One
thing I forgot to quote yesterday from editor-in-chief Katherine Viner’s long
exegesis about her reinvigorated Guardian
newspaper, was the following passage: “We will give people the facts, because
they want and need information they can trust, and we will stick to the facts.”
This almost child-like belief in “the
facts” is one of the prevailing myths of journalism, and is especially popular
among journalists who hold positions of authority. They are sincere believers,
usually, in the mission --- Viner’s title betrays this belief in the missionary
objective --- “A mission for journalism in a time of crisis.”
Perhaps I can be forgiven after half
a lifetime of working for newspapers to cast some doubt on the existence of
these “facts,” and on the reality of this great missionary cause. The best description of such facts is that given by the late,
inimitable socialist, Irish journalist and wit Claud Cockburn, who wrote:
To hear people talking about the
facts you would think that they lay about like pieces of gold ore in the Yukon
days waiting to be picked up by strenuous prospectors whose subsequent problem
was only to get them to market. Such a view is evidently and dangerously naive.
There are no such facts. Or if there are, they are meaningless snd entirely
ineffective; they might, in fact, just as well not be lying about at all, until
the prospector --- the journalist --- puts them into relation with other facts:
presents them, in other words. Then they become as much a part of a pattern created
by him as if he were writing a novel.
For
those who have never heard of Claud Cockburn, he was the son of a family of fairly
elevated status in Ireland, who started out working for The Times in Germany and the United States, resigned when sickened
by appeasement of the rising Nazi movement to start his own cyclostyled
newsletter that was reputed to be handed around out of the back of the hand in
Westminster to a fascinated political audience that couldn’t do without it, then
seamlessly and without any fuss morphed into the Communist party, and as
seamlessly morphed out of it into a latter-day life as a remarkable wit and
raconteur, before dying in 1981, leaving behind him a slew of books and one of
the most entertaining memoirs ever written.
The truth of his observation about
facts was borne in on me most vividly when I was a reporter for a Canadian
newspaper in London in the 1960s, and had the ten daily newspapers published
at that time delivered to my door every morning at 7.30. By reading them all,
from the Communist Daily Worker,
through the liberal Guardian
and News Chronicle, to the
conservative Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Times, not forgetting the popular mass-circulation Daily Mirror and Daily Express, one could get a fair idea of what might be going on
in Britain, but only a fair idea, not a definitive account.
The newspapers were capable of
reaching hilariously different conclusions from the same set of facts. And
personally I felt I could not discount any of them, even the popular tabloids
which had the capacity, when put to it, to illuminate important public issues
with bell-like clarity in simple language that would be comprehensible to everyone,
even to people with minimal education.
I remember a classic example of this
variety of opinion from the report on the Royal Commission on the Press in
Britain, published in 1948. A table was printed of the headlines published by
each of the newspapers reporting on a document issued by the government giving
the figures for houses built in the previous months. The government being
Labour at that time, naturally the headlines of the conservative papers
revealed the hidden truth, that the figures revealed scandalous neglect, if not
mismanagement; the newspaper supporting
the government, The Daily Herald, had
an entirely different opinion, claiming a triumph of successful governance; and
so on, down the line. So much, one might think, for the facts.
In the present day, one can observe
the same carefree use of “the facts”
every day on one’s television. I watch a
lot of television, and especially I watch stations that are owned and financed
by different governments --- the BBC for Britain, the CBC for Canada, RT for Russia, AlJazeera, owned by Qatar, a
small country in the Arabian gulf.
I am alone among my acquaintance in
watching RT, a station that has so exercised the authorities in the United
States that they have forced the station to register as a foreign agent. To me,
this is an entirely idiotic action. They could as well declare BBC or CBC to be
foreign agents, for one thing that has been brought home to me quite powerfully
from my watching of RT is that all these stations propagate news and
information within, in each case, an unquestioned set of (different) assumptions. The BBC is probably the greatest news
organization in the world, and yet one can watch it for days or months on end
without hearing it broadcast anything that might be held to question what is
the widely held set of assumptions known as “the western viewpoint.”
I listen to a lot of RT programmes,
and although their news never deals with events in Russia itself, and concentrates
on items that basically are critical of United States life, these programmes
seem to be based on information that is freely available to everyone, and are
more or less indisputable. RT is so far from being only an agency to propagandize
Russian values, that it regularly attracts to its screens prominent experts in the
west who have no hesitation, it seems, in accepting the invitations to appear,
and who have no reticence about criticizing Russia if they feel like doing
so. Their programmes are laden with former diplomats, former professors, and well-known experts. Programmes are run every week by
such Western luminaries as Chis Hedges, a freelance journalist after a lifetime
spent as a correspondent for the New York
Times, Larry King, the doyen of American online hosts, Ed Schultz, a battle-hardened veteran of
progressive causes, Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota, Alex Salmond,
the former leader of the Scottish nationalist party, and many others. In
addition there are regular programmes that attract interesting representatives
of ideas that are not much, if at all, featured on American private stations.
And they have two women interviewers, Sophie Shevardnadze, grand-daughter of
the former Soviet foreign minister, later president of Georgia, who has no
trouble attracting high-level experts from elevated circles in the West, and
Oxana Boyko, a reporter of wide experience, highly educated, and with the
authority to carry on illuminating argument with the most powerful brains from
anywhere. In fact, for example, this
week I heard Oxana discussing the state of Russia with Ichak Adizes, who is considered one of the most influential management consultants in the
world, and who is obviously a deeply
thoughtful man, who regretted that Russians appear to demand authoritarian leaders
to such an extent that any leader who tries to democratize his style is fated
to be replaced almost immediately
In relation to Putin Oxana said: “He
really needs to change his leadership style if he is to modernize Russia as he
says he wants to do,” and Adizes commented, “He wants to change, but he doesn’t
know how to go about it.” According to those who demonize Putin, these two
should be clapped in irons.
Just as these women accept and defend
their country, so exactly does Stephen Sackur, host of the long-running BBC
programme Hardtalk, expose himself week after week as a veritable repository of
Western values that he defends, when he thinks it necessary, with absolute
ferocity.
Meantime Claud Cockburn’s eclectic
style lives on. He gave rise to a family of journalists who are still prominent
in the UK and the US. His son Alexander,
one of those people (John Pilger, the admirable Australian reporter is another
such) who always had to be further left than anyone else, and founded the
excellent left-wing web site Counterpoint, that lives on five years after his
death. His brothers Andrew and Patrick are busy writing books that reveal some
of the dark corners of global politics to the naked eye, and are quite often to
be heard on RT. RT costs $3.50 a month, and I would no more be without it than
I would be without the BBC World Service, the CBC, or AlJazeera.
Between them, and with the help of
the many left-wing sites that consistently write excellent stuff describing our
present condition and espousing a better future for all of us, I do manage, I hope, to make some sense of the
facts that, as Claud said, could be lying about out there waiting to be picked up and put
to good use.
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