Break this silence

John Pilger

Reducing journalism to a branch of corporate and government 
public relations is the hidden agenda of the media deregulators 
in Britain and the US.

Australian novelist Richard Flanagan was recently asked by the 
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to read a favourite 
piece of fiction on national radio and explain his reasons for 
the choice.

"I was unsure what fiction to read to you this morning," he said. 
"If we take the work of our most successful spinner of fictions 
in recent times, Prime Minister John Howard, I could have read 
from the varied and splendid tall tales that he and his fellow 
storytellers have concocted".

He listed Howard's most famous fictions — that desperate 
refugees trying to reach Australia had wilfully thrown children 
overboard and that faraway Australia was endangered by Iraq's 
"weapons of hysterical distraction'", as he put it.

He followed this with Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Joyce's 
Ulysses, "because in our time of lies and hate, it seems 
appropriate to be reminded of the beauty of saying yes to the 
chaos of truth".

This was duly recorded, but, when the program was broadcast, the 
entire preface about Howard was missing.

ABC censorship

Flanagan accused the ABC of rank censorship. No, was the 
response, they just didn't want "anything political".

This was followed, he wrote, by "a moment of high comedy. Would 
I, the producer asked, be interested in coming on a program to 
discuss the disillusionment in contemporary Australia?"

In a society that once prided itself on its laconic sense of 
irony, there was not a hint of it, just a managerial silence.

"All around me", Flanagan later wrote, "I see avenue of 
expression closing, an odd collusion of an ever more cowed media 
and the way in which the powerful seek to dictate what is said 
and what isn't read and heard".

He may well be speaking for the rest of us.

The censorship in Australia that he describes is especially 
virulent because Australia is a small media pond inhabited by 
large sharks — a microcosm of what the British might expect if 
the current assault on free journalism is not challenged.

The leader of this assault is, of course, Rupert Murdoch, whose 
dominance in the land of his birth in now symptomatic of the 
worldwide grip.

Of 12 daily newspapers in the capital cities, Murdoch controls 
seven. Of the 10 Sunday newspapers, seven are Murdoch's.

In Adelaide, he has a complete monopoly. He owns everything, 
including all the printing presses. It is almost impossible to 
escape his augmented team of Pravdas.

Like all his newspapers, they follow the path paved with his 
"interests" and his extremism.

Echoing Murdoch

They echo Murdoch's description of Bush and Blair as "heroes" of 
the Iraq invasion and his dismissal of the blood that they spilt.

For good measure, his tabloid the Herald Sun invented an 
al-Qaida terrorist training camp near Melbourne and all his 
papers promote John Howard's parrot-like obsequiousness to Bush, 
just as they laud Howard's racist campaign against a few asylum-
seekers who are locked away in outback concentration camps.

Murdochism, disguised or not, is standard throughout the media 
that he does not control.

The Melbourne Age, once a great liberal newspaper whose 
journalists produced a pioneering charter of editorial 
independence, is often just another purveyor of what Orwell 
called "smelly little orthodoxies" wrapped in lifestyle 
supplements.

Flickering beacons are the visionary Special Broadcasting Service 
(SBS), which was set up to serve Australia's multiethnic society 
and the eternally battered ABC.

The ABC is different from the BBC, its model, in one crucial 
respect. It has no licence fee and must rely on government 
handouts.

In Australia, political intimidation of the national broadcaster 
makes Downing Street's campaign against the BBC seem almost 
genteel.

Howard's minister for communications, a far-right dullard called 
Richard Alston, recently demanded that the ABC reply to 68 counts 
of "anti-Americanism".

Oath of loyalty to America

What the government wants is no less than an oath of loyalty to 
the foreign power to which it has surrendered sovereignty.

Charges of "left-wing bias", familiar in Britain and just as 
ridiculous, drone out of both the Murdoch and the non-Murdoch 
press.

A Sydney Morning Herald commentator, a local echo to the 
far-right's "monitoring" of the media in the US, has attacked the 
ABC for years.

With no guarantee of financial independence, the ABC has bent to 
the pressure — the censorship experienced by Richard Flanagan is 
not unusual.

More seriously, current affairs investigations that might be 
construed as "left-wing" are not commissioned.

As one well-known journalist told me, "We have a state of fear. 
If you are a dissenter, you are out".

The despair felt by many Australians about this and the cosmetic 
democracy in Canberra that it reflects, expresses itself in huge 
turnouts at public meetings.

More than 34,000 attended the recent Melbourne Writers' Festival, 
where, said the director, "anything political" and "any session 
that allowed people to express a view" was a sell-out.

The global model for censorship by omission in free societies is 
the US, which constitutionally has the freest press in the world.

In Washington, former CBS 60 Minutes producer Charles Lewis, who 
runs the Centre for Public Integrity, told me: "Under Bush, the 
silence among journalists is worse than in the 1950s.

"Murdoch is the most influential media mogul in America. He sets 
the standard and there is no public discussion about it.

"Why do 70 per cent of the American public believe that Saddam 
Hussein was behind the attacks of 9/11? Because the media's 
constant echoing of the government guarantees it. Without the 
complicity of journalists, Bush would never have attacked Iraq."

Harnessing journalism

Harnessing journalism and reducing it to the "spokesman's 
spokesman", a branch of corporate and government public 
relations, is the hidden agenda of the new media deregulators.

In the US, the Federal Communications commission, run by Colin 
Powell's son, is finally to deregulate television so that 
Murdoch's Fox Channel and four other conglomerates control 90 per 
cent of the terrestrial and cable audience.

That is the spectre in Britain, with a Blairite placemen now 
overseeing public service broadcasting in the new commercial 
deregulator Oftel, which has a remit to follow the US 'market" 
plan.

The next stop is to end the licence fee and diminish the BBC to a 
version of its Australian prodigy. That's Blair's agenda.

The genesis of this — and for the current Blair/Murdoch campaign 
against BBC independence — can be traced back to 1995, when 
Murdoch flew the Blairs first class to Hayman Island, off the 
Queensland coast.

In the tropical sunshine and standing at the blue News Corp 
lectern, the future British prime minister waxed lyrical about 
his "new moral purpose in politics" and pledged himself to hand 
over the media to the "enterprise" of those like his host, who 
applauded him warmly.

The next day, satire died again when Murdoch's Sun 
commented: "Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks 
our language on morality and family life".

* * *

From Morning Star September 29, 2003