LONDON, 13 September 2004 — In London last Wednesday, the Council for Arab-British Understanding kept up its valiant work with a lecture on the British media’s coverage of the Palestine-Israel conflict. At Portcullis House, close to the House of Commons, the Council’s co-chairman, MP John Austin, introduced a well-attended talk by Greg Philo, professor of communications at Glasgow University. The product of extensive research, Philo’s grimly instructive new book, “Bad News from Israel”, documents the growing failure of the media in Britain to do justice to the Palestinian point of view.
Philo explained how British television news programs (from which the bulk of the population derives its knowledge of current affairs) nowadays operate on the assumption that viewers have a 15— second attention span and that to burden them with anything other than sound bites is to risk losing their interest. The result is that news bulletins concerning the Palestine-Israel conflict are dominated by sensational images, by attention-grabbing film of tanks and stone throwing, with no more than token effort being made to explain the context of such footage. There was a time when British television executives spoke of the “mission to explain”. Now, even at the BBC, their mission is above all to entertain.
Philo went on to discuss the “incredible confusion” which prevails among large sections of the British public regarding the source and significance of the conflict. Questioning ordinary Britons, Philo and his colleagues discovered that the overwhelming majority of them had no idea what it was about. Among other extraordinary examples of ignorance, many assumed that the “occupied territories” were not under military occupation by Israel but were simply “occupied” by Palestinians in the purely matter-of-fact way that someone might be said to occupy a house. Philo provoked rueful amusement when he pointed out that some Britons were of the opinion that the throwing of stones by young Palestinians stemmed not from profound and understandable grievances but from unsatisfactory parenting. Yet when it was explained that the Palestinian stone-throwers were often reacting to the destruction of their homes and property, the response of interviewees was very different. In those circumstances, declared the same people, they too would be hurling whatever missiles they could lay their hands on.
Much of Philo’s talk was taken up with the way the British media connives at entrenching public ignorance. Philo insists that his findings demonstrate conclusively the pervasive bias of news broadcasts in favor of the Israeli perspective. Whereas dead Palestinians are routinely described as having been caught in “crossfire”, Israeli fatalities are apt to be portrayed as “cold-blooded” and “savage” killings. What, according to Philo, especially serves to cloud the understanding of the British public about the Middle East is the London media’s mounting reliance on US spokespersons with a Zionist agenda. One of his more startling claims was that at times there is a more wide-ranging debate in Israel about the conflict than there is in Britain. A member of the audience suggested that the increasingly one-sided representation of Middle East affairs reflected Britain’s growing subservience to the Washington. The former BBC Middle East correspondent, Tim Llewellyn, who shared the platform with Philo, did not demur. He spoke of the trend toward the “Americanization” of communications in Britain and of the cowed state of the BBC in the wake of the Hutton inquiry (which chastised the corporation for implying that Tony Blair’s government exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein).
Philo believes that inadequate coverage of what is happening in the Middle East is stifling the democratic spirit in Britain. Faced with endless news bulletins that highlight the region’s escalating violence while failing to make sense of it, viewers are retreating into what he called a “poisous despair”. Far from writing to their MPs or e-mailing the BBC with their concerns, they feel they are being exposed to a crisis that is never going to be resolved. Yet meanwhile, Philo observed, Israel’s proponents — not least in the United States — are more committed to their cause than ever, missing no opportunity to challenge negative accounts of Israeli behavior. Specialists in instant rebuttal, they have already deluged the Amazon website advertising Bad News from Israel with reviews which revile the book as crude anti-Israel propaganda. Philo recalled the patently orchestrated Zionist effort to discredit John Pilger’s television documentary Palestine is still the issue. After the program — which detailed Israeli brutality toward Palestinians — was transmitted, Pilger was bombarded by several thousand hostile e-mails, the bulk of them originating in the US. Because of this concerted vilification, the veteran journalist was obliged to write a lengthy justification of a program that in due course was to be categorically cleared of bias by the television complaints authority.
Philo’s message to the audience at Portcullis House was that bad though the situation he described may be, it is not intractable.
As he pointed out, the “public spaces” in which to challenge the media version of events do exist; the BBC and other broadcasters cannot be accused of denying people the opportunity to emulate the “corrective” zeal of Israel’s supporters. Many in the audience will have needed no persuading of the pressing need to redress the lack of balance in British coverage of the Middle East conflict.
— Neil Berry is a freelance journalist living in London. He is working on a book about British Arabists and British Zionists.
Anthony Sampson
The Independent
LONDON — Are the Americans acquiring a ruling class, just when the British are finally losing theirs? Certainly the Bush family is now quite openly reveling in its dynastic strength, proclaiming a family continuity which has little connection with the old American ideal. The tradition of the self-made president, “from log cabin to the White House”, and the promise of the “century of the common man” have gone out of the window.
At the Republican convention last week, George W. Bush was backed up by his father George H. W. Bush, his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, and his nephew George P. Bush who already shows promise as a future president, while a score of Bush relations was among the Republican activists.
It seemed like a throwback to British politics in the 18th or 19th centuries. The two British authors of a new book on American politics, The Right Nation, begin by quoting Sir Lewis Namier, the historian of the age of George III, who wrote that English parliamentary history “is made by families rather than individuals”; and they go on to add: “The same could be said of American political history, especially in the age of George I and George II.” The Bush dynasty established by the president’s grandfather Sen. Prescott Bush now looks more like British aristocratic rule than the previous tradition of American political upstarts — such as Truman, Nixon or Clinton. Transposed to 18th-century Britain, George W. Bush might have been the third Marquess of Bush. It was hardly surprising that he should keep referring to Winston Churchill — who was not only the victor of World War II but also the son of the Duke of Marlborough.
The Democrat challengers have been hardly less blue-blooded: first Al Gore, the son of a senator from an old American political dynasty; then John Kerry, with the style and wealth of a Boston Brahmin — even though his grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Germany.
But the Bush family’s strength lies not so much in its conservative continuity as in its adaptability, and its ability to retain power through fast-changing political changes: To quote The Right Nation again: “There is no better introduction of Republicanism in the past generation — from patrician to populist, from Northeastern to Southwestern, from pragmatic to ideological — than the radical transformation of Republicanism’s current leading family, the Bushes.” Thus the first President Bush, with his Wasp Ivy League style, was able to migrate to Texas, where he could both make a fortune and link up with the rough-hewn voters of the oilfields. And he produced a son who, partly by the accident of his own drunken youth and later repentance, was able to emerge as the model of the populist leader with a folksy born-again style — while still inheriting the shrewd experience and political connections of his family.
Above all, the family had money, and a deep understanding of how to raise money for political campaigning, which depended, much more than before, on huge resources. The Bushes were interlocked with the powers of the corporate world, as the great British political families had been interlocked with landed interests and fiefdoms; and they had the same natural instinct for seeing where the real power was moving as the Cecils or the Churchills.
But in the meantime British politics has been moving in the opposite direction. Looking at the reshuffled Labour Cabinet, and the new Tory Shadow Cabinet this week, we are reminded how far we have abandoned the tradition of the British ruling class.
It has been a slow demise, since the first Reform Bill of 1832 was expected to bring about its downfall. More than a century later, Macmillan’s government in the late 1950s still bore many of the marks of a ruling class, with a Cabinet full of aristocrats and Old Etonians. Harold Wilson’s Cabinet had few aristocrats; but it was dominated by an intellectual aristocracy of Oxford dons who had little natural contact or communication with ordinary voters.
It was not till the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher that the Tories broke their links with the old ruling families and gave way to self-made businessmen and professional politicians from Cambridge. Michael Howard’s new Shadow Cabinet is largely disconnected from any ruling class.
And the New Labour Cabinet is now a world away from any ruling class: With its array of self-made Scotsmen, Northerners and immigrants from the Commonwealth, including the Australian Patricia Hewitt, the South African Peter Hain, the Guyanese Lady Amos and the Ghanaian Paul Boateng. Only Hilary Benn, the son of Tony Benn and grandson of the Labour peer Lord Stansgate, remains as a hereditary politician.
The prime minister, it is true, was brought up with some feel for British politics, as the son of a Tory barrister who wanted to be an MP, but he showed little interest in politics at his public school or at Oxford. It was showbiz and the law, with much help from his wife, that pressed him toward public life.
Insofar as British ministers have a common class, it is a professionalized politicians’ class, of people brought together by careers in party politics without much experience of life outside Westminster and their constituencies, and with a fitful knowledge of business.
It is true that Blair and his colleagues increasingly need businessmen, whether as donors, collaborators or patrons. But they depend heavily on a few rich men, and their approaches are amateurish, compared with the systematic links of the Bush administration with huge and shady corporations such as Enron or Halliburton — which are the ultimate support for America’s new ruling class.
The British political class might seem far preferable to the emerging American rulers: The combination of political families and greedy corporate backers, who often seems to bear out the nightmares about the military-industrial complex. But the shortcomings of British politicians become much more apparent as they become more dependent on American policies and bargains, Blair’s government begins to look like innocents abroad when confronted by the solid ranks of Republican rulers and their corporate allies. British politicians can be thankful to have got rid of the arrogance and self-interest of their old ruling class. But they need to be reminded of the advantages of the best of it — the tradition of public service and long-term thinking. They need to escape from the short-term pressures of opportunism and dependence that are so evident. And as they face America’s new ruling class, with all its cynical bargains with corporations and manipulation of the voters, they need to remember the British still have their own inherited values and traditions of political integrity.
