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Hi Susanna,

I'm an independent writer currently concerned with mainstream media reporting of the 'Iranian nuclear threat'.

There are actions now being planned to confront (peacefully) journalists such as yourself who are failing to question the government position on this issue - a questioning which is the job of any objective journalist. See Jeremy Paxman's discredited admission that he was 'hoodwinked' over Iraq because he believed Colin Powell to be a trustworthy man!!! But as Media Lens pointed out when they took apart his excuse: 'Does not government submission of evidence mark the point where serious journalism begins rather than ends? What is the reason for journalism at all, if the responsibility is simply to accept what a US Secretary of State says because we “know” he “is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man”?'

I'm not sure if you are aware of the following taken from Media Len's latest alert:

'.. we can consider the filmed testimony of former Nato chief, General Wesley Clark, when he recalled  a conversation with a Pentagon general in 2001, a few weeks after the September 11 attacks:

‘He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”’

Clark added:

‘They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.’

He recounted a conversation he had had in 1991 with Paul Wolfowitz, then US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who told Clark: ‘we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us’.

In response, Clark said he asked himself: ‘the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s not to deter conflicts?’

Clark’s conclusion will be blindingly obvious to future historians, if not to contemporary journalists:

‘[T]here are always interests. The truth about the Middle East is, had there been no oil there, it would be like Africa. Nobody is threatening to intervene in Africa. The problem is the opposite. We keep asking for people to intervene and stop [violence]. There’s no question that the presence of petroleum throughout the region has sparked great power involvement.’

It is hard to imagine Clark being dismissed as a crazed conspiracy theorist lacking 'insider' knowledge – he was Nato chief, after all. But his account has been ignored – talk of a hidden agenda of realpolitik challenges the Manichean view of the world that makes ‘humanitarian intervention’ possible...'

I'm not sure either how aware you are Susanna of the many writers and journalists (independent of any corporation) who are now questioning the exact same build-up to war with Iran that we saw with Iraq. We have been anticipating this point for the last few years as we knew well that it was coming, as Clark's testimony makes clear. But the mainstream media (msm) are again falling into step and repeating the govt line rather than questioning it, as any journalist worth their salt should do, especially considering that the stakes are so very high for the innocent civilians in Iran who will be lying dead before long if this basic journalistic method is not applied - alongside the hundreds of thousands of innocent dead in Iraq who, with no exaggeration, could now be alive if the msm had questioned the lies over WMD's. When Pilger put to ITN chief David Mannion that his journalists had 'blood on their hands' over Iraq, Mannion's squirming said it all.

What we see too often in the msm, masquerading as a proper debate, is what ex-NY Times Middle East bureau chief Chris Hedges calls 'the narcissism of minor difference', whereby two guests argue a point (refereed by a news presenter) but within very narrow parameters, giving the impression the issue is being mined effectively when, in fact, the real, wider discourse is taking place on the internet, free of the culture of corporate journalism.

No-one is saying that journalists like yourself are deliberately failing to examine govt claims, it is simply the result of the culture in which you operate, but it is deeply damaging nonetheless and its consequences can be devastating as we have seen. Media Lens quoted Jeff Schmidt on this conditioning process:

"The qualifying attitude, I find, is an uncritical, subordinate one, which allows professionals to take their ideological lead from their employers and appropriately fine-tune the outlook that they bring to their work. The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology. The political and intellectual timidity of today's most highly educated employees is no accident." (Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000, p.16)

I mention US journo Gary Webb in my piece below, and his words are perhaps the most critical that any msm journo can hear:

"In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking under rocks. I didn't get any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as I could tell. It +encouraged+ enterprise. It +rewarded+ muckraking. And then I wrote some stories that made me realise how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress." (Webb, 'The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On', in Kristina Borjesson, ed., ‘Into The Buzzsaw - Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press’, Prometheus, 2002, pp.296-7)

That from the excellent Media Lens alert, 'Chaining the Watchdog' which also contains the section: 'You're Nobody Unless You're in Six Figures'.

There is urgency here in contemplating that there may just be a possibility that our govt is capable of lying about their true motives - who woulda thunk it? Something historian Mark Curtis proves is routine in his excellent book 'Unpeople' from which I quote in my piece here.

As long as mainstream journalists fail to stop and question before they regurgitate establishment information then innocent lives will be at risk. As independent writers, journalists and activists, we are not willing to let this happen again without a fight - a non-violent one of course.

Regards

Alison Banville