Location : Talks : Lenten2005 : Fraser

Truth, politics and the Fourth Estate

Morag Fraser

Jesuit Seminar Series 2005
February 2004

Edited version of this paper published in Eureka Street, 15(3) April 2005

These Lenten seminars have been introduced with the prophetic words of Mahatma Ghandi. Quote from flyer: "The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice."

First on Ghandi’s list was politics without principle. I want to elaborate on that theme. But I also wish to talk about the role and responsibility of the media. Do they guide us, honestly, towards truth, or are they the treasonous clerks, the scribblers (or broadcasters) who will help push us to perdition.

Most political leaders talk about truth. Not all are as confident or as frank in their view about truth as Joseph Stalin. So let’s begin with the worst first. This is what Stalin said: ‘We ourselves will be able to determine what is true and what is not.’

We know now, and have known for almost half a century, what kind of truth, and how ‘honest’ was the truth that Stalin determined for his people, and how catastrophic the consequences. Stalin might have died in his bed, but he caused the death of tens of millions of people, many of them his compatriots. In the end truth did deliver its summons upon the Stalin’s regime. But the people of the former Soviet Union are still paying the heavy social, psychological and economic price of having been forced to live with, in and through lies. Lies are a contagion. They fester in everyone they touch.

Unless we ignore both memory and recent history, we know what happens to societies that are founded on lies, dishonesty, evasions, weasel rhetoric and strategic propaganda. Innocent people suffer, grievously. Institutions that protect all of us crumble. The law is made a mockery; education—in schools and universities—becomes corrupt and co-opted. We see examples of that the Madrassas, which currently serve as training grounds for one brand of militant Islamic fundamentalism. We see it in Western academies, in our own universities, when political or financial When the moral and institutional underpinnings of a society are corrupted, it can take decades, sometimes centuries, to recover. Some societies never do recover.

We can’t say we don’t know. Even in secure and peaceful Australia, somewhere in our hearts we know it’s not just enough to live by bread and circuses. We have a personal responsibility to know about our world. We can all read. We can watch and listen. Many of us have the Internet at our fingertips. We are witnesses, not passive bystanders. Many of us have personally seen the creep of corruption in our own lifetime. In Richard Nixon’s Watergate America, in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, Cambodia, Chile, in Greece and Argentina under the generals, in Australia under our current immigration and detention regimes. None of that is ancient history. All of it is documented. And all along, we have been alerted by whistle blowers or inveterate truth tellers, like the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam or the Washington Post journalists Woodward and Bernstein, or the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh. Or here at home by men like Andrew Wilkie and more recently the modest intelligence analyst and weapons inspector, Rod Barton, interviewed two weeks ago on ABC Four Corners. So, we have been warned in advance what happens when we choose, as individuals or as nations, to value power or wealth above honesty, above truth.

Here is one of those inveterate truth tellers, George Orwell, from his Collected Essays I’ll read just a little:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible … Things like the dropping of an atomic bomb… can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aim of political parties. Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants are driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions … are sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry. This is called transfer of population, or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial or sent to camps…. This is called elimination of undesirable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

George Orwell was writing that essay at the end of the Second World War, as the Nazi death camps were being opened and Dresden was being bombed to ashes. Some of his details—reference to an atomic bomb for example—fix the essays in a particular time. But so much of it could have been written now. One need change the words only minimally: ‘border control’ for ‘rectification of frontiers’, ‘illegal enemy combatants’ for ‘undesirable elements’. For ‘camps’, well—in South Australia, you can name the names yourself. Or we can simply say Guantánamo. Or Abu Ghraib or the interrogation cells of Syria, Jordan, Morocco or Egypt. But the message remains the same.

As Orwell understood, it is easier to talk about dishonesty, lies, spin and propaganda when we are analysing the mode of operation of the ‘enemy’, the ‘other’, the moral foe. I began tonight with Stalin—an easy target, especially with hindsight. But remember how we once characterised Stalin. He was a Western ally, just as Saddam Hussein once was. He was ‘Uncle Joe’. It’s easy to look back and condemn. Much harder to look at now, to look inside, deal with dishonesty, lies, spin and propaganda when they comes not from the ‘other’ but from our own ‘side’. When dishonesty begins at home it is a much more difficult proposition. At an individual level, telling the honest truth is hard. It often requires more courage than we can muster. At a political level it seems even harder. Avoiding doing so has become an art form. In Western democracies like Australia’s, our politicians have a phrase for avoiding telling the truth. They call it ‘plausible deniability’.

If you have been listening to the recent Senate hearings in Canberra you will have heard ‘plausible deniability’ in operation when Senator Hill was questioned as to what he knew about Australians being involved in interviewing or interrogating terrorism suspects. And we will see more of ‘plausible deniability’ as the Rod Barton story and his ongoing revelations play out.

We saw deniable plausibility most blatantly, during the 2001 election campaign with ‘children overboard’. Of course we are now supposed to have ‘children overboard’ fatigue. We have ‘moved on’. But the issue of principle remains. Queensland academic and public service expert, Patrick Weller puts it very neatly and dispassionately in his useful very short book, Don’t Tell the Prime Minister. This is what he says:

The prime minister has the largest office in history and it is dedicated to providing him with information. In his initial comment to the media, he used the caveat: ‘If these reports are true’. He later said he would ask for checks to be made. If they were, he insists he was never told the outcome. The advisers never told him and he never pressed them…

Accountability is at the heart of Weller’s concerns. And mine. We haven’t ‘moved on’ from the need for it. What happens to the fabric of a democracy, let alone other forms of government, when our representatives are so reluctant to accepts responsibility? ‘Perhaps we need a change of attitude’, concludes Weller, perhaps we need one

closer to that of the man from whom Howard got his middle name: Winston Churchill. Certainly he was always partisan, blithely opportunistic, and often cynical. But he was prepared to take responsibility. When told of the loss of Singapore and the weakness of its defences, he is said to have commented: ‘I did not know, I was not told, I should have asked.’

That’s accountability. It accepts that public servants should check and tell. It accepts that ministers should ask. I’d like to see that.

Most of us would like to see that, if we are honest. But time passes, we become preoccupied with new issues, the footy, Australian idol, desperate Housewives, we forget, new elections are held and success carries with it a euphoria that can make victory seem synonymous with virtue.

W H Auden understood that particular phenomenon. Here is one of his more astringent poetic diagnoses:

Base words are uttered only by the base
And can for such
at once be understood.
But noble platitudes—ah there’s a case
Where the most careful scrutiny is needed
To tell a voice that’s genuinely good
from one that’s base
but merely has succeeded.

We are now at a point where the victors of recent elections in both Australia and the United States are riding high on success. And with success comes increased power. In Australia that means fewer curbs on, and scrutiny of, government after the 30th of June, when the Coalition assumes control in the Senate. In the United States electoral success means more clout and influence centralised in the Bush administration, with implications for the composition of the US Supreme Court. It also means an increased assertion of the executive power of the president as United Nations’ and Geneva Convention rules and norms come under question, are denigrated or simply bypassed in the prosecution of the ‘war on terror’.

What role will the media play in keeping governments and us, the citizens, honest in this brave new future? In defence of the best of my profession I’d like to make some distinctions between media, between television, radio and print, between journalists and proprietors, between serious journalism and celebrity reporting. I also want to look at what I would call the cultivation of mistrust, that is, the deliberate denigration of serious journalism and journalists for political ends.

First, let me say up front that I have read and heard better journalism in the past decade than I have at anytime since the Vietnam War. The quality of reporting—from correspondents in war zones, from investigative reporters working in archives, from many foreign and domestic correspondents, has been outstanding. I am thinking of veteran journalists like the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh who has told us so much about Abu Ghraib, for example, and indeed about Pakistan and North Korea, and nuclear secrets trading. From Baghdad, Australia’s Paul McGeogh has kept us informed about exactly what is happening on the ground there. Another stellar example: When Yasser Arafat was dying, Independent journalist Robert Fisk gave to the ABC one of the best first-hand accounts of the man you could ever wish to hear. Fisk was appropriately critical, but having watched Arafat in action, working crowds, he could also explain why the man had held sway for so long. While so much of the media was devoted to reflex deifying or vilifying, Fisk helped us to understand. Not sympathise. Understand. You can’t change what you don’t understand.

The English guardian journalist Martin Woollacott has been in Australia recently and gave a lecture at La Trobe University entitled The Journalist as moralist (you might have heard it broadcast on the ABC last weekend). It may sound like an oxymoron, the journalist-moralist. But Woollacott’s case was persuasive. There are many fine journalists at work—he named an impressive list—whose professional stance is moral without being politically partisan. Moral outrage is often the spur to great journalism. We’ve seen that in Rwanda, in Bosnia, Iraq, Cambodia, for example. But journalism is a craft as well as a vocation and the craft, the experience, is what tempers outrage into information, righteousness into investigation.

Of course not all journalists are like Robert Fisk or Martin Woollacott or Paul McGeogh. Some are venal; some are lazy or simply inadequate to their task. Most are competitive. Our culture acknowledges and rewards journalists for breaking new stories, not for sifting through old ones. Many of them these days are cowed or constrained or suborned by the corporations for which they work. Some are straight forwardly corrupt. They violate every ethical principle of the profession by taking money, usually covertly, to write or broadcast stories with a particular political or commercial slant, one that suits those who hire them. We are seeing that happen to an alarming extent in the United States at the moment.

And we know all about it here. We have our own home grown practitioners of cash for comment. And we have them endorsed and used, by politicians of both stripes and from the rank from the prime minister down. If Mr Howard made a public point of not going on Alan Jones’ program what, one wonders, might happen to the ratings—of either man.

In this week’s New Yorker magazine—readily available in Australia and online—there is an singular example of the kind of journalism that Martin Woollacott would characterise as coming from a journalist moralist. The article, by one Jane Mayer, is called ‘Outsourcing Torture, The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program’ . I mention it because it is an exemplary, documented series of interviews with insiders, many from the CIA or FBI. It demonstrates how the US program of sending foreign suspects to foreign locations for interrogation—initially adopted as a desperation measure after September 11—has now gone completely out of hand. What is impressive is that the article’s all revelations come from insiders, people with no obvious axe to grind, but with an conviction that their own codes have been abused in this program of ‘extraordinary rendition’. Note the terminology. ‘Extraordinary rendition’ like ‘collateral damage’ or the other new one, ‘Stress and duress” it is designed to obfuscate, to avoid telling the truth about what is going on.

One testimony was particularly revealing. Dan Coleman, an FBI agent who retired last July, not in disgrace but because of asthma, tells what he thinks about the extraordinary rendition program and about interrogations. Coleman is no leftie softie, but as an FBI professional he opposes the use of torture in interrogation on pragmatic grounds, because, as he has found, information revealed under torture is unreliable. ‘There’s no value in it’, he says. These are his words: many of the suspects expected to be tortured, and they were stunned to learn that they had rights under the American system. Due process made detainees more compliant, not less… ‘The lawyers show these guys there’s a way out ‘It’s human nature. People don’t cooperate with you unless they have some reason to… Brutalisation doesn’t work. We know that. Besides, you lose your soul.’

When an FBI agent acknowledges that a current US interrogation program puts its investigating agents in danger of losing their soul, then we are all in trouble.

But will our respective governments, here in Australia, in the US, or in Britain, admit that we are at risk of losing our soul? They won’t even admit to the existence of the program. They have might and power on their side and they claim to have right too.

They are echoed by many of the media corporations upon which millions in the West rely for news and information. We have reached a stage now when reporting the truth, as honestly as possible, can be interpreted as an unpatriotic act. Journalists are threatened, censored, sacked. The messenger is shot. Quality newspapers and magazines in the United States, like the New York Times or the Washington Post even the pro Republican Chicago Tribune are castigated as ‘liberal’ and therefore to be disregarded. A climate of fear and resentment has been exploited for media marketing purposes—to shift circulations and viewers away from the mainstream quality media. Half-truths, evasions, lies, spin, press releases and blatantly partisan reporting rule. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is the highest rating news program in America. Is it any wonder that more than 50 per cent of Americans believed, before the last election, that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks.

Dark times. But let me conclude in hope:

It is ten years and ten months since South Africa voted in free elections. Ten years and ten months since the world saw the fall of a totalitarian regime, apartheid, which enshrined racial discrimination, sanctioned torture and murder, and coopted the law, judiciary and the police force to keep it in power.

Extraordinary figures brought about the demise of that regime. Individuals, Mandela, and his white friend and onetime foe, FW de Klerk, like Desmond Tutu, were brave enough to speak honestly and require honesty about their country and its history. No one could have expected such a dramatic and fundamental turnabout. From high politics to private individual lives in South Africa, truth again became a byword. Honesty became possibility again.

No one pretends that South Africa has solved its problems, but then no one expected that it might be brave enough to take the chance. We all have children, and children offer us the chance of renewal, of starting afresh. We can all teach them to be brave enough to take the chance, to risk honesty in their daily lives and we can provide the example by doing so ourselves. There is a Lenten resolution I’d commend to you.

Morag Fraser is an academic, journalist and former editor of Eureka Street.

print this page