Does Murdoch’s Support for the Iraq War Mean He Has Blood on His Hands?

The NotW phone-hacking scandal has led serious news outlets to examine the influence of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers in Britain, the USA and Australia in the formulating and publicising of government policies. How much influence does Murdoch actually have? Can it be said that Australians live in a democracy when one man owns 70 per cent of the capital city press in Australia, and openly admits that he uses his newspapers to push his own agenda?

The horrifying terrorist attack in Norway rightfully headlined the television and press news on the weekend. But the bombings and gunfire that continue to blight life in Iraq following its illegal invasion in 2003 by the Coalition of the Willing, headed by the USA and including the UK and Australia, receive little attention these days.

The legacy of that war is still being endured by the population, not only through the constant threat of sectarian violence and the death and injury of loved ones, but in the displacement of millions, both within Iraq itself and outside of it. Writing in December 2010, the BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse reports that: ‘In almost any other country, this daily violence would be cause for a state of national emergency. In Iraq, it is called progress’.

Some commentators are once more calling Murdoch to account for his role in promoting the bloodshed and destruction that the Iraq War unleashed.

As writer David Swanson says in his article on Murdoch’s use of his empire to support the war: ‘Bribery is dirty stuff. So is sneaking a peak at the private messages of murder victims. But there’s something even dirtier: ... murder on the largest scale ... in other words: war’.

All Murdoch’s newspapers – he owned over 175 worldwide at the time – supported the Iraq War. The Murdoch-owned Fox News not only backed the war but condemned anyone who didn’t. Fox was the most popular cable television network for news about the war and its ratings supposedly went up by 239 per cent following the onset of the war. Its shrill pseudo-patriotism was hurriedly adopted by television news outlets such as CNN. Thus its influence on the way the war was reported and received extended far beyond its own remit and its own audience.

Those viewers were being fed misinformation and downright lies. A 2003 study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that key misperceptions about Iraq – that Saddam Hussein was working closely with al-Qaeda, that the USA had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that the majority of people in the world favoured the US going to war in Iraq – were held by a higher percentage of Fox News viewers than viewers of other news networks.

What was going on in the UK at the time? Robin Beste, of the Stop the War Coalition, poses disturbing questions about the relationship between the then prime minister Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch in the lead-up to the war, identifying three key phone calls between them in nine days. He wants to know what cosy deals Blair and Murdoch made at this time – that is, what commercial interests did Blair promise to look after in return for Murdoch’s support for plunging the UK into war?

In Australia, Murdoch’s flagship newspaper The Australian, as well as his other titles, not only vigorously prosecuted the case for war but lambasted the Opposition leader, Simon Crean, for not doing so.

Not that Murdoch’s views managed to convince most Australians that another Vietnam would be a good thing. A majority of Australians opposed a war in Iraq without the endorsement of the UN; in February 2003, more than 500,000 people across Australia demonstrated against the war. However, Murdoch’s coverage presented Howard in a positive, statesmanlike manner that may have limited the anti-war backlash against him; his support may have contributed to the fact that the war did not lose Howard his prime ministership at the 2004 federal election.

In June 2009 the UK’s then prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a full-scale independent inquiry into the Iraq War. It was to include the lead-up to the war, the war itself and the ‘reconstruction’ that followed. It would cover the entire period from the 9/11 attacks until July 2009 when the last UK soldiers left Iraq.

Yet Australia has never had an inquiry into this illegal war, and the MSM in Australia has never even debated the need for one. Jeff Sparrow, writing in Crikey in 2009, was one of the few to call for such an inquiry. Why the lack of interest? Can the expected reaction of the Murdoch press be one reason?

Murdoch’s personal support for the war is no secret. In an extraordinary moment at the World Economic Forum in 2007, he admitted that through his media empire he had tried to shape the public agenda regarding the Iraq War. He went on to state: ‘Well we basically ... supported the Bush policy ... we’ve been very critical of its execution’. In another context, Murdoch baldly admitted the reason why he thought the war would be a good thing: cheaper oil. In a 2003 interview published in the Bulletin and quoted in the Guardian, he blurted that ‘The greatest thing to come out of [the Iraq War] for the world economy ... would be $20 a barrel for oil’.

Unleashing hell
The Iraq War ignited the country’s underlying sectarian tensions. By 2006 Iraq was mired in a civil war between the Sunnis, the dominant group under Hussein’s regime, and the Shiites, initially favoured by the US invaders. The problem wasn’t limited to gangs of Sunni insurgents murdering Americans and Sunnis, but included Shiite death squads pursuing their Sunni enemies. We now know that US soldiers trying to train the Iraqi police force were powerless to stop the goings-on in Iraqi police stations, where Sunnis were illegally detained, tortured, and sometimes killed or forced to pay enormous bribes for their own release.

According to Wikipedia, estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians either killed or injured as a result of the war vary between 100,000 and 650,000 (the respected Iraq Body Count website has documented over 110,000 deaths by violence, which suggests that the number of deaths could be higher than this if deaths indirectly attributable to the war were taken into account). American deaths in Iraq, including soldiers, officially number 4500; the official number of Americans wounded is 33,100, but the actual number could be higher, given that mental illnesses such as post traumatic stress disorder often escape detection.

Displacement and miserable poverty are widespread. According to Refugees International, ‘Millions of Iraqis have fled their homes – either for safer locations within Iraq or to other countries in the region – and are living in increasingly desperate circumstances’.

Meanwhile the sectarian violence in Iraq continues. The Iraq Body Count website states that nine people were killed by violence in Iraq as recently as 24 July.

What the MSM have failed to communicate properly is that many of those considered moderates in the Iraqi parliament have links to Islamic extremists involved in the insurgency. This, along with the routine horrors of the sectarian violence, is made clear in a riveting book by US journalist Michael Hastings, I Lost My Love in Baghdad.

Hastings covered the war in Iraq for Newsweek between 2005 and 2007. His fiancée, Andrea Parhamovich, had followed him to Iraq where she had obtained a job as an aid worker.  In January 2007, she was tragically killed in a botched kidnapping attempt that Hastings believes one of the parliamentary parties, the Iraqi Islamic Party, helped to facilitate – a party whose members had visited Bush in the White House in December 2006.

A corrupted media environment
This blog entry can’t hope to answer the question of how much influence Murdoch actually had over the decision by the USA, the UK and Australia to go to war. But in the short term at least, the predominance of Fox News and its replacement of objective reporting with unsubstantiated pro-war propaganda must be seen as giving significant ballast to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.

It’s extraordinary that someone who values human life so lightly has been granted so much power to shape public opinion. However, it would be wrong to personalise the position of Murdoch too much; the point is that no one person, especially when they are unelected, should have this much power to shape the public agenda.

Nevertheless, it’s important to consider the nature of Murdoch’s influence and not just its extent. We need to look further back than 2003 to understand how an abomination such as the Iraq War became thinkable, and to ask whether the reporting of prior events in any way constituted a kind of inadvertent ‘softening up’ process.

Since the election of John Howard in 1996 and George Bush in 2001 many progressives, and even some Liberals, have started to feel we live in an alternative universe where the unimaginable has become acceptable, and where many of the institutions and processes that distinguish Western democracies from dictatorships have been significantly weakened and sometimes dismantled. Witness the widespread use of torture at Guantanamo Bay and the practice of rendition; in Australia, consider the locking up of child and adult asylum seekers in detention for years while denigrating them as queue jumpers, and the attacks on ABC journalists who quote independent experts rather than right-wing fanatics.

How much responsibility does Murdoch bear for the style in which  these developments have been reported in the MSM? To what extent did his media empire help to create a situation whereby not only did the West commit destructive acts (nothing new) but those acts have been presented as being justifiable and morally right when they came to light? And to what extent is he responsible for creating a situation in Australia, both in the media and in the formulation of government policy, whereby qualified experts are no longer given their due, and the concept of the ‘fair go’ is no longer a consideration?

The need to even ask these questions makes it vital to the future of Australian democracy that an inquiry into the concentration of media ownership in Australia be held immediately.

Corrupted Masculinities: Review of Snowtown

Snowtown is one of the most astonishingly good Australian feature films in recent years – and perhaps the most disturbing.

Dividing audiences both here and overseas, it has been variously described as ‘degrading’, ‘depraved’, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘a masterpiece’.  

The film is based on a shocking series of murders that were perpetrated in Adelaide’s disadvantaged northern suburbs in the 1990s, murders so gruesome that they would stretch the imagination of a crime fiction writer. The discovery of the remains of some of the victims, stored in barrels in a disused bank in rural Snowtown – not the location of most of the murders – horrified Australia.

The film is, simply, a tour de force – a triumph of tone and the avoidance of the many traps that filming its weighted story would set in the path of any filmmaker. It’s no wonder that at its Cannes debut in May, this low-budget film earned a special mention from the President of the Critics’ Week Jury.

Chilling and at times confrontingly graphic, the film takes some dramatic licence but is broadly factual. It was filmed on location in rundown public housing areas in northern Adelaide, and uses mostly non-actors from the local community to relate the events that led up to the discovery of the bodies.

This gives Snowtown a grit, realism and emotional truth that leave filmmakers like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh far behind. It’s a better film than Animal Kingdom, which falls apart dramatically after the first half hour; it’s similar in tone to The Boys, and at least on a par with it. The film is riveting but there’s no sense in which it is easy to watch.

Perhaps the most outstanding achievement of first-time film director Justin Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant is that Snowtown depicts how the seeds of evil flourish and take root in poverty and marginalisation without demonising poor people themselves. There is an unflinching willingness to not only confront the extremities of human evil, but to account for them. There are moments of extreme violence in the film, but they are never exploitative or sensationalist.

Charismatic sociopath John Bunting arrives in town in classic outsider style. He worms his way into the lives of a marginalised family, vulnerable single mother Liz Harvey and her four sons. Charming the family with home-cooked meals and ocker cheerfulness, he holds kitchen table lectures for locals where he fosters and exploits their anger at local paedophiles, and styles himself as a righteous vigilante.

Central to the film is the twisted father–son relationship Bunting fosters with the vulnerable 16-year-old Jamie Vlassakis, who is desperate for a father figure. The audience traces Jamie’s devastating journey as Bunting’s true nature is slowly revealed, and as Jamie becomes first an unwilling accessory to the violence and then a perpetrator.

The violence in the film, both on and off screen, does escalate, from dismembering a kangaroo to the bloodthirsty torture and murder of marginalised, unloved people. But the graphic violence is not unrelenting as some critics have falsely stated: it’s occasional and always intrinsic to the plot.

What is unrelenting is the atmosphere of moral corruption and hopelessness that pervades the film. Yet this is always intermingled with an almost poignant examination of the intensity of life in all its guises. The film never falls into the trap of nihilism, and it never discounts or belittles the attachments the characters have to their environments and to each other, refusing to draw an aesthetic line between the killings and everyday life.

The blighted suburban setting features small fibro houses surrounded by junk, and shabby interiors that are overcrowded and messy, with the television perpetually on in the background. Yet some of the more mundane moments of the film, especially in the early scenes, have a force and intensity that lends a quasi-beauty to the ugly surrounds. An early scene of the younger children doing wheelies on their bikes on the road outside the house in front of a blindingly strong sun is both slightly menacing and visually appealing.

This is what the film intends: to throw us in at the deep end, visually and emotionally, from the beginning. Given the setting and the use of mainly non-actors, you might think it would have a documentary feel. Not at all. We are not to be allowed the degree of distance that a documentary, with its calm voiceover and recital of facts, might offer. Instead we are forced to witness and vicariously experience the human story behind the killings, and to identify with Jamie’s dawning horror. And in doing so, we are somehow implicated in that story.

Kurzel uses frequent close-ups, especially in group scenes, to bring the audience in on the action and make us feel we are part of it. The viewer’s forced identification with Jamie as he bonds with Bunting and transitions from observer to participant is deeply unsettling. We are being interpolated. We are being confronted with the question: Why did you let this happen?

While the director has stated his wish to underline the banality of the settings in which the killings took place, his emphasis on the domestic achieves more than this. Food is a metaphor for the corrupted love Bunting offers Jamie, and for the nurturing the young man longs for. Bunting’s endless serving up of hearty cooked breakfasts and dinners is indissoluble from his brutalised attitude to the human remains he produces through his ghastly torture scenarios. We are not permitted to separate the masculine and domestic connection that the killer offers Jamie from the ultimate horror of his actions, any more than 16-year-old Jamie can.

The film’s pace doesn’t change that much: it’s charged from the very beginning. But the intense focus of the camera is never voyeuristic or fixated on aesthetics at the expense of emotional complexity. The soundtrack charts the tense atmosphere in a way that is visceral, bringing us closer to Jamie’s perspective and often imitating a heartbeat.

The use of non-actors is inspired. There isn’t a trace of amateurishness here, just an authenticity that makes the film more compelling. How much less powerful it would have been if recognisable stars had played the main roles.

Daniel Henshall, the only professional actor in the film, gives a flawless performance as Bunting in what was his first feature film role. Looking like the baby-faced Damon Gameau, he is compelling as a sociopathic sadist who charms with his down-to-earth cheeriness.

Newcomer Lucas Pittaway, discovered by the filmmakers buying jellybeans in a suburban shopping centre, may look like a cut-price Heath Ledger but his acting style in the role of Jamie is very much an interior, understated process; he nails this introverted child–man who becomes brainwashed by Bunting and whose life and innocence are destroyed by his need for a male role model. Louise Harris gives an intense and riveting performance as Liz; this character’s air of benighted defeat, and her passivity following her discovery of Bunting’s actions, are clearly the results of a difficult history of bare survival.

Some critics have complained about a poor set-up, and difficulties in working out who’s who. There were indeed a few times when it was difficult to work out what was going on, an unfortunate byproduct of the super-effective realism.

Apparently some of the real-life murder victims were so marginalised that two or three years after their disappearance no one had noticed. At one point in the film, Bunting says of his victims: ‘They’re nobody ... They’re nothing’. Snowtown forces us to ask whether on some level we think the same thing; and whether we must bear some responsibility for allowing the kind of poverty and disadvantage in which such evil could flourish.

The Age of Plutocracy: Why I Won’t Be Renewing My Age Subscription

Last week I received a letter from the Age newspaper informing me that my subscription was due for renewal. I’d been receiving the newspaper, Melbourne’s main broadsheet, four days a week. I’d already decided not to renew; a few days later I received a phone call from the paper reminding me that the subscription was due. When I said I wasn’t planning to renew, the polite young woman on the phone asked me why.

At last, for the first time, the Age actually wanted my opinion! Finally it cared about what I thought! Politely but briefly, and trying not to sound smug, I explained that the content had become too corporate and that the paper didn’t give the Greens a fair go. I could have said a lot more, but brevity was of the essence.

‘Okay, then’, said the young woman. For all I know she had simply typed ‘content’ into the space on the screen after ‘Reason’; or perhaps there was no such space and she’d typed nothing.

For various reasons I won’t go into here (Murdoch) there has been a huge shift to the (Murdoch) right in the Australian media in the last few (Murdoch) years. The Age, while it isn’t owned by Murdoch, has been no exception.

But what does a shift to the right actually mean in the case of the Age, a paper with a long and proud history of progressive activism, which was first published in 1854, and which Wikipedia still amusingly describes as ‘left-wing’? Below are the reasons that I didn’t give to the polite young admin person as to why I wouldn’t be renewing my subscription.

Pretend progressives

The Age pretends to be progressive but actually supports the status quo. It maintains this contradictory stance by advocating that the major parties adopt progressive policies that they are now incapable of, while failing to inform readers that those policies are in fact those of the state’s third political party, the Greens – that is, that readers actually have a choice. This sleight-of-hand enables the paper to maintain its progressive readership while ensuring that nothing ever changes.

Last Friday, for example, the paper ran a story about a cancer victim who had urged the state premier, Ted Baillieu, to introduce pro-euthanasia legislation that would allow him to die a dignified death. The story included a very brief history of failed euthanasia legislation in Australia, including Victoria. However, it failed to include a simple paragraph, even a sentence, that would have informed readers that the Greens are in favour of voluntary euthanasia. This kind of failure to inform indicates that the Age has abrogated one of its major tasks as a newspaper.

During the recent state election, the paper failed to hold Liberal Party policies to account, then complained about those policies after the party was elected to government. One example of this is the ridiculous policy  of arming underqualified bovver boys to patrol train stations, a policy the government is currently rolling out; the millions being spent on training and paying this gun-toting urban militia should instead be going towards providing more reliable and frequent train services and building new train lines, which is what public transport users actually want.

Corporate takeover

The content of the Age is increasingly becoming friendlier to the big corporations at the expense of news values and a commitment to the truth. A few months ago Good Weekend, a features magazine that is included in the Saturday edition of the Age, included a story that was generally positive about feedlots for Australian cattle. About six weeks later the magazine included a double-page advertisement spruiking the advantages of red meat by Meat & Livestock Australia.

A recent article in the magazine about coal mining in the Hunter Valley failed to mention the harm it is doing to local residents. (Mining billionaire and anti-tax activist Gina Rinehart now owns just under 4 per cent of Fairfax Media, the owner of the Age; her statements have indicated that she intends to use her media holdings to advance her business interests.)

Populism

The Age is generally positive towards climate change science and in favour of government action on it (apart from its hatred of the Greens). However, it sometimes features articles from unqualified deniers for purely populist purposes. This occurred as recently as 27 June, when climate change denier Bob Carter made an ill-informed attack on the trustworthiness of climate scientists, in an article in the paper that was also published on Fairfax’s National Times website.

The Age also has a denialist right-wing cartoonist, Spooner, whose opinions seem consistently out of step with both the editorial line and the readership – no doubt to appease a minority of right-wing readers.

Failure to act

The Age still views itself as a sometime activist newspaper and has run occasional campaigns on key issues affecting Melbourne; one of the most notable was its ‘Save the Yarra’ campaign. However, its activist role is threatened by its increasingly corporate slant. For example, an obvious target to campaign against, or at least be critical of, is the Grand Prix, a yearly travesty that takes place in one of Melbourne’s most loved parks, Albert Park.

The race is able to occur in the park only because in 1994 the Coalition government passed the undemocratic Australian Grand Prix Act.  This removed the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court from the operations of the Act and gave the Australian Grand Prix Corporation total control of the park – it can cordon off any area it wants, demolish any building, close roads and cut down trees at will.

For four months of the year, key roads are closed leading to traffic delays and use of the park is disrupted by preparations for the Grand Prix, which turns parts of the park into a huge construction site. During the race, residents have to put up with blocked-off streets, traffic disruptions and the constant high-pitched whine of the dangerously loud cars. The race loses millions each year,  and is subsidised by reluctant taxpayers; in 2010 it cost taxpayers an estimated $50 million. Even many businesses hate it because locals flee the city on the Grand Prix weekend. Yet, while the Age does critique the cost of the race, its links with the big end of town are too strong these days for the paper to actively oppose the race.

Shoddy editorial standards

The Age had already deskilled and casualised its subediting staff to the great detriment of editorial quality – it has long been common to find literally dozens of small grammatical and typographical errors in any one issue. But recently it went further, announcing that it was planning to outsource its subediting entirely to another company, Pagemasters.

Journalists responded with howls of fury and expressed grave fears about the future quality of news reporting without subeditors available onsite to liaise with reporters.

Dodgy advertisers

I know that the paper has to make money somehow, but I’m sick of the pages and pages of cheap alcohol deals the Age runs, encouraging the boozy culture that Australia still retains. Scientists are still discovering just how much harm alcohol does, even in quantities once considered safe; pending a ban on alcohol advertising, media outlets need to start doing the responsible thing and stop running advertisements for alcohol, especially cut-price deals that encourage binge drinking.

Entrenched sexism

The rot really set in for me when an attempt to complain to the Age about the busty bimbos featured regularly on its website was greeted with derision. Meanwhile the paper’s literary editor, Jason Steger, continues to blatantly favour white male writers, despite recent general criticism in literary publications of this practice, still all too common in Australian literary pages and journals.

Not all bad news

There is plenty still to like about the Age. The connections between the Victorian police association, police command, the Office of Police Integrity and the state government are labyrinthine and sometimes sinister and the Age has done a good job in reporting these connections, given that it also has its own complex relationships with its police sources.

 Many of the feature stories in the Saturday Age are still of high quality and take into account the complexities of the issue under review. The paper has also dramatically improved its reporting of women’s issues both in Australia and internationally.

Yet while I’ll no doubt still pick up the paper on weekends, my relationship with it has substantially weakened. At a time when Australia is fast becoming a faux rather than real democracy, its parliament increasingly captive to the big polluters, miners, and other business interests, a strong, independent news source is more important than ever before; sadly, the Age is becoming a symptom of the democratic crisis in Australia, rather than being part of the solution.