It is becoming clearer day by day that the Wikileaks saga has changed journalism and citizen’s relationship with government forever. This is not about some temporary embarrassment to governments and their leaders but a sea change in the way we are ruled and the information we are entitled to expect about how decisions about our future are made.

Journalists have always known in their heart of hearts that their reporting on government has only been half the story. How to get the other half? How to sort out the truth from the propaganda? How to learn what is really going on—as distinct from what our leaders tell us is going on. Julian Assange and the whistle-blowers who have provided his organization with its sensational material have answered this.

Naturally, governments are not pleased. Assange is in jail in Britain over what looks like a very weak case—suspicion of rape in Sweden earlier this year. He has been labeled “a criminal” for facilitating the release of the secret documents, although no one can say what crime he has committed. The US authorities continue to do their best to close down the Wikileaks websites. Many of its bank accounts have been frozen. The more extreme elements on the American political scene have called for Assange to be kidnapped and “rendered” to the USA for trial, or failing that, for him to be assassinated.

But Wikileaks has them all over a barrel. It did not steal the documents; one or more whisteblowers did. All Wikileaks did was to publish them. So did the New York Times and thousands of other newspapers throughout the world. And freedom to publish material, secret or not, offensive or not, is enshrined in the American Constitution and has been confirmed by the US Supreme Court case of Near v Minnesota, 1931.

The government of Minnesota had banned publisher Jay Near’s anti-semitic, bigoted, racist, scandal-ridden sensationalist newspaper. The American Civil Liberties Union appealed on his behalf to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that freedom of speech was absolute. The Court agreed 5-4. Chief Justice Charles Hughes summed it up brilliantly: “The rights of the best of men are secured only as the rights of vilest and most abhorrent are protected.”

As for those who have argued that the Wikileaks material has destroyed the diplomatic process and that for diplomacy to function there must be some things kept secret, have they forgotten President Woodrow Wilson, who made “open diplomacy” number point of his famous 14 points in 1918.

“Diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view”, was Wilson’s argument and he would certainly have approved of Wikileaks actions, in contrast the current US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who has called them “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests” and on “the international community”—though she failed to specify which community members were the victims, or of what they were the victims.

There has been some criticism of the media for concentrating on the more scandalous side of the revelations rather than on the terrible injustices revealed, such as that inflicted upon Khalid El-Masri. A German citizen, he was kidnapped while on holiday in Macedonia, taken to Morocco by CIA agents tortured there and later in Afghanistan on behalf of the US government.

The Americans eventually realized that he was who he had always said he was, a victim of mistaken identity. They were reluctant to release him, despite orders to do so from the then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, because “he knew too much”. He was eventually dumped by the roadside in Albania.

Back in Germany he complained to the German authorities who issued criminal proceedings against the CIA officers responsible for his kidnapping, imprisonment and torture. The Wikileaks documents reveal that the US embassy in Berlin pressed the German government to block the proceedings because the outcome could have “a negative impact on bilateral arrangements”. The German government acceded to the request.

If that is the way that international diplomacy functions, then the sooner all is revealed the better. Unless the US Government succeeds in shutting down Wikileaks—and I do not think liberal America would stand for this—then Assange and his organization has a lot more suprises in store for us.

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 24 May 2010.

The Duchess of York offers to “sell” her former husband’s services to a businessman for a promise of £500,000 and $40,000 in cash now.

The businessman turns out to be “the fake sheikh”, the News of the World reporter Mazher Mahmood, and the Duchess finds herself splashed all over the front page of the newspaper.

Lord Triesman, the Football Association chairman, tells a young lady of his acquaintance about an alleged plot by the Spanish and Russians to bribe World Cup referees in South Africa. The young lady has a concealed tape recorder and Lord Triesman finds himself splashed over the front pages of the newspapers.

A good week for undercover reporting? Or a shameful example of invasion of privacy, entrapment and shoddy, lazy journalism?

The ethics about undercover reporting are far from clear. The journalist has to weigh the public interest of the story and the importance of what is being revealed, against the opprobrium of the technique and the victim’s feeling, often shared by the reader, that they have been lied to and deceived. Donal MacIntyre, who went undercover many times for the BBC, said: “The golden rule is this: as an undercover reporter you must never encourage anyone to say or do anything they would not otherwise do if you had not been there.”

This is a judgement call and without hearing the whole tape – rather than the extracts provided by the newspaper – a difficult one to make. Most of the reporters I worked with at The Sunday Times in the 1980s opposed the use of deception on principle. They took their lead from a statement by Benjamin C Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post: “In a day when we are spending thousands of man-hours uncovering deception, we simply cannot afford to deceive.”

So why do newspapers do it? Going undercover is considered glamorous. Acting a role that exposes wrongdoing or greedy and bad behaviour attracts some journalists, particularly those seeking to become the heroes of their own stories.

But above all, at a time of falling circulations and editorial financial restrictions it is a comparatively cheap form of journalism with a quick result. Standard investigative journalism is expensive, often open-ended and uncertain. Many stories simply fail to stand up.

All that Mahmood and the News of the World needs is a tip-off that suggests the victim might be susceptible to an approach, and the external trappings to make Mahmood appear believable (a Rolls-Royce, a decent suit, an expensive flat or hotel room) and his own plausible manner.

His success rate is remarkably high. He claims to have helped convict 231 criminals using his undercover approach. But in July 2006 his methods came under scrutiny when three men were cleared at the Old Bailey of plotting to buy radioactive material for a terrorist “dirty bomb”.

Similarly, an exclusive about an alleged plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham collapsed after police found that Mahmood’s main informant had been paid £10,000 and could not be considered a reliable witness. Roy Greenslade, professor of journalism at City University, London, tried to publish a photograph of Mahmood but the News of the World obtained a temporary injunction claiming it was necessary to protect his privacy.

Wikipedia put the photograph on its website in 2008. Apparently it escaped the Duchess’s notice.

Phillip Knightley was a member of The Sunday Times Insight investigative team in the 1970s and 1980s

Published in The Khaleej Times.

With the war in Afghanistan taking place in a news vacuum — when did you last read in the mainstream media a report on what is happening there — journalism academics have turned their attention to previous wars to see what lessons, if any, have been learnt.

In the current edition of the journal Media, War and Conflict, Michael Griffin, visiting professor of Media Studies at Macalester College, St Paul, Minnesota, blows away some of the media myths that have grown around the war in Vietnam.

He writes: “For the last thirty years the media myth of Vietnam has proved a constant touchstone against which the media coverage of every new conflict has been compared. According to this popular version of history, Vietnam was an “uncensored war”. Reporters, photographers and cameramen were allowed unprecedented freedom of movement and the ability to dispatch their material to outlets all over the world, which reproduced them on a daily basis.

Griffin then exposes this as simply untrue and partly responsible for the story that this coverage was responsible for the accusation that it undermined the US war effort and was eventually responsible for America’s defeat in Vietnam.

“It is part of the myth that a liberal American media, as well as British and European reporters, were highly critical of the war and routinely presented stories and images that emphasised American casualties, civilian suffering and lack of US military progress towards victory that eroded public support for the war at home and effectively undermined the US war effort, eventually leading to America’s defeat. Often one or more of the iconic images of that war is given special responsibility for the undermining of American morale.”

Griffin says that a more condensed version of this myth is that Vietnam was the first “living room war” watched on television in the living rooms of American homes and that the onslaught of horrific images turned the American people against their own military. “The media lost the war,” is a slogan still repeated by many and taught as a cautionary tale in military and public relations training programmes.

Griffin says that facts show otherwise. Firstly, the portrayal in the media of the American soldier remained sympathetic right to the end of the war. Next, an analysis of US television coverage of the war in Vietnam showed network news programmes neither depicted the horror of war nor did their reports play a leading role in the collapse of American support for the war at home. But what about the My Lai massacre? According to a recent study of American reactions to news of the massacre, the revelations had little effect on overall American public opinion concerning the war, as did other evidence of Vietnamese civilian suffering, visual or otherwise. Many Americans simply refused to believe the news of the massacre.

Photographic evidence of the truth of the war, evidence that could have shifted the American consensus concerning US involvement, was never allowed to accumulate because there was little desire on the part of the public or the media to confront such realities, says Griffin. Yet, since Vietnam successive Western governments have devised strategies to avoid a repeat of the kind of media success they felt was detrimental in Vietnam. They have adopted a plan for managing the media in wartime that has been amazingly successful in the Falklands war, in the invasion of Panama, the invasion of Grenada and in both Gulf wars and Afghanistan.

Basically this is to deny the media access to the war unless it accepts the military’s conditions, and to ensure that journalists and photographers identify with “the cause” by “embedding” them with a military unit. Even the most independent-minded war correspondents have found it difficult not to identify psychologically with the soldiers on whom they rely for their safety, lodging, food, supplies and information.

This success in controlling the media represents the ultimate victory of the military over a free press.

Published in The Khaleej Times.

One of the most exciting features about the general election campaign currently being fought in Britain has been the relegation to the sidelines of the media, especially the political commentary writers. This has been due partly to the introduction of TV debates between the leaders on the three parties, Labour, Conservatives and Liberals, and partly to the intervention of the Internet, particular the Twitterati.

How the political leaders must be ruing the day that they agreed to the TV debates. And how the political commentators must be kicking themselves for failing to realise that the debates would make them redundant.

For election after election the public has relied on the political commentators to tell them how the candidates were doing, what they stood for and why they should or should not vote for them. This made these media people all powerful. Suddenly this power has been taken away from them, never to be returned. Instead everyone who watched the TV debates could learn for themselves what the candidates policies were, how well they were presented and get an impression of whether their political masters were to be trusted to keep their promises. The intermediaries were removed.

They put up a fight, of course. The moment the debates had ended the TV coverage switched to the various political party rooms where the media interviewed the party spin doctors who tried to put the best possible face on their masters’ performances. It was embarrassing to watch as, of course, each spin doctor claimed a victory for his boss.

It was also embarrassing because we, the viewers, were able to compare the reality of what we had just seen to the fantasy world that the spin doctors and political commentators painted for us. The thought inevitably came to us that perhaps there had always been this gap.

The media tried to blame the leader of the Liberals, Nick Clegg, for their sidelining. There had been a swing to him because he was “TV friendly” and had handled the demands of the medium brilliantly. But behind the panic was the realisation that Clegg’s platform includes the introduction of a fairer voting system and a more transparent party funding system.

If Clegg should win or hold a balance of power, the media would suffer. As George Monbiot, one of the few progressive columnists covering the election, put it: “The press barons would no longer be able to push an unrepresentative party into office or easily manipulate it once it’s there.

“The liberal press claims to provide an antidote to these powers, but it still allows them to frame the question. It is obsessed by Westminster politics and the narrow range of interests that divide the main parties, while neglecting both the external forces that limit political choice and the grassroots movements that seek to confront them.”

Simultaneously, we have the arrival of twitter on the political scene. Some of Clegg’s most fervent supporters can be found on Twitter and the other parties will ignore them at their peril. The more the conventional political press has turned on Clegg, the greater has been his support on Twitter.

Tweeters used the social networking site to lampoon the Conservative press, particularly the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Sun, which had been running scare stories trying to blame Clegg for all Britain’s ills. The big thing about all this is that the tweeters are young. Many have not voted before. Many did not plan to vote this time around. But the demise of the professional political commentator and the advent of the TV political debate have drawn them into this election in a big way. Now they may well decide who wins. It can only be good for democracy.

Every now and then you can come across a book that is so startling that it changes your view of the world. I found such a book this week. It is one of the great love stories of all time and it concerns Queen Victoria, Empress of India, and a humble Muslim man from Agra, Hafiz Abdul Karim.

It is a story that has been concealed, only hinted at, for more than a century. It is a story that had social and political implications. It is a story that illuminates how the British Empire functioned at its peak. But above all, it is an intensely human story about a love affair that lasted 14 years between a woman and man 44 years younger than her.

They triumphed over the opposition of politicians, the Royal Court, the Queen’s advisers, Viceroys of India and the Queen’s family. (At one stage her family considered whether they should have her declared insane, and on her death burned many of her letters to Abdul and, in effect, had him deported back to India. The fullest account to date of this amazing story is told by Shrabani Basu, an Indian author and journalist based in London. Her book, “Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant” is the result of years of research and a tracking down of new sources of information.

Adbul came into Victoria’s life at the time of the Golden Jubilee. He had a humble background — his family worked at Agra jail — and he had been chosen as a servant to help out during?the festivities in Britain. But his position at court soon changed. The Queen decided that she wanted to learn Urdu and that Abdul would be her teacher, her “munshi”. They met daily and he became devoted to her and she to him. She lavished gifts and decorations and property on him, some quite substantial. She gave him 400 acres of land in the Agra region, much to the dismay of the Viceroy who felt that bypassing the Prime Minister and Secretary of State for India in this manner was not justified. The Queen ignored him.

She began to bombard various Viceroys with letters suggesting how India should be run. Whatever the Queen and Abdul discussed today, would be in a letter to the Viceroy tomorrow. All this seriously worried the Palace. Curry was on the menu at whichever palace the Queen was staying at — to the horror of the Royal chefs. Palace rooms were stuffed with Indian valuables and artifacts. Royal courtiers were ignored in favour of Abdul. They tried a protest strike, and sent one of their numbers to the Queen to announce that if she took Abdul on her Diamond Jubilee tour of Europe they would not be going.

Victoria was so angry she swept the contents of a table in front of her crashing to the ground. The courtier fled, the strike collapsed, and Abdul accompanied the Queen on her European tour.

How intimate was the relationship? There are clues: little, personal notes in the Urdu homework Abdul set the Queen; emphasis on love poems in Urdu. But for me the clinching piece of evidence is a letter from Victoria to Abdul that has survived.

Abdul’s wife came from India to join him. Victoria was disturbed to find that the wife was childless and wrote to Abdul a letter setting out in intimate detail how he should go about getting ?her pregnant.

After Abdul was deported to India he seemed to fade away and died four years later. He was only in his forties. Why should their love story be resurrected now? Because it is all part of the rich history that the two nations share.

Published in The Khaleej Times.

Some years ago I attended a conference outside London run by a Buddhist organization who wanted to know why the Western media had dozens of war correspondents on their staffs but not a single peace correspondent. It was a simple, fair and important question and although we argued about it for hours no satisfactory answer emerged. As far as I know the Buddhists are still looking.

They will be greatly helped by a new academic study published in “Media, War and Conflict” (Sagepublications.com) which draws on a six country study of viewers of CNN International, BBC World and Al-Jazeera English to see whether broadcasters foster cross-cultural understanding or a clash of civilizations. War or peace?

The study was carried out by Shawn Powers of the University of Southern California, and Mohammed el-Nawawy, of Queens University of Charlotte, NC, USA.

They are not impressed with the job that war correspondents have been doing. “Media coverage of contemporary conflict has been dominated by a style of ‘war journalism’ that is more likely to further international tensions between global publics,” they write.

They quote other findings by academics that suggest that the mass media are both structurally and institutionally inclined to concentrate on escalation of conflict rather than on solutions.

The journalists’ professional standards have grown to thrive on drama, sensationalism and emotion and are therefore more compatible with war than peace. “War provides visuals and images of action. It is associated with heroism and conflict, focuses on the emotional rather than on the rational and satisfies news values demands—the present, the unusual, the dramatic, simplicity, action, personalization and results.”

The authors quote “Promoting Peace through the News Media” by G. Wolfseld to explain why peace principles and media principles are contradictory. “A peace process is complicated; journalists demand simplicity. A peace process takes time to unfold and develop; journalists demand immediate results. Most of the peace process is marked by dull, tedious negotiations; journalists demand drama.”

Further, the continuous demand for news in an environment that is dominated by 24/7 satellite television has led to sensationalization and trivialization of often complex stories and a temptation to highlight the entertainment value of news.

The authors say that in times of war today’s mainstream media tend to tailor their coverage in ways that reinforce what they perceive to be the attitudes and opinions of their target audiences. They feel that it is in their best commercial interests to give their viewers what they want, or what they believe their viewers want.

The media snapped up Samuel Huntington’s theory of an inevitable clash of civilizations because it offered an explanation for the emergence of a new and uncertain international order and, more importantly, an explanation that was ideologically and structurally similar to the much-missed Cold War.

Western journalists had again the simple us-versus-them narrative that had been so effective at mobilizing Western (particularly American) public opinion during the Cold War.

But the risk of dependence on international media that tends to foster attitudes of fear and hate must be a serious threat to peace in the globalised world of the 21st century, the authors conclude.

But they have some good news. The appearance of Al-Jazeera English offers, they say, a tremendous opportunity for a new direction in the discourse of global news flow. With a potential audience of over one billion English speakers, it could have the power to change “war journalism” into “peace journalism”.

The indicators are good. The authors’ survey found that the more months a viewer had been watching Al-Jazeera English the less dogmatic they were in their thinking. For instance, viewers who were dependent on BBC World and especially on CNN International were more supportive of US foreign policy generally.

This is an area that has been crying out for examination and now that these academics have set the ball rolling those Buddhists I met years ago might yet get the answer they were seeking.

Phillip was the guest lecturer last night at City University’s Graduate School of Journalism in a talk titled Adventures in Journalism: Tall Tales and True Scoops.

The lecture was written up by Journalism.co.uk, a short excerpt of which is below (click here for the full story).

Journalists working in a digital age should not underestimate the importance of ‘off-the-street’ whistleblowing, investigative journalist and author Phillip Knightley has said.

The transformation of newspapers into commercial machines is strangling investigative journalism and leaving huge scoops uncovered, Knightley said…. It was a ‘great mistake’ for newspapers to move from city centre premises to cheaper out-of-town locations, making access more difficult for potential sources.

The migration had severed one of the fundamental links between investigative journalists and their informants, Knightley argued. “A newspaper has got to be in the centre of things,” he said. “Prospective whistleblowers used to be able to walk down the northern side of Fleet Street and go past three or four newspapers.”

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 10 July 2006.

‘He had all-round ability. There wasn’t a job in journalism he couldn’t do’

I joined The Sunday Times in 1965 and Harry Evans arrived shortly after. The paper was changing from an old-fashioned, Tory-orientated newspaper into a dynamic exposure paper, and he was a breath of fresh air.

The Insight team got going and you were seconded there when things got interesting. The idea was to tell people what was really going on. Evans’s role in that was absolute confidence in everybody working for him. He encouraged people to stretch themselves and never stinted on cost.

I realised I was working on something exceptional when someone said, “It’s Paris Fashion Week. Let’s have a new look at the fashion world”. The next day, The Sunday Times had three fashion writers there, three reporters from Insight and two cameramen – and we got about 800 words!

But we had tried. If a similar idea had come up the following week, Evans would have said, “Go for it”. He carried everybody’s loyalty because of his all-round ability. There wasn’t a job in journalism he couldn’t do.

A big story was Thalidomide. If a section editor today went to the editor and said, “I want to do a story about a drug called Thalidomide. It’s marketed for pregnant women but we suspect about 8,000 children have been born deformed because it’s not safe. It’s made by the biggest advertisers in our paper and they will fight all the way to prevent us from publishing. It mightn’t stand up in the end, and if we include legal costs it might run to a couple of million”, what editor would say go ahead?

Phillip Knightley was a Sunday Times investigative journalist for 20 years. Sir Harry Evans edited The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981.

Photo by Dan Callister / Rex Features ( 498934E ) Sir Harold Evans, New York, 07 Oct 2004

Published in The Independent, 14 October 2005

The Great War for Civilisation:
The Conquest of the Middle East
by Robert Fisk
(Fourth Estate, £25)

This brilliant but enormous book (no less than 1,366 pages) has been sixteen years in the making. Its obvious ingredients are 328,000 notes, documents and dispatches and Robert Fisk’s thirty years’ experience of reporting the Middle East. But there is also a hidden element – the author’s ethical, philosophical and moral approach to his life’s work.

Fisk believes that most journalists who have reported from the tragedy-strewn and bloody countries of the Middle East have failed their readers and viewers. He has decided that they have been competent – even outstanding – in giving the who, how, where, what and when of events but have left out the “why”. He says that every journalist in the Middle East needs to walk around with a history book in his back pocket to remind him or her why we got to where we are; why the injustices and horrors of yesteryear are engraved in the people’s minds and why they have a powerful influence on what happens next.

This conviction was put to the test in a most personal manner. Fisk was on the Afghanistan border in November 2001 when a crowd of refugees from the American bombing turned on him and began to stone him. His head was split open, blood clouded his vision and for a while it looked as if he might not survive. He fought back and then realised what he was doing. “What had I done? I kept asking myself. I had been hurting and attacking and punching the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country – among others – had been killing. . . God spare me, I thought. The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too.”

He escaped and decided he would not be able to live with himself unless he stuck to his convictions and explained to his readers why the Afghan crowd had attacked him. So he wrote about the humiliation and misery of the Muslim world and how the determination of the Alliance that “good” must triumph over “evil” even if it meant burning and maiming civilians and their families. He concluded that if he were an Afghan refugee, “I would have done what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.”

It is a measure of how intensely Fisk is hated by some that his mail included unsigned Christmas cards regretting that the Afghans had not finished the job. Americans were particularly vicious. The Wall Street Journal carried an article which was headed “A self-loathing multi-culturalist gets his due.” The Canadian/American columnist, the pugilistic Mark Steyn, wrote of Fisk’s account of his ordeal: “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter.”

It is not only Fisk’s efforts to explain the Muslim side of events but to understand them that makes him enemies. He is also seen as an apologist for the West’s worst bogeyman, Osama bin Laden. Fisk has interviewed bin Laden three times, once in the Sudan and twice in Afghanistan. The two men got on well, even though Fisk says that bin Laden tried to recruit him. From Fisk’s description of the meetings we get an impression of the man very different from the one generally disseminated in the West. Fisk says bin Laden is devout, shy, thoughtful and like Bush and Blair possesses that dangerous quality – total self-conviction. Fisk says bin Laden has an almost obsessive interest in history and believes that it is working against the United States for whom hatred “lies like blanket” over the Middle East.

Fisk got his break on The Times in its glory days when, aged only 29, the then foreign editor Louis Heren, offered him the Middle East as his beat. He had the temperament for the job – adventurous but not foolhardy: “There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.” He stayed with The Times for 18 years and says it was always loyal to him and that he had great trust in its editors.

Then in July 1988 a story he had written for The Times, the results of his investigation into the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus by the American warship Vincennes, killing 290 passengers and crew, was cut and changed, its meaning distorted by omission. “This, I felt sure was the result of Murdoch’s ownership of The Times . . . Readers of The Times had been solemnly presented with a fraudulent version of the truth.” So he resigned and went to the work for The Independent where he remains today. In the book he justifies his long explanation of why he left The Times by writing–and any serious reporter has to agree with him–”When we journalists fail to get across the reality of events to our readers, we have not only failed in our job, we have also become a party to the events that we are supposed to be reporting.”

Fisk’s critics complain that he is not objective and detached. This is right. He is subjective and engaged. What’s wrong with that? We are talking here about different views on what journalists, especially foreign correspondents, are for. Fisk has thought a lot about this. He writes: “I suppose, in the end, we journalists try – or should try – to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: ‘We didn’t know – no one told us.’ ”

But he quickly realised that this is not enough. Our leaders present war as a drama, a battle of good versus unspeakable evil and demand that we are either with them or against them. They promise that with God on our side and minus a few hard-won civil liberties we will march to eventual victory, But, as Fisk points out: “War is not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.” Then one day he meets Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist whose articles on the occupied Palestinian territories Fisk rates higher than anything written by non-Israeli reporters. She gives him a better definition of his duty: “Our job is to monitor the centres of power.”

So he began to challenge authority, all authority, “especially when governments and politicians take us to war, when they decide that they will kill and others will die.” He continues to fulfill this duty with passion and anger. As he admits, his work, especially in this powerfully-written book,is filled with accounts of horror, pain and injustice. His triumph is that he has turned a slightly dubious and over-romanticised craft into a honorable vocation.

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