THE inquiry by Lord Justice Brian Leveson into the ethics and practices of the British media has exposed some dark facts of the relationship between men in power and the press.
The issue of access came to the fore because it concerned the owner of the News Corporation’s (Rupert Murdoch), easy access to four prime ministers — Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
Time there was, nearly two centuries ago, when an editor proclaimed that “the newspaper is not an organ through which government can influence people, but through which the people can influence the government”.
The nadir was reached when Tony Blair was prime minister. His spin doctors systematically misled the public with leaks and inspired reports planted through obliging pressmen. Peter Mandelson, Blair’s confidante in government, flamboyantly declared “Of course we want to use the media, but the media will be our tools, our servants; we are no longer content to let them be our persecutors”.
He would not have felt emboldened to say this, were it not for the servile compliance of some in the media. The Bush administration used reporters to spread falsehoods about Iraq in order to prepare public opinion for its aggression against that country. Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. But he ran into resistance from the paper’s editors, and his piece was relegated to page 17.
Within months the criminal folly of the attack on Iraq became embarrassingly evident — there were no weapons of mass destruction. The press began chest-beating.
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman explained the inspirations behind the confessionals. “Why did the press credit Bush with virtues that reporters knew he didn’t possess? One answer is misplaced patriotism. After Sept 11, much of the press seemed to reach a collective decision that it was necessary, in the interests of national unity, to suppress criticism of the commander in chief. And some American journalists just couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the president of the United States was being dishonest about such grave matters.”
There was another reason besides. The administration had used a carrot-and-stick strategy: woo some, bully others. The technique is an old one. Franklin D. Roosevelt practised it to perfection. Correspondents were invited to play cards, to dinner or for a swim. It is hard to criticise a man in power after enjoying such proximity.
James Reston writes in his memoir Deadline how Walter Lippmann broke the maxims which he preached. “He was always lecturing me on the virtues of detachment — of avoiding personal involvement with influential officials or politicians.
‘Cronyism is the curse of journalism’ he would say. But actually, he was more involved with them than any other major commentator I knew…. Even during his last days in Washington, he was working privately with President Johnson and even drafting speeches for him in the vain hope of getting him out of the Vietnam War.” He loved to advise the high and mighty.
All that the Leveson inquiry has revealed is a grosser form of the practice which was the bane of British journalism in the last century. During the Suez crisis in 1956 Prime Minister Eden’s press adviser William Clark shamelessly declared “public opinion could not be ignored; it had to be fooled. The power of government to deceive is immense”.
One obvious ploy is to appeal to the press in the name of national security or nationalism. Patriotism is a potent intoxicant.
In countries locked in adversarial relations, the media enthusiastically bats for its country; academia does not lag far behind it. This was true of the West during the Cold War and even now vis-à-vis Russia, China and the Arab world.
It is true of most of the media in South Asia as well. The results can be nothing but harm to the national interest itself. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco president Kennedy warned the press “to re-examine their own responsibilities” and ask of every story they proposed to print. “Is it in the interest of national security?”
A fortnight after the fiasco he told Turner Catledge, managing editor The New York Times, in the privacy of the White House. “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”
He spoke the truth whose implications he is unlikely to have grasped. The press is as entitled to judge the claims of national security as is the state with the obvious qualification that it does not have access to information to the degree the government has. However, the broad contours of a given crisis are never obscure.
If the state honestly takes the press into confidence, it can be trusted to respect its limitations. But confidence, abused by attempted intimidation, bribery or cronyism, is often in poor supply. The press must do its duty at all times. For, it is fundamentally an adversarial relationship. This does not imply a hostile relationship but a questioning one, demanding justification from the state all the time.
This relationship is betrayed when a journalist begins to perform the role of an adviser. Ministers like to flatter journalists by soliciting their ‘advice’ when they are, in truth, soliciting their support. Worse still, governments have enlisted them as spies; especially those stationed abroad as foreign correspondents of national papers. Then there are trips abroad on the plane which carries the leader to foreign lands. Who is to select the pressman, the editor or the government? The Press Council of India attempted to lay down the guidelines more than once, but to no avail.
Guidelines in matters such as this are easily laid down. But no guideline can protect the journalist from error in situations less clear; for example is the ‘off the record’ briefing a genuine one or is it designed to silence him? In the final analysis, only the journalist’s commitment to his profession and his unbending integrity can help him ward off the threats from men in power.
The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.
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