoring individuals to a position of decision-making primacy, it would be altogether more difficult to argue that gardening could be counterposed to “participation.” As the NAFTA case suggests, a Multilateral Agreement on Investment might bear precisely upon the wellbeing of the gardener - by entering the air we breathe, the water we drink and use to cultivate our vegetables, and the view over our back fence. Do we see open fields, preserved by planning regulations, or woodland, protected by environmental legislation; do we hear birdsong? Or is there a new housing estate and the incessant growl of traffic from roads built by developers, “freed” to exploit greenfield sites as public transport declines and inner-city housing rots?

Questions such as these have shaped the philosophy of participants in actions aimed at changing the existing order - Think Global, Act Local. The Luxembourg demonstrators were acting in solidarity with thousands more, developing their own opposition to the neo-liberal hegemony and increasingly in evidence at every multinational forum. Correspondents, meanwhile, stick to official discussions which omit or, as at Luxembourg, exclude and obscure the really significant business going on behind the scenes.

For journalism to avert its gaze, even for some of the time, from the official agenda and engage with this discourse, might prove more effective in bringing audiences where the prospects for significant change are located, in areas like the safety of their homes, their cities and even their gardens. Learning from the alternative media, discussed by Paul O’Connor in Chapter 5, Part 2, it would represent a start in formulating a radical newsgathering practice which would make change more thinkable, not only by carrying images of those trying to bring it about, but also by transgressing a binary opposition which is among those most deeply embedded into the Doctrine of News.

THE SPHERE OF DEVIANCY

In newsgathering, what is the boundary between the “legitimate” and the “deviant”? By treating political action originating outside the normal sphere of “legitimate controversy” - the charmed circle of the Official Sources Industry - as raising important, serious political issues, a radical practice in news can simultaneously rehabilitate the “deviant” and interrogate the “legitimate.” Form thus coincides felicitously with content - unravelling familiar binary oppositions has the effect of focussing audience attention on the constructedness of the story, thereby raising the possibility of constructing it differently. If the story can be constructed differently then so can “the facts.”

Brighton, British public holiday weekend, August, 1996. The story, on a notoriously slow day with 24 hours of news to fill - what draws the crowds to the English seaside? Colourful package and live interview on the beach required.

Approaching the town, another hardy perennial of holiday bulletins cropped up - the traffic, which had slowed to a standstill by the last couple of miles before the sea front: the handiwork, as it turned out, of a sit-down protest on the main coast road by a group, then in its infancy, called Reclaim the Streets. Stopping to catch some pictures of the march through Brighton which the group carried out to bring their message to the townsfolk, there was talk of arrests having been made, and the inkling that a soft assignment might be starting to harden up.

Rounding a corner, demonstrators were dispersing down a side street with police bringing up the rear, shepherding them away from the congested town centre. Then, suddenly, momentum ceased as a police snatch squad emerged from behind the line to target individual protestors for arrest. Suddenly the peaceable aftermath of the action was transformed, before our camera, into a chaotic scene of officers skirmishing with demonstrators.

An offer to the newsdesk to do a quick turnaround of this story, backed by visual evidence of questionable police tactics and amid reports from the scene of earlier arrests running into the dozens, at first met an enthusiastic response. Then, back at the truck, came the call. The producer of the day was “not keen” on the idea - because, after all, the demonstrators were “just a bunch of hippies.” We would run some of the pictures, and revert to plan A, the live broadcast on the beach.

A CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT = A CHANGE ON THE GROUND?

A year later. August Holiday weekend, 1997. John Prescott, British Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Transport, dominates the airwaves as he launches his department’s review of the options for reform, leading every bulletin and hogging newspaper headlines. The aim - to lessen the dependence on the private car and reclaim the streets for pedestrians, cyclists and users of public transport.

At the time of the Brighton demonstration, Labour’s official policy was to strike at one of the root causes of the local traffic problem - the inadequacy of rail services. Producing a politics show for Tyne Tees Television, I watched from the balcony as Tony Blair promised his party’s Brighton conference in 1995 that under Labour, Britain would have a “publicly owned, publicly accountable railway system.” At that time it was still Mr Blair’s policy to re-regulate local bus services, so private operators, whose vehicles choke the thoroughfares of central Brighton and popular routes through many other towns and cities, deserting outlying areas outside peak hours, would have to provide a more socially responsible service.

By the election, the promise on buses had gone as an unacceptable abrogation of management’s freedom to manage and the expression of market forces. The main casualty before polling day was the vision to restore public railway ownership, spiked by sticking to neo-liberal policies of sound money and bearing down on public spending, inherited from the outgoing Conservatives. But the commitment to improve accountability still remained. Labour won its target seats on the South Coast, including one in Brighton, as commuters looked forward to a time - hopefully soon - when the private companies running their trains, at least, would have to improve services and respond to public need.

Fast forward again, to the British Holiday weekend, August, 1998. London’s Guardian newspaper led its front page with a story headlined, “Blair halts transport reforms,” juxtaposed, in a flash of sardonic humour from the chief sub’s desk, with a large picture of racing driver Damon Hill celebrating his first Grand Prix win for nearly two years (18).

According to this story, “The Prime Minister has wrecked John Prescott’s much-vaunted transport strategy by ruling out legislation to tackle Britain’s mounting road and rail problems in the next parliamentary session... There will be no action on his transport white paper for at least a year, and no guarantee of legislation in the 1999 2000 session.”

The decision meant that “Mr Prescott will have to deal with an increasingly fraught situation on the railways, without tougher regulation to control the private-monopoly rail track and train operating companies.” Voters in Brighton, struggling up to London on the “misery line” would, it seemed, have to wait for improvements.

(Actually, there was a White Paper, which sneaked out with altogether less trumpery at the end of 1998. In place of re-regulating buses there was talk of voluntary “partnerships” and no clear plan for tough new regulation on the railways. What radical initiatives it did contain for public transport were, according to one authoritative academic analysis, “not supported with the substantial increase in capital investment which is needed to improve its quality and quantity sufficiently to attract many car users to switch modes.”

This was because “the White paper itself was delayed while more radical policies [to raise revenue] were deleted in fear of a political backlash from car-owning voters” (19). An investigation by the London Observer newspaper some weeks before the draft legislation was published found that one such idea, to tax carparking spaces at out-of town shopping centres, had been dropped after expensive lobbyists, hired by the supermarket giant, Tesco, gained access to advisers inside 10 Downing Street to argue against them. Spared the trouble of campaigning, as advocates of measures to revive public transport had done over many lean years, it seemed that powerful interests could still pull the levers of change if they knew where to buy the right contacts.)

WHAT IS NEWSWORTHY ANYWAY? PART 2

To recap - news is about change, and in Brighton the only actual change which had so far come about, in terms of reclaiming the streets from the private car and creating space for pedestrians, was when demonstrators stopped the traffic two years previously. It was only for an afternoon, but it happened, albeit with a lot less than the fanfare of coverage greeting each government transport “initiative,” “launch” or “relaunch.”

By the middle of 1998, when the Reclaim the Streets movement had grown in importance and organised a dramatic day of action in London, it did gain more - and more serious - coverage by news organisations, including Sky. Activists this time circulated national newsrooms with a press release, containing a sophisticated critique of the innate contradictions of neo-liberalism, perhaps as palpable on Britain’s overcrowded roads as anywhere, as Mrs Thatcher’s “great car economy” became increasingly gridlocked. The release said: “The people of London, especially children and those on low incomes, have had enough of appalling air quality and deteriorating public transport (not to mention education and health care.) The struggle for clean air in London is the same as the struggle for social justice everywhere, so when we close the street to traffic on June 6th, we will also be closing it to the theft of our communities, our planet and ourselves by globalising multinational companies and governments. We will be opening up the street to the forces of play, laughter and life. The car is a symbol of the way our obsession with commerce and profit has stolen our freedom, poisoning both our lungs and our futures.”

The preparedness by these activists to draw such connections, and to address themselves to serious issues of widespread concern - concern proving, by then, frustratingly difficult to see being met by real action for change at government level - had effectively broken down a barrier of perception which has underpinned, and been sustained by, the bureaucratised news values of mainstream news organisations.

Contained in the output editor’s dismissal of the 1996 action - “just a bunch of hippies” - is a key binary opposition between official and unofficial information sources. Daniel C Hallin, in The “Uncensored War”, a famous study of reporting from Vietnam, puts it slightly differently: the world of the journalist is divided into three concentric spheres. At the centre, the “sphere of consensus” contains shibboleths which are not worth questioning since they are taken as “givens”. The next, where journalistic endeavour takes place, is the “sphere of legitimate controversy” - containing disagreement within certain bounds, set by the extent of change approved of within bodies and institutions established as legitimate. Outside this lies the “sphere of deviancy,” where “people and issues deemed unworthy of serious consideration reside” (20). When the bounds of zone two contract, as under the neo-liberal hegemony, then journalistic endeavour either contracts with them - the process which has helped to plunge the Doctrine of News into crisis - or moves instead into zone three.

TECHNIQUES FOR COVERING GRASSROOTS ACTIONS

To cover political actions by grassroots activists as a set of colourful pictures of strange people doing whacky things would be to reduce them to “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” and to leave Hallin’s structure in place. To gain the full transgressive effect, journalists need new newsgathering and writing techniques. There are many reporters experimenting with their own versions of these. The following account concerns episodes involving the present author which highlight some of the demands, and the potential for creating news which makes it more thinkable for members of the audience, if they so wish, to contemplate taking their own actions to bring about significant change.

Reclaim the Streets activists gathered on a tiny patch of parkland next to a major junction outside Brixton town hall, closely watched by a large detachment of police. These officers, however, were powerless to act as two venerable old cars drew up to the traffic lights, alongside each other in the lanes to go straight on. As the lights turned to green, these two suddenly headed on a diagonal, crashing into each other at the front corner of each vehicle and effectively blocking the two lanes. The drivers immediately leapt out, snatching the keys, and disappeared into the crowd. From the opposite direction, someone lobbed a bright orange smoke bomb to cause more confusion as the mass of people swarmed into the traffic-free space suddenly created in front of the two cars. Vans were driven into this space from side streets, the panels let down to reveal sound systems, and a party ensued.

Shortly afterwards, Brixton High Street was filled with families holding children’s parties using sand unloaded from wheelbarrows, intense young activists pedalling exercise bicycles attached by electrodes to power amplification equipment, people in fancy dress and generally having a good time.

*SEEK POINTS WHERE LEGITIMATE AND DEVIANT AGENDAS OVERLAP

It was important, however, not to squander the opportunity this presented, to challenge the Doctrine of News, by reducing the occasion to one of mere spectacle. The first segment of commentary in the piece drew attention to the fact that the activists’ agenda overlapped substantially with the aspirations expressed in public by government ministers at the countless launches and relaunches, reviews and consultations, which had dominated media strategy in the Department of Transport since Labour took office more than a year earlier. Unlike on those occasions, here was something actually changing, albeit, in one sense, only for an afternoon. Which was more newsworthy?

Almost a year earlier, for the funeral procession of Diana, Princess of Wales, The Mall, a broad and busy road in front of Buckingham Palace, was closed to traffic. Strategically placed TV cameras had provided a memorable panoramic view as people dispersed up, down and across the Mall, and neighbouring St James’s Park, after the cortege had passed by. The point made by several commentators was that such scenes were last visible in Victorian times, when The Mall was still used for its original purpose, as a pedestrian thoroughfare for pleasant strolls. It had led to talk - though, again, no more than talk - about possible Government initiatives to pedestrianise this area of central London permanently, as a fitting memorial to the Princess.

Explaining this in the piece not only provided an opportunity to use some interesting and memorable library pictures, but also reached into the very heart of officially sanctioned imagery - approving of Princess Diana and public sentiment as expressed at her funeral is located firmly in Hallin’s sphere of consensus. Linking this with the Reclaim the Streets action thus transgressed another boundary - the idea that it would be good to create more space in the inner city for pedestrians and families was something that linked the Brixton demonstrators, Government ministers and the received meaning of Princess Diana’s funeral, something independent broadcast news provider ITN described as “the most significant event of the late twentieth century” (21).

*SEEK OUT POINTS WHERE THE DEVIANT ACTION ELUDES OFFICIAL STRUCTURES AND DISCOURSES INTENDED TO PATROL BOUNDARIES

At Brixton, the occasion was notable for its good humour. The prevailing priorities for policing in the area, set by an enlightened chief officer at the local station in dialogue with representatives enjoying substantial trust among the local community, stress cooperation, common sense and restraint - making SW2 perhaps the last place in London, at least by mid-1998, where officers would be likely to wade in and make unnecessary arrests. Quite a contrast with Brighton, 1996, and one to which my coverage drew due attention. I also observed, in an in-vision stand-up, that it would be difficult to justify arrests since very difficult to establish that any offence had occurred. This piece-to camera explained that such an action was very difficult to categorise, drawing on the ideas, in one sense, of the mainstream and the tactics of the radical fringe, falling between the civil and criminal law.

Groups like Reclaim the Streets have developed highly sophisticated tactics to resist the notion, traditionally relied on by police, of “ringleaders.” By being loosely or surreptitiously organised, they do not expose individuals to arrest under Britain’s Draconian public order legislation. Another key tactic for the reporter intent on moving beyond the Doctrine of News is to discuss these issues - the tactics - with the protagonists on air, and, most importantly, how they themselves expect more lasting change to become more likely as a result of their action - the strategy behind it. Doing so explicitly challenges the notion, deeply embedded in the values, practices, rhetorical strategies and the very economic structure of mainstream news - that change as initiated from the grassroots is neither possible nor desirable.

BEYOND VICTIMS AND VOX-POPS

To reinforce the boundary between the legitimate and the deviant, the Doctrine of News allots two roles for speakers outside the charmed circle of Official Sources - “victims” and “vox pops.” This creates a framework of understanding in which it makes sense to ask them “how do you feel?” but never “what do you think?” By using specific techniques to transgress this boundary, a radical newsgathering and reporting practice can create its own framework of understanding in which it makes sense to overturn this also.

In March, 1998 European Foreign Ministers met in Edinburgh, at about the time when the crisis in Kosovo - or its Albanian rendering, Kosova - first began to dominate the international diplomatic agenda. A small but noisy group of exiled Kosovan Albanians chanting slogans positioned themselves to feature in all the shots as Ministers came and went. When the dignitaries had disappeared inside for another session, news crews duly converged on the demonstrators to record a quick interview.

These were almost entirely devoted to asking them what they had heard of conditions back at home for their relatives, now Serbian forces were attacking their villages, and how they felt about it.

*INVITE ACTIVISTS TO CONSIDER THE PROCESS BY WHICH REAL CHANGE MIGHT REALISTICALLY RESULT FROM THEIR ACTIONS

Experiments in transcending victim journalism and vox-poppery are many, but one of the most interesting was conducted by a clergyman and former radio producer in another conflict arena - Northern Ireland. As politicians embarked on the tortuous negotiations which were eventually to yield the Good Friday Agreement, the Reverend Trevor Williams of Belfast’s Corrymeela Community group convened a series of forums which brought people together to address two important questions: “what do you want from the talks?” And, crucially, “what could you live with, given that others in the community hail from different traditions than your own?”

The Community took this step in response to the inadequacy of existing debates in the media, still mostly modelled on stale old formulae ranging participants on two sides and hearing from people at the grassroots only as victims or vox-pops. (The enduring unexamined dominance of this newsgathering strategy within mainstream news was suggested by a memo, from the then editor of Granada’s World In Action programme, a longstanding current affairs flagship on British television, which fell into the hands of London satirical magazine Private Eye. The note, to journalists working on an episode set in Northern Ireland, titled, The Price of Peace, advised: “Hundreds of psychos will be out of prison and back on the streets if people vote Yes in the referendum. This [programme] is relatively easy to do - I have seen shorter versions on the news. What you do is to focus on four or five particularly vicious killers and remind people of their crimes. Talk to the relatives of their dead victims, or even some living victims minus various limbs, eyes, etc” (22).)

In Edinburgh, meanwhile, the demonstrators brandished placards bearing the legend, “Free Kosova.” This turned out to be merely the answer to the first of the Corrymeela questions - what they wanted, as an outcome to the crisis, was total independence. A familiar feature on the War Journalism map of the conflict as consisting of two irreconcilable opposite views, with “intransigent” Serbia, bent on subjugating the faintest suggestion of Kosovan autonomy, at the other extreme.

When I asked a version of the second Corrymeela question, “what could you live with, given the experiences of your people but also the international community’s apparent unwillingness to support full independence?” two of them opened up with a range of ideas, based on some limited autonomy for Kosovo/a. One suggested the province could be given the status of a republic within the Yugoslavian federation, like Montenegro. Again, form and content are co-terminous - lifting the opinions and analysis of activists on a demonstration into the sphere of legitimate controversy not only transgresses a key binary opposition inscribed in the very economic structure of news, but also moves from the zero-sum map of the conflict, consisting of mutually exclusive dogmas “expressing” deep, natural enmities, to one permitting a dialogue about creative solutions.

*SEEK POINTS WHERE LEGITIMATE AND DEVIANT AGENDAS OVERLAP

At the meeting, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook called for “creative ideas” to break the twin impasses on Kosovo/a and the prospect of Cyprus becoming a member of the European Union. By linking this with clips with the two Kosovans it was possible, again, to transgress the legitimate/deviant boundary.

The equivalent here of using the Diana funeral pictures was to juxtapose the Edinburgh demonstration with much larger ones on the streets of Pristina. The Doctrine of News interprets such events as an inchoate expression of nationhood, suppressed by the Serbs - a rhetorical strategy which, as with coverage of Iraq and the US embassy bombs, obscures questions about the larger conflict and the steps necessary to address legitimate fears and grievances. Asking “what do you think” rather than “how do you feel” disarms this rhetorical strategy, and is, therefore, a contribution to discharging the responsibility news bears for real events, while remaining, recognisably, news. To quote from Professor Galtung’s table, reproduced as an Appendix in the Peace Journalism Option: “War journalism focusses on elite peacemakers. Peace journalism focusses on people as peacemakers.”

THE ‘GIVEN’

Transgressing a boundary such as that dividing the “legitimate” from the “deviant” automatically destabilises the categories on either side of the line. In Hallin’s structure, it does not take much instability to begin to raise questions about the central category, the sphere of consensus, as well. A new, radical form of political reporting would seize on such moments - not to undermine, say, respect for parliamentary democracy but to bring into the open the normally unrehearsed issues of how it is supposed to work, how it is constructed and how it might be revived, rather than taking it, as in the Doctrine of News, as a given.

(It is, of course, presently permissible to go further in raising such questions about the “Other” than about the “Self.” As Kenneth Starr published his report on the Internet, Russian President Boris Yeltsin was forming his new Cabinet, including, for the first time, some Communist ministers. This, reports said, was condemned by ousted Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin as a “coup” - a description attached, with some justification, to events in Washington by the author Gore Vidal, but an analysis strangely absent from that evening’s news of a process, conceived and carried out within the Beltway, aiming to deprive the American people of a twice-elected President.)

A story which cropped up in London in July 1998 centred on an attack on British Prime Minister Tony Blair by his predecessor, John Major, for showing “contempt for Parliament” by airing policy changes through leaks to journalists before presenting them in the House of Commons.

That very day, newspaper headlines brought news that the Government was preparing to sell off property in valuable central London locations owned by the Ministry of Defence, such as the Chelsea Barracks, “said to be” worth as much as five hundred million pounds. My own coverage broke the modest development in this story that a prominent estate agency, Savills, was drawing up valuations for the Ministry. Ironically, this nugget of information emerged quite by chance when I rang requesting an interview with a property expert to assess whether the sums being mentioned were realistic - they could not oblige, their spokesman apologised, because they were “involved” - lending credence to the charge that the idea was already being put into practice before MPs had even been informed.

That morning, in a separate development, Home Secretary Jack Straw had given an interview to BBC Radio Four’s Today Programme, in which he spoke of the need for “active citizens” to safeguard the future of representative democracy. Again quite by chance, this was the very day that a Private Member’s Bill to outlaw foxhunting was withdrawn in the House of Commons, the Government having refused to make available the parliamentary time necessary to ensure its passage.

Over the years, members of the anti-Blood Sports movement had campaigned through all the means open to active citizens - from letter writing, organising public meetings and putting up posters in their living room windows through to rallies in London and demonstrations at hunt meetings, eventually being rewarded with support from a majority, as measured by opinion polls, in the country and even the countryside as well as in the House of Commons. Why, they even secured a manifesto commitment by Labour to abolish foxhunting.

Pulling together a piece for that evening’s news, I juxtaposed these developments and included some shots of a knot of anti-foxhunting demonstrators huddled in the rain opposite the House of Commons, and a clip of an interview with one of them about the questions raised over the continuing vitality and legitimacy of representative democracy. Today, without addressing these questions, the very categories of political news and the Political Correspondent are difficult to sustain. Certainly, for news to behave as though politics begins and ends on a piece of paper stamped with a portcullis, is no longer on.

REVIVING SERIOUS NEWS FOR THE AGE OF SPIN, CHEQUEBOOK JOURNALISM AND GLOBALISATION

How are such techniques received in the newsroom? What are the prospects for the reporter experimenting with them now, and how might they contribute to a journalistic discourse capable of reviving the category of serious journalism in the future? News sticks out like a sore thumb as a discursive practice determined not to theorise its own approach, sticking to inherited techniques of writing and newsgathering even as readers bypass the newsstand and viewers reach for the remote. The Doctrine of News is in crisis, and for journalists to try new approaches such as those advocated here, while currently an endeavour largely confined to the margins, potentially places them in the economic mainstream of the industry in times to come.

The unquantifiable effect of experimental techniques such as those discussed above is to dislodge the sense of familiarity reinforced by conventional approaches. In the newsroom, a typical response might be a puzzled expression accompanying the comment: “Nice piece that. Different...?” They can’t put their finger on how it’s different, but it is. Such a story carries an implicit caution to the audience: “Regard me, for I am a story.” It encourages the viewer, in this case, to look at the story as a construct, not to believe he or she is looking through it to “the facts.” This is where a dialogue would begin, from the living room outwards, about how it is constructed, opening the possibility of constructing it differently and, therefore, exposing “the facts,” even the “given,” as also only one possible construction among many.

These are some of the means journalism can use to catch up with other discursive or creative practices such as art and literature. Just as, in the last century, the popularisation of photography rendered the realist conventions of contemporary painting automatically less useful and impressive, so new technology is among the influences outflanking the conventions of mainstream news and rendering them obsolete.

Newspapers emerged in an age of information scarcity, often read out loud by the only literate person in the room, having been carried by horsepower from the nearest town or city to outlying areas. Today we live in an age of information glut. In any major Western city, it is a daily task to remove from the mailbox the latest items of junk mail - several a day, lavishly illustrated and enticingly worded. Someone writes this stuff, remember - to say nothing of the proliferating free newspapers which arrive weekly or even, in more and more cases, daily. Add in the potential offered by the Internet and it makes the point - the achievement of putting a package of information on the doorstep every day is now less impressive and less useful than at any time since newspapers were invented.

The response of painting to such changes in conditions was to devise new techniques - Impressionism, post-Impressionism, Cubism and Surrealism - to interrogate perspective. Another important underperformed task in journalism, as many are coming to realise.

Actually, audiences are already familiar with some such interrogation, as long as it does not cast doubt on perspectives cherished by Official Sources on “our” side. During each episode of the Iraq weapons inspection crisis, French and Russian objections to the use of force were routinely attributed, by official or officially-approved sources from Britain or the US, to ulterior motives. Paris and Moscow traditionally enjoyed lucrative trading partnerships with Baghdad, we were told, and therefore want a rapid restoration of normal relations so they can resume enjoying them. Interestingly, during the second of - at the time of writing - four separate phases of this crisis, in February 1998, this point would often crop up in the same bulletins which brought us TV pictures of the latest innovation from the American arms industry - the bunker-busting bomb.

This formidable piece of weaponry was designed to counter the unsporting Iraqi tactic of burying targets in bunkers in the desert, which so confounded the forces of Operation Desert Storm. Here is a journalistic assignment, as yet uncovered to my knowledge, for anyone who would like to mount a similar interrogation of perspective on the American side. What were the development costs to the company concerned, of preparing this weapon for actual deployment? How many units were initially ordered by the Pentagon, and at what price? How far would such an order go towards (a) recouping the development money and (b) making an acceptable contribution to company profitability?

Perhaps the arithmetic requires some of these weapons to be used, in order to generate more orders. Maybe the sums on the Tomahawk cruise missile carry a similar built-in momentum towards the need for actual deployment. Maybe that could be juxtaposed, as in the techniques discussed above, with the claim by President Clinton that “the dangers of inaction are greater than the dangers of action,” and the fact that US perspectives so often seem to involve firing missiles and dropping bombs. The bare minimum editorial standards of fairness and impartiality should lead to America’s own perspective being interrogated if her explanation of France’s and Russia’s perspective is accepted, uncritically as is nearly always the case. A job for all those reporters assigned to Washington perhaps.

CONSEQUENCES - THE REALITY OF APPEARANCES

The notion that news is based on “reporting the facts” is undermined by evidence that “facts” are provided for reporters to report. More evidence is at hand in the bureaucratic structure of news, and the evolution of an Official Sources Industry, imbricated into that structure, to take the provision of facts in the service of a prior agenda to ever more sophisticated levels. Is it possible to close the feedback loop and establish that the complicity of news extends the other way - to have a measurable effect on subsequent and consequent developments? If so, what further responsibilities might it bring?

It would be a large and risky claim to assert that journalism can have a direct, linear effect on observable events. British war correspondent turned MP Martin Bell does attribute two specific policy changes in Bosnia to particular episodes in coverage (23) - discussed in The Peace Journalism Option. This, together with former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s famous remark about CNN being “the sixteenth member of the Security Council,” has helped give rise to a small but significant literature which raises such claims as a kind of Aunt Sally, to be knocked down at all costs lest the edifice of “objective reporting” crumble and fall instead.

Warren P Strobel concludes: “The News media have less influence over American foreign and military policy than many observers believe to be the case. Claims that this influence is growing do not hold up under scrutiny, and what at first appears to be media-driven policy eventually reveals a host of other determining factors... The CNN effect is highly conditional” (24).

Nik Gowing, formerly Diplomatic Editor for ITN’s Channel Four News in London and now a presenter on BBC World Service Television, broadly concurs, that not only is the media influence on interventions in overseas conflict arenas vastly overstated, when it is discernible it is “unhelpful”: “It must, therefore, be asked whether invisibility is the answer to the question: What role for the media in conflict prevention? The media, however, would like to believe otherwise. In theory” (25).

US State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns and former British Foreign Secretaries Malcolm Rifkind and Douglas Hurd are among those diplomatic players who explain to Gowing that their decisions, or those of their governments, were not swayed by graphic TV images - notwithstanding that their emotions may have been captured by the images just like those of any other viewer. Likewise, a suitably reassured James A Baker III, former US Secretary of State, commends Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, in remarks quoted on the back cover: “Warren Strobel carefully and effectively debunks the media-makes policy myth.”

But the margins of Gowing’s text contain an intriguing series of hints as to how news coverage may indeed, as Baker also observes, “have a powerful effect on process.” In 1991, Gowing recalls, “TV images of JNA (Yugoslav National Army) tanks in the former Yugoslavia moving towards Slovenia left the impression of a unilateral offensive by Belgrade. The fact that Slovenia had declared independence from the Yugoslav Federation and set up border posts tended to be forgotten as the graphic TV images showed a large JNA military operation advancing towards military engagement.”

THE REALITY OF APPEARANCES IN YUGOSLAVIA

During this brief period of skirmishing along the Slovene border, the production team at the BBC’s Newsnight, under the editorship of Tim Gardam himself, were told to obtain a recording of a Slovene national song and a Slovenian flag. A pair of us held it in front of one of the studio cameras, and - there is no other way of putting this - waggled it. The closing images of that night’s programme offered pictures of this flag, in slow-motion to give the impression of billowing in the wind, half-mixed with Slovenian soldiers brandishing their weapons in triumph and accompanied by this rather martial piece of music. The significance of these events, Gardam declared, was that “a new nation has been born in Europe.”

Actually, the nation could only be born with the assistance of a NATO imposed no-fly zone which grounded the Yugoslav air force, and the EC’s hasty recognition of Slovenia’s self-declared sovereignty, whereupon Belgrade’s hamfisted efforts to sustain the integrity of the Yugoslav Federation became a violation of international law. There were warnings over this at the time. Then UN Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, wrote to the prime mover behind EC recognition, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher: “...the possibly explosive consequences of such a development - being a potential time bomb. I believe that the Twelve were correct when they reiterated [at a previous EC foreign ministers’ meeting, in the run-up to the Maastricht summit] that recognition can only be envisaged in the framework of an overall settlement.”

As Perez de Cuellar’s forebodings were borne out by events in Bosnia, where the new independent status of Slovenia and Croatia led to demands for a referendum on independence, splitting the republic along ethnic lines, the assumptions behind these initial essentialist interpretations continued to exert a profound influence on the framework of understanding applied by journalists and policymakers alike to events in former Yugoslavia. BBC correspondent Mark Urban summed up the approach: “Few of the British-employed journalists - with some exceptions - seem to have been concerned with telling us the tales of the Serbian housewives blown away by Muslim snipers’ bullets, or the Croat villagers whose throats were slit by the Muslim raiders from nearby villages in central Bosnia” (26).

Gowing goes on to ponder what is surely one of the most disturbing episodes of modern journalism - the Sarajevo market massacre on 5 February, 1994 which “was instantly assumed to be the work of Serb artillery firing from the surrounding mountains. Without any question, the media swiftly reflected the conventional belief that Serb gunners were responsible for the outrage. However, a series of subsequent crater analyses by UNPROFOR ballistics experts from several different nations concluded otherwise. On a clear balance of probabilities, all evidence pointed to the fatal mortar bei