Distant Voices (3 page)

This is presumably what Murdoch himself believes. As a principal backer of Thatcherism's ‘radical philosophy', he can claim to have shaken the old order, helping to abolish the humanist wing of the Tory Party and to damage the royal family. As his London man implies, he intends to replace this with a Murdoch-approved elite which ‘places the media corporation . . . in direct competition to the established elites'. In other words, so powerful are Murdoch and his fellow media corporatists that they hardly need governments any more.

For many people, this struggle between the elites means an accelerated erosion of real freedom. Under the old system the bias of the state operated through a ‘consensus' that was broadly acceptable to the established order. Controversial television programmes could be kept off the air, or watered down, merely by applying arbitrary ‘guidelines' that were accompanied by ritualistic nods and winks. In this way,
The War Game
, a brilliant dramatisation of the effects of a nuclear attack on Britain, was suppressed by the BBC for twenty years;
¹³
and during the same period more than fifty programmes critical of the war in Ireland were banned, delayed or doctored.
¹⁴

As the influence of television has surpassed that of the press, perhaps in no other country has broadcasting held such a privileged position as an opinion leader. Possessing highly professional talent, and the illusion of impartiality (a venerable official truth, with its lexicon of ‘balance', etc.), as well as occasionally dissenting programmes, ‘public service
broadcasting' developed into a finely crafted instrument of state propaganda. Witness the BBC's coverage of the Cold War, the wars in the Falklands and the Gulf, and the 1984–5 miners' strike.

One wonders why Thatcher wanted to change it. Of course paternalism and false consensus were not her way, neither was dissent in
any
effective form, albeit token. Thus, she never forgave Thames Television for showing
Death on the Rock
and exposing the activities of an SAS death squad in Gibraltar.

As for the BBC, most of its voices of dissent have long fallen silent. They are the broadcasters and producers who opposed the slaughter in the Gulf and the way it was represented to the British people, but who remained anonymous. Even before the last British election campaign had got under way, the BBC's principal current affairs programme,
Panorama
, felt the need to suppress a report that had made a few mildly critical observations of seasonal Tory back-stabbing over economic policy.
¹⁵

Today BBC current affairs is seldom controversial as it is secured within a pyramid of ‘directorates' that have little to do with free journalism and are designed to control: to shore up assumptions, not to challenge them. In any case, silence is no longer optional in the increasingly centralised, undemocratic state that is the other side of the media society. As the market has been ‘freed' from state controls (i.e. nineteenth-century
laissez-faire
nostrums have been re-imposed), so information has been subjected to draconian new controls.

I have touched upon these restrictions in several chapters, believing that many people may be unaware that, behind the supermarket façade, certain state controls are now reminiscent of those in the old Soviet Union. As you drive south across Vauxhall Bridge in London you pass the most striking new building in the capital; it houses the domestic secret intelligence service, MI5, now expanding its role as a police and domestic surveillance force, its anonymity and unaccountability guaranteed by Parliament. How ironic that is, now that the KGB is no more. While John Major professes
‘open government' and theatrically names Stella Rimington as the head of MI5, the secret state grows more powerful than ever.

As Tim Gopsill has pointed out, Britain is the only country in the world with a statutory bar on an elected member of Parliament addressing his constituents through the broadcast media.
¹⁶
There are now more than 100 laws in Britain that make disclosure of information a crime. Under the ‘reformed' Official Secrets Act – ‘reformed' being officialspeak for even more restriction – all the major revelations of official lying and venality in the 1980s would now be illegal. The
Sunday Telegraph
once likened investigative journalism to an offence against the state; it has become just that.
¹⁷

Two examples: the 1981 Contempt of Court Act empowers judges and magistrates to ban the reporting of trials. Thus, hundreds of trials take place in secret every year, some of them deeply sensitive to the state. Under the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, broadcasters and journalists must surrender film and source material to the police; and an order against one media organisation automatically applies to the others.

In 1991 Central Television and I encountered the full sanction of government secrecy and intervention in the courts in a libel action brought against my film
Cambodia: The Betrayal
. ‘Public Interest Immunity Certificates' – gagging orders – were used successfully against us before they were exposed in the Matrix Churchill trial. I have described this in the chapter ‘Through the Looking Glass'. Britain has the most restrictive libel laws in the democratic world – a fact which Robert Maxwell exploited until the day he drowned.

The Director of Public Prosecutions has used the Prevention of Terrorism Act to force Channel 4 and an independent programme maker to reveal the identity of an informant whose life could be at risk. The case concerned a documentary film,
The Committee
, which alleged widespread collusion between members of the British security services, Loyalist paramilitaries and senior members of Northern
Ireland's business community in a secret terrorist campaign dedicated to sectarian and political assassination.
¹⁸

This, and similar cases, receive scant attention compared with the sex lives of establishment politicians, and the marriage difficulties of the royal family. There are the perennial calls for protection of privacy legislation, but this has little to do with protecting the rights of ordinary people, and everything to do with protecting the reputations of establishment figures. There is no real desire to intervene in ‘tabloid scandal-mongering' – which is duly reported in depth by the ‘quality' press. The scandal mongers, after all, are important people. They can witchhunt dissenters when required; and every five years most of them can be relied upon to help elect a Tory government. For this, the Queen is instructed to honour their editors: a fine irony. The lost issue is the need to protect the public from the state, not the press.

I have devoted the final chapters to Australia, which in many ways offers a model for the future. In the 1960s Australians could boast the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. Since then the redistribution of wealth has been spectacular as the world's first Thatcherite Labor government has ‘reformed' the fragile Australian economy and given it over to the world ‘free market'. Bob Hawke's ‘big mates' – the likes of Murdoch, Kerry Packer and Alan Bond – were able to borrow what they liked and pay minimal income tax.
¹⁹
In 1989 Bond's borrowing accounted for 10 per cent of the Australian national debt.
²⁰
Today, Bond's empire has collapsed, Bond himself has been in and out of prison; unemployment is as high as 15 per cent and the rate of child poverty is the second highest in the developed world.
²¹
And Australia can now claim the most monopolised press in the Western world.

Of twelve metropolitan dailies, Murdoch controls seven and the Canadian Conrad Black three. Of ten Sunday papers Murdoch has seven, Black two. In Adelaide Murdoch has a complete monopoly. He owns all the daily, Sunday and local papers, and all the printing presses and printing premises. In Brisbane he owns all but a few suburban papers. He controls
more than 66 per cent of daily newspapers in the capital cities, where the great majority of the population lives. He owns almost 75 per cent of all Sunday papers. And Black controls most of the rest.
²²

Both are conservative ideologues. Another arch conservative, Kerry Packer, owns most of the magazines Australians read and the only truly national commercial TV network. None of this could have happened without government collusion: the bending of regulations and legislation advantageous to a few ‘big mates'.
²³
In the East Timor section I have documented how the interests of the Keating government and its principal media ‘mate' converge in the promotion of the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia as ‘stable' and ‘moderate' while the truth of the regime's genocide in East Timor is suppressed and obfuscated.

This presents good journalists in Australia and all over the world with an increasingly familiar dilemma. How can they pursue their craft without serving such concentrated power? And once having enlisted and taken on the day-to-day constraints of career and mortgage, how do they remain true to a distant notion of an ‘independent' press?

Some journalists try their hardest, maintaining high standards in mostly uncontroversial fields. Others believe they can change the system from within, and are forced out. Others are unaware of their own malleability (I was), or they become profoundly cynical about their craft. Echoing the fellow travellers of Stalin's communist party, they insist, as one Murdoch editor once told me, ‘I can honestly say I have never been told what to put in the paper and what to take out of it'.
²⁴
The point was that no one
had
to tell him, and his paper reflected the unshakeable set of assumptions that underpin Western power and prejudice, including those that would lead us, to quote Nicholas Rothwell, into ‘a social and even ideological transformation . . . in the image of a radical philosophy'.

I have attempted throughout the book, to show how closely censorship in the old communist world compares with that in the West today and that only the methods of
enforcement differ. I am reminded of a story recounted by the writer Simon Louvish. A group of Russians touring the United States before the age of
glasnost
were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that all the opinions on the vital issues were the same. ‘In our country', they said, ‘to get that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what's your secret – how do you do it?'
²⁵

In the section ‘Tributes' I express my admiration for Noam Chomsky, whose formidable analysis has helped many of us to identify how they do it. It was Chomsky who understood the nature of the ‘delusional system' of one-doctrine democracy and the sophisticated manipulation of public opinion, using the ‘free' media.

The results of this manipulation are often historic. When President Kennedy declared in the early 1960s that there was a ‘missile gap' with the Soviet Union, his message was carried without question by the Western media, and the nuclear arms race accelerated. In fact, the opposite was true: America was well ahead in missile development.
²⁶
When President Johnson unleashed American bombers on North Vietnam in 1964, he did so after the media had helped him sell to Congress a story that communist gunboats had ‘attacked' US warships in the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident'. There was no attack, no ‘incident'. ‘Hell,' Johnson is reported to have said in private, ‘those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.'
²⁷
Thereafter the American invasion was legitimised, millions of people were killed and a once bountiful land was petrified.

In manipulation on such a scale, a vital part is played by an Orwellian abuse of conceptual thought, logic and language. In Vietnam, the indigenous forces resisting a foreign invasion were guilty of ‘internal aggression'.
²⁸
In the Gulf the slaughter was described as one in which ‘a miraculously small number of casualties' was sustained.
²⁹
In Russia today, anti-Yeltsin democrats opposing ‘free market reforms' – ‘reforms' that are likely to reduce some 60 million pensioners to near
starvation – are dismissed as ‘hardliners' and ‘crypto communists'.
³⁰

The unerring message is that there is only one way now. It booms out to all of humanity, growing louder and more insistent in the media echo chamber. Those who challenge this sectarianism, and believe in real choice in public life and the media, are likely to be given the treatment. They are ‘outside the mainstream'. They are ‘committed' and ‘lacking balance'. If the criticism is aimed at American power, the critics are ‘anti-American' – a revealing charge for it evokes the ‘un-German' abuse used effectively by the Nazis and the ‘anti-Soviet' provisions of the old Soviet criminal code.

These attacks come not only from the Murdoch camp, but also from a liberal elite which sees itself as the fulcrum of society, striking a ‘sensible balance' between opposing extremes. This is often translated into evenhandedness between oppressor and oppressed. Faithful to the deity of ‘impartiality', it rejects the passion and moral imagination that discern and define the nature of criminality and make honest the writing of narrative history.

In Britain and the United States members of this liberal group can be relied upon to guard the conservative flame during difficult times, such as when established forces go to war, or feel themselves threatened by civil disturbance or a surfeit of political activity and discussion outside the confines of Parliament. This is especially true of the ‘modernised' Labour Opposition which, in moulding itself to what ‘market research' tells it, serves to muffle any suggestion of mass resistance. What it says, in effect, is that society is static and people's consciousness cannot be raised. Of course this is a role that goes back a long way, perhaps as far as the reaction to the seventeenth-century revolution when John Locke thought that ordinary people should not even be allowed to discuss affairs of state.