Why journalism Matters
The passing of one of the giants of campaigning and investigative journalism. Guatemala's corrupt attorney general and the subtle but important workings of TV bias in the coverage of conflict
4 minute read
In memory of John Pilger—both highly praised and bitterly pilloried for his work as an investigative and campaigning reporter
“It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it.”
We start the new year by marking the passing of one of the most prominent journalists of the last half of the 20th century, the Australian reporter and filmmaker John Pilger. He died at the age of 84 of pulmonary fibrosis in London on December 30, 2023.
Although he began his career in his native Australia it was in the UK where he established his career, starting off with what was then the crusading Daily Mirror under the leadership of legendary chairman Hugh Cudlipp in the 1960s. He twice won British Press Journalist of the Year awards, in 1967 and 1979. He was also lauded as a humanitarian who told the stories and took the part of common people caught up in war, injustice and violence.
Granted, he won dozens of other awards for his journalism and film making, but his main focus was on the many ordinary punters who read his articles and watched his TV films. One reader commended him for “regularly and willingly exposing himself to mockery and vilification by those who lack his principles and moral courage…for having more balls than the rest of the Fourth Estate put together”.
He came to prominence, and is still often best remembered for his fearless reporting from Cambodia for the Mirror which often spread from the front over multiple pages. In it he revealed that as many as two million people out of a population of seven million had been murdered or died of starvation during Pol Pot’s heinous Khmer Rouge regime.
Pilger’s reporting led to $USD45 million being raised in aid to help Cambodia, a huge sum in the 1970s.
Documentary films
His print career soon developed into making documentary films shown on television around the world. His reporting on Cambodia led to the documentary Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia which found an audience of 150 million viewers across 50 countries and won more than 30 international awards.
His journalism had enormous impact despite the fact that he was relentlessly critical of American and British foreign policy. Often during his films Pilger made controversial revelations and expressed anti-establishment viewpoints. But this didn’t stop his work being highly popular on commercial TV channels and later in the cinema, as well as in newspapers and magazines.
Over more than 40 years, that work was wide ranging and prolific. He made more than 60 documentaries, often looking at the underlying political power machinations that too often left innocent victims in its wake. From 1970 right up until 2019 his output of films, books and articles was non-stop, as a visit to his website johnpilger.com will attest.
In his obituary in The Guardian newspaper, Anthony Hayward outlined just some of the major issues that Pilger put under the investigative microscope, often pointing fingers at culpable western governments and institutions, which other journalists either failed to explore or simply ignored.
World in Action
“From his first ITV documentary, in 1970, Pilger made waves. In The Quiet Mutiny, for Granada Television’s World in Action current affairs series, he broke the story of the disintegration of morale among US troops in the Vietnam war – and reported that some officers were being killed by their own soldiers.
“Following a complaint by the US ambassador in London, the ITA – then commercial television’s regulator – rapped Granada over the knuckles, setting the tone for future battles with Pilger over questions of balance and impartiality.
“Many of his documentaries exposed human rights abuses. At great personal risk, Pilger and his regular director, David Munro, entered countries run by military dictatorships. In Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994), he interviewed eyewitnesses to genocide by the occupying Indonesian regime in East Timor and revealed an unreported massacre. In Inside Burma: Land of Fear (1998), he uncovered the generals’ torture.
“But a constant subject of Pilger’s films over almost 40 years, beginning in 1976, was his homeland and the treatment of Indigenous Australians. Most significantly, he made The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985), the bicentenary trilogy The Last Dream (1988) and Utopia (2013), telling the story of his great-grandparents’ arrival in Australia as convicts, Aboriginal poverty and deaths in police custody, and the stolen generations of mixed-heritage children taken from their families.”
Alongside such extensive and brave investigative reporting inevitably there were also sometimes mistakes and poor judgement to be found. These featured in somewhat acerbic obituaries in the London Times and Daily Telegraph.
As Dominic Ponsford editor of the UK Press Gazette explained:
“… he was also seen by some as a propagandist who sought out facts to back up pre-determined narratives.
“Famously in 1982 he wrote about how he had bought an eight-year-old girl in Bangkok, exposing a modern slave trade.
“Although the wider issue was correct, as The Times obit explains, it turned out Pilger had been duped by his fixer and the girl and her mother were paid to play a part.
Most recently, his contrarian, anti-Western approach led to Pilger supporting a pro-Russian stance in the war in Ukraine. This in the face of overwhelming evidence of war crimes on the part of Putin regime and its ruthless suppression of press freedom and political opposition at home.
One of Pilger’s most inspirational projects (one, indeed which led to the creation of this Why Journalism Matters newsletter) is a book which he didn’t even write. Tell Me No Lies: Investigative journalism and its Triumphs (2004), edited by Pilger, is a review of some of the world’s most important and courageous investigative stories, from 1945 onward, including the work of little remembered heroes like Wilfred Burchett and legends such as Martha Gellhorn and Edward R. Murrow.
In his introduction to the book Pilger comments: “Why is journalism like this so important? Without it our sense of injustice would lose its vocabulary and people would not be armed with the information they need to fight it. Orwell’s truth that ‘to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country’ would then apply.”
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Corrupt Person of the Year obstructs democracy and justice in Guatemala
The world is looking forward to a host of elections in 2024, but rather than a celebration of the strength of democracy, global societies have learnt that democracy and the rule of law remain fragile plants in need of constant care and attention.
And the will of the people is not guaranteed even when an election result is clear cut.
Such has been the case in Guatemala—long plagued by brutal military rule and corruption-- where the reformist anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo won the presidential election decisively in August 2023. Initial results gave Arévalo 58.01% of the vote compared to his rival Sandra Torres who garnered only 37.24%.
But as the new year dawns he has yet to take power because of the anti-democratic manoeuvering of Guatemala’s attorney general, María Consuelo Porras.
Such has been the shameless audacity of Porras’s efforts to keep the corrupt ruling elite in power that she has earned the top prize for Person of the Year in Crime and Corruption 2023 from the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
Every year the OCCRP—the world’s leading investigative journalism outlet for corruption and organised crime — judges someone from around the world as representing the worst example of corruption over the past 12 months.
(As WJM readers may recall in 2022 it was the Russian mercenary and oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, killed by a not-very-surprising airplane bomb following his failed attempt to orchestrate an armed insurrection against the Putin regime.
Banal bureaucrat
According to the OCCRP, Porras is not so much a grasping kleptocrat as a banal bureaucrat, willing to calmly manipulate the procedural levers of power to cheat her opponents and frustrate the will of the people of Guatemala.
As OCCRP reports in their announcement about this year’s award: “ Porras has acted as an efficient instrument used by the government to eviscerate the rule of law. She has overseen efforts to prevent president elect Bernardo Arévalo from assuming office, including suspending his political party and raiding the election commission. Arévalo has called it a ‘coup in slow motion’.”
Maria Teresa Ronderos, director of the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP) is one of the OCCRP’s judging panel for this year’s ‘competition’.
She comments: "Porras is protecting what has been called in Guatemala ‘the pact of the corrupt,’ which involves bent businessmen, corrupt politicians, members of organised crime, and retired generals.
“She has brutally persecuted honest prosecutors, journalists, and activists, chasing them into exile and depriving the public of these crucial checks on authority."
Porras has overseen a justice regime that refuses to investigate and prosecute high level corruption cases, obstructed justice and appointed officials for their political standing instead of their competence.
In 2006, the United Nations established the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which was tasked with investigating “criminal groups believed to have infiltrated state institutions,” and oversaw the prosecution of some of the country’s worst offenders.
However, that work came to a halt after the election of Jimmy Morales as president in 2015. His administration attacked the CICIG, finally shutting it down in 2019. Porras, who was appointed Attorney General in 2018, played a key role in ousting the CICIG.
Undue favours
Porras’s mission has been to ensure that Guatemala's corrupt leadership stays in power. The US government sanctioned Porras in 2022, saying she had “repeatedly obstructed and undermined anti-corruption investigations in Guatemala to protect her political allies and gain undue political favour.” The European Union is also considering sanctions on those attempting to reverse the vote by Guatemalans.
There have been street protests against the actions of the old guard and calls for Porras to resign or to be dismissed from office, but so far she and the corrupt elite remain clinging to power.
But it is hoped that external pressure and sanctions against Porras and other members of the regime will lead to Arévalo being able to take office, even if that happens months after he was duly elected.
Guatemalans have placed a great deal of hope in Arévalo. His victory is considered to be the vindication of the legacy of his father, Juan José Arévalo, Guatemala’s first freely elected president who governed the country from 1945 to 1951 and who created the Guatemala’s social security system.
After Bernardo Arévalo’s election last year he spoke of trying to restore hope to his country: “What the people are shouting at us is: ‘Enough of so much corruption’ – This is a demonstration of the change of mind that we are witnessing in Guatemala. Guatemalans today have hope and we are celebrating in the streets the recovery of the sense of hope in our country.”
One of the indications of that sense of hope is the prospect of release from detention of Guatemala’s leading investigative journalist José Rubén Zamora. In October an appeals court overthrew the six-year prison sentence imposed in June on trumped-up charges of money laundering and ordered a retrial which is scheduled for February 5 this year.
Zamora, the founder of the newspaper elPeriodico remains in detention as he also faces further charges of using false documents. Reporters without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists continue to call for his release and for his right to a fair trial.
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5 minutes
Both sides of the story will not be televised
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine almost two years ago, we in the West have been treated to extensive coverage about the ludicrous and pernicious propaganda doled out by Russian television channels regarding the conflict.
After reviewing 50 hours of Russian television coverage of the war in Ukraine the New York Times reported in May 2022: “Much of Russian news media is tightly controlled by the Kremlin, with state-run television working as a mouthpiece for the government. Critical reporting about the war has been criminalised.”
“Russian television’s convoluted and sometimes contradictory narratives about the war are not solely intended to convince viewers that their version of events is true, disinformation experts say. Just as often, the goal is to confuse viewers and sow distrust so audiences are not sure what to believe.”
By comparison, recent investigations of the TV news coverage broadcast by both the BBC and Israeli TV reveal how much more subtle and nuanced are the ways that the ‘free’ media in the West can be used to shape attitudes and perceptions of a conflict like the one in Gaza.
TV more patriotic
In a report in The Observer (the Sunday edition of the Guardian) on January 7 reporters Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum indicate that since the military operations began in Gaza, Israeli TV has become more patriotic than informative. TV coverage is important because nearly half of Israelis get their news from TV channels and they are influential in shaping public opinion.
Graham-Harrison and Kierszenbaum write: “…the Israeli media have rarely presented their audiences with such a uniformly patriotic vision of reality as they have over the past three months.
“A ‘United we will win’ slogan sits on the screen for most TV news and talk shows. Politicians face heavy criticism, but interrogations of the military, its strategies, its generals and ordinary troops are muted…the suffering of Gazan civilians barely features.”
The Observer report includes comment from one of Israel’s leading investigative journalists Raviv Drucker who describes how the October 7 attacks have changed the mainstream media’s attitude.
“The shock was so brutal, and the trauma is so hard that journalists see their role now, or part of their role, to help the state win the war. And part of it is showing as little as possible from the suffering in Gaza, and minimising criticism about the army…[Israelis] don’t see the pictures from Gaza that most of the world is seeing.”
Journalist Ana Saragusti who has reported from Gaza and is now press freedom director for the Union of Journalists in Israel corroborated that view.
“They [Israeli media] cover the Palestinians only in the framework of security. You hardly see any women, no kids. The spirit is that they are all Hamas.
“I think the media are not doing their job,” she added. “It’s not about emotion, it’s about policy.
Against us
“The majority of Israelis don’t understand how the world is suddenly against us, or why we are not the victim that should be supported, like we were on October 7 when all the world leaders came here in convoy to show support.”
In fact, far from being detached, according to the Observer report, TV, radio and newspapers have been used to make ‘explicit calls for the mass murder and expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza’ particularly on Israel’s Channel 13 where commentator Zvi Yehezkeli—without apology or sanction-- called on the military to start the war with Hamas by killing 100,000 Gazans.
According to the Observer Israeli military censors operate in every studio and newsroom and have released little detail of how the military operation is progressing on the ground.
And although many Israeli media outlets have correspondents in New York and London there has never been ongoing journalistic cover in the West Bank or Gaza. A notable exception is Amira Hass who writes for the Haaretz newspaper and lives in the occupied West Bank.
He comments: “Gaza and Ramallah…have more influence on Israeli lives and politics than London… Palestinians are part of this land, they are not going anywhere.”
Meanwhile, in the UK, the BBC has received persistent criticism that it is anti-Israeli, in part because it refuses to describe Hamas explicitly as a terrorist group. The complainants include the monitoring group BBC Watch and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
But this allegation of anti-Israeli bias is disputed by systematic social science research carried out by the UK investigative and campaigning outlet Open Democracy—research that goes back 20 years.
The Open Democracy (OD) report is written by Greg Philo and Mike Berry and readers interested in getting a rounded picture of the results and the methodology should read it in full. See link below.
They write: “Most studies carried out prior to the current fighting in Gaza – including research commissioned by the BBC itself – have repeatedly found that it is the Israeli perspective that is favoured. This judgement is formed on the most basic criteria, such as the number of appearances of spokespeople, the use of press statements and the legitimacy accorded to Israeli rather than Palestinian perspectives.”
Open Democracy’s initial research went back to the second intifada (the Palestinian uprising of 2000 to 2005). They took samples of 3500 lines of text which covered the first three weeks of the uprising and the way it was covered on mass audience bulletins on the prime channels BBC1 and ITV1.
“Only 17 of these, across both channels, mentioned any aspect of the history of the conflict. For the Palestinians, the loss of their homes and land when Israel was created, and the military occupation under which they have lived since 1967, are fundamental.
“Yet we found that explanations of the conflict given in news accounts tended to reduce it simply to a ‘cycle of violence’ that started when one side attacked and the other ‘retaliated’. In this initial sample we found that approximately three times as much text (50 lines) was devoted to explanations of the conflict as a ‘self-perpetuating’ cycle of violence, as was given to discussion of its origins or history.”
Suffocating occupation
This need for an understanding of the beginnings of the war were highlighted in a speech given last year by the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. His remarks were bitterly criticised by Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen who said he was not fit to lead the UN.
Guterres stated that the 7 October attacks “did not happen in a vacuum” and were related to the history of the occupation: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their lands steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
But according to the OD research ‘the BBC repeatedly gives reports of events without such context.
“For instance, on 23 November BBC Online reported that: “The conflict began when Gaza-based gunmen from Hamas attacked southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 240 others hostage.”
Although the BBC focuses coverage on the recent actions of Hamas, the ‘Palestinians see themselves as resisting the actions of Israel stretching back decades’.
OD also found that Israeli casualties were given proportionally more coverage than Palestinian ones by the BBC, and the language used to describe them was very different. Israeli military killings in Gaza are rarely referred to as murder or mass murder but words such as ‘atrocity, murder, lynch-mob and barbarically killed’ are very often used to describe the deaths of Israeli soldiers, but not of Palestinians.
“Such patterns are also evident in current reporting. We examined four weeks (7 October to 4 November) of BBC One daytime coverage of the 2023 Gaza war using the database TV Eyes to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves (not in direct or reported statements) to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths.
Decades-long struggle
“We found that “murder”, “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths.
“The same pattern could been seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).
“One senior BBC correspondent commented to us in 2002 that what was missing was the view that the Palestinians saw themselves as engaged in a decades-long struggle of national liberation ‘in which a population is trying to throw off an occupying force’.
“Our research has found that this perspective, if it occurs at all, is not developed as a theme by journalists or related routinely to events, and has nothing like the status given to the Israeli perspective which stresses that Israel is subject to terrorist attacks motivated by Islamic extremism and antisemitism.”
By contrast, Palestinians regard the Gaza attack by Israel in 2023 as genocidal in terms of ‘level of civilian casualties and damage to residential areas, infrastructure and health facilities, well beyond defined military targets’.
(There is more evidence referenced, but it should be added there is no discussion in this report of how BBC has covered Hamas’s long-standing rocket attacks on Israel including the several thousand fired on October 7, or of the network of tunnels allegedly built by Hamas under hospitals in Gaza.)
Philo and Berry conclude their examination of the research with a cautionary comment.
“We did not write this article or engage in research to justify the use of violence by anyone in any circumstances. But we write in the knowledge that peace can only come when realistic negotiations take place between people who are actually fighting. For peace to have any chance, the reasons for conflict must be understood and seriously addressed.”
Reference
Open Democracy report on BBC bias
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