Government criticism of UK media

'Scots with the Black Watch, living with the noise and peril of machine gun fire on the outskirts of Basra, have repeatedly heard BBC World Service suggesting the city fell two days ago.' Helen Puttick in the Herald, 25 th March, 2003.

Criticism of the media

Viewers and readers can see through the fog of war

From the Herald Editorial, 4 th April 2003

AN apology. The British media (or a majority of it) would like to say sorry for any distress caused to the government by the coverage of the war in Iraq. In reporting the facts about the deaths of civilians and allied troops, and in detailing the progress of the campaign, the media acted in the belief that this was the job of a free press in a democratic country. The error of those ways has now been made clear by David Blunkett, the home secretary, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's spokesman, the Labour Party chairman, and others, who in the past few days have accused the press of giving the public a distorted picture of events. Will the media ever learn?

It will be a sorry day if they do. War brings with it three certainties. First, people die. Secondly, things do not go according to plan. Thirdly, the government will shoot the messenger who reports such events. According to the government, reporters have been treating the British and American forces and the Iraqi regime as if they were "moral equivalents".

The media have failed, says the government, to apply the same scrutiny to the claims of a dictatorship as they do to allied assertions. Nor has it been made clear enough, particularly in the BBC reports from Baghdad, that reporters are operating under fierce Iraqi restrictions. In addition, al-Jazeera, the independent satellite television station, has been allowed to pump out "fiction" to the Arab world and the west. Mr Blunkett went further, accusing the station of being "linked into" the Iraqi regime.

The home secretary's case was undermined when, within hours of his speech in New York, al-Jazeera suspended operations in Baghdad after the Iraqi information ministry banned two of its correspondents. It was not the first time the British government has fallen into the gap between truth and reality. Need the taking and re-taking of the port of Umm Qasr be mentioned? Or the uprising at Basra that never was? Or the prime minister's description of the deaths of two British soldiers as executions, for which the MoD later apologised? Or the two Republican Guard convoys, said to be steaming south for a key battle, which failed to put in an appearance for the cameras?

Viewers and readers do not need any assistance to see through the fog of war. Being wise enough to balance information from many competing sources, including the internet, they are able to arrive at their own conclusions. They expect reporters to seek out the facts and the views of all sides - a job that occasionally involves great risk, as the death of Terry Lloyd, the television reporter, and Kaveh Golestan, a BBC cameraman, demonstrate. It is particularly ironic that the British press is being criticised for its reports of a war meant to bring free speech and democracy to a foreign land. The public has no difficulty appreciating the value of a free press, as in Britain, compared with a neutered one, as in Iraq. It is a pity the British government cannot always do the same.