30 March 2004
If nothing else, the farce surrounding Andrew Gilligan’s/Dr David Kelly inadvertent revelations concerning British government’s dissembling and lying over the invasion of Iraq has revealed the true nature of what the British establishment likes to foist on an unsuspecting public as ‘objective’ journalism. But what is objective journalism and is there such an animal?
2 February 2004
“I saw evidence that was categoric on Saddam possessing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Now I saw the evidence, so did the Prime Minister, so did other cabinet ministers. That informed our decision to go topple him. I think we were right in doing so, but let’s wait and see what the jury finds out in the end.”
So says Peter Hain, Leader of the Commons and former anti-apartheid activist and if you believe this statement, you’ll believe anything.
But what is this statement based upon? The September 2002 dossier? The ‘dodgy’ February 2003 dossier or the stuff that nobody else has ever seen? Perhaps it’s Hans Blix’s final report to the UN? Perhaps it was the fairies at the bottom of the garden?
30 January 2004
In 2002 when I first returned to the UK after many years abroad and started my long period of readjustment to this malignant society, a major part of the process was getting a handle on the media here. I read many of the leading ‘papers, listened to the news and of course watched it on tv. I tried to immerse myself in the gallons of turgid prose that gurgled out of ‘news central’, for that’s what it is, a factory for the manufacturing of ‘news’ for passive consumption, designed it would appear for an audience with the attention span of a gnat.
29 January 2004
Do politicians lie? Do fish swim and birds fly? It’s difficult to know where to start with this ‘inquiry’ except to say that Hutton has transformed what was meant to be an investigation into the events surrounding the alleged suicide of Dr David Kelly and his being ‘outed’ by the government into a total whitewash of Blair’s rationale for going to war. Everybody involved in the entire disgusting and illegal invasion has been absolved of any wrongdoing, except the BBC, but more on this later.
29 August 2003
Well predictably the media here in the UK has, by and large, given Blah a clean bill of health, not because he didn’t lie but because he did such a good job of lying. Apparently, the more articulate you are at the business of dissembling, the more kudos you acquire. This is the ‘post-modern’ world where form takes precedent over content.
28 August 2003
Blair, Campbell, Goebbels and the Word
As the state is increasingly exposed as fraudulent, so the media has created a barrier that absorbs direct attack by deflecting criticism into the ‘nooks and crannies’ of the management of the state machine. How it does this is revealed by the nature of the relationship between the state and the media and the use of language, where the grammar and syntax becomes critical to the process of persuasion.
23 August 2003
The media’s complicity in putting spin on the spin
The media’s response to the ‘revelations’ of the Hutton inquiry reveals more about the nature of corporate journalism than it does about the role of the government’s propagandists. And especially, the back-peddling being performed in an attempt to justify the complicity of the media in not seeing what was patently obvious to anyone who cared to look, namely that the government lies and lies on a consistent basis about its reasons for invading Iraq.
19 August 2003
One is tempted to hold off saying anything until the loathsome Alistair Campbell, chief propagandist for the Blair government does his pitch at the Hutton ‘enquiry’ today. However, of far more importance than what he does or doesn’t say (after all, the cat’s out of the bag anyway), is how will the Blair government deal with this mounting crisis of confidence in its reign and indeed the potential challenge to the credibility of the state that Blair’s cockup represents?
17 August 2003
It is instructive as well as fascinating to follow the convoluted trail of disinformation and hyperbole in the government and the media’s attempts to transfer the blame from one individual to another in the agenda of diverting attention from the central issue, namely why we went to war.
14 August 2003
Far from being troubled about the impending invasion, Dr David Kelly could just as easily have been troubled by the use of ‘evidence’ that “takes away from the case for war.” In other words, Kelly’s statements can be interpreted as continued support for the war but that he objected to the way it was being sold through the crass intervention of the Downing Street propaganda machine, headed by Alistair Campbell.
Investigating Imperialism 