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.

The big unanswered question in the never-ending war on terror, the question the West is afraid to tackle, is: how can we win against an enemy who is prepared to die for the cause he or she espouses? How can we beat the suicide bomber?

The West has tried to play down their role in the war by denigrating them: suicide bombers are crazy, depressed, half-wits manipulated by terrorist masterminds; their acts are more about suicide than about terrorism. Or suicide bombers are ignorant religious fanatics who believe that they will reap their rewards in the afterlife.

Surprisingly, there has been little real research about what motivates the suicide bomber or what their motivation is. Unless they have left statements explaining themselves there has been little material to work with, interviews after the act obviously being impossible.

Shankar Vedantam, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, has set out remedy this gap in our knowledge. He has written a book called “The Hidden Brain: how our unconscious minds elect presidents, control markets, wage wars and save our lives” (Scribe).

He draws heavily on the work of an Israeli psychologist, Ariel Merari, who has collected the biographies of suicide bombers whose missions were aborted, who changed their minds or who failed for other reasons. He found them in Israeli and other prisons and spent hours interviewing them.

The results are astounding. Suicide bombers are not crazy, a conclusion reached not only by Merari but by other psychologists as well. If anything, they have better mental health than the rest of the population. Religion is not their main motive and they are not more religious than anyone else. Many of them are secular. Some are even atheists.

They are not deprived underdogs of society. Many come from wealthy and privileged backgrounds. They list professions like architects, doctors and engineers in their CVs. They are not suicidal by nature. Nor are they nihilists. If anything they are more idealistic than average and more prone to feelings of guilt. To my mind not enough thought has been given to the suicide bombers’ sense of injustice and their feeling that they are fighting against an enemy so powerful that they can only make a mark by sacrificing their lives. Merari says that only a few listed personal vengeance as motivation but I have read that interrogations by Pakistan authorities of terrorists revealed that humiliation at the hands of their Western enemies and the ongoing Arab-Israeli confrontation was behind their decision to resort to terrorism.

So what does turn a person into a suicide bomber?

Shankar Vedantam says that one cannot believe what the bombers say are their motives. They may cite religion and may carry out their mission in the name of religion in part to explain their behaviour to themselves.

So in the end we are left with theories and he and Merari theorise that suicide bombers are influenced by what they call the psychology of small groups, the “band of brothers” syndrome known to all military historians.

“Military commanders have known for generations that people don’t give their lives for King, God and country. That may be what they say. In reality ordinary men and women give their lives for the sake of the small group of buddies in the trench ?next to them.

“The power that small groups wield over individuals explains why in every historical instance that has produced suicide bombers, the supply of men and women willing to volunteer to kill themselves has exceeded the demand . . . Suicide bombers belong to a very exclusive club and the exclusivity is one of its central appeals.”

One thing is certain. The suicide bomber is not going to go away until the conditions that brought about their rise go away. Many told Merari that if they were released from prison, they would volunteer for another mission and they thought the Israeli was crazy for not seeing how obvious and rational was their course of action.

Published in The Khaleej Times.

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.

It is nearly nine years since President Bush declared a global war on terror so it is fair to ask: how is it going? Well, the first point to make is that it is not called a war on terror anymore. It is the “global struggle against violent extremists”.

But whatever it is termed, the answer to how it is going is: very badly. Not only is there no end in sight—some military men talk of victory in 25 years—but Osama bin Laden, the man America vowed to get “dead or alive”, is as elusive as ever.

Britain and the United States claim that terrorism has grown into an international force that threatens all those who stand with the US. But wait a ?minute. This growth in terrorism has occurred during their colossal war against it, using all the military, political and intelligence powers at their disposal.

So as Saad al-Fagih, director of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, pointed out, “the logical conclusion must be that the so-called war ?on terror in its present form, is yielding precisely the opposite results to those intended.”

Further, as Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, charges, “War is itself terrorism… that taking away people and subjecting them to torture is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less.”

The main front in the war, now Afghanistan, remains a disaster. The British Army is taking casualties at a level not seen since the 1950s. The United Nations reported recently that Afghan civilian deaths doubled in 2009.

Two thirds of the British public believes that the war is unwinnable and all the troops should be brought home by Christmas. The hawks urge the Pentagon to put even more troops into the war, forgetting that General Westmoreland had a million soldiers in Vietnam but said he needed a million more in order to win.

At home there has been a shift in the public mood. Insiders are said to be telling President Obama he should follow the advice given to President Johnson in the middle of the Vietnam quagmire – “Declare victory and leave.”

And abroad the United States slides steadily downwards in the Anholt-GMI Nations Brand Index, the equivalent of a world popularity contest.

Some knowledgeable Americans recognise the danger. Robert Baer, a former top CIA officer, says: “Every time you kill a Muslim, whether it is an Israeli killing them or an American or a Brit, there is humiliation, anger, reaction and bombs go off somewhere.”

The unpalatable fact is that Britain and America are fighting an unwinnable war against an unidentifiable enemy. How can they fight terrorism when they cannot even agree what terrorism is?

That seems unlikely but either way what journalists should certainly be doing is reporting the views of terrorists so as to try to understand their motives. Would it not be more productive to try to understand what the terrorists want and what they would be prepared to accept to end their operations.

Instead acres of newsprint and hours of TV time have been devoted to condemning them as “evil”, a word which absolves us from thinking about the problem: if they are evil (born evil; grew up to be evil; taught to be evil? Which is it?), then it is useless to try to understand them.

But as David Clark, the former British Labour Party adviser points out, those who condemn terrorists as evil cannot answer the question: why is there more evil around today than there used to be? And they have nothing to contribute to the debate about what needs to happen next.

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.

These are the homepages of distinguished journalist and author Phillip Knightley. An Australian by birth, Phillip became part of the celebrated Sunday Times Insight team from the 1950s to the 1970s, breaking such famous stories as the Kim Philby spy scandal, the Profumo sex scandal and exposing the effects of thalidomide on new-born babies.

Now an acknowledged expert in the dark arts of warfare, having written the seminal text of wartime propaganda First Casualty, he lives in London and works as a freelance journalist for publications all over the world. He is the author of some 10 books, covering in depth some of the biggest stories of recent times. Most recently he has written his autobiography A Hack’s Progress and the critically acclaimed history Australia: A Biography of a Nation.

These pages aim to provide an archive of the freelance pieces written by Phillip Knightley, as well as information about his life and work, with links to his books for those interested in reading further.

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.”