"Pernicious and anti-journalistic"

When I started this blog three years ago (to the day), one of my first and by far one of my most trivial posts concerned an organisation called Media Lens. I have scarcely mentioned, and then only in passing, the group since then. While fringe organisations are an interesting subject in themselves, a site devoted to them would be an esoteric interest. In this field I prefer to cover the better-known and more influential practitioners, notably Noam Chomsky, to whose co-authored book Manufacturing Consent the editors of Media Lens attribute their inspiration.

Media Lens's propaganda is trivial and nugatory, being founded on a gross and unexamined confusion among the notions of power, authority and economic interest. (This is from their description of their aims: 'We did not expect the Soviet Communist Party's newspaper Pravda to tell the truth about the Communist Party, why should we expect the corporate press to tell the truth about corporate power?') The Media Lens home page used to carry a description of the organisation from the former BBC political editor Andrew Marr: 'I'm afraid I think it is just pernicious and anti-journalistic. I note that you advertise an organisation called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting so I guess at least you have a sense of humour.' The editors didn't grasp (or perhaps they eventually did) that quoting judgements against yourself is self-defeating rather than endearingly self-deprecating when those judgements are clearly the truest and best-written things to appear in your publications.

I'm beginning to think that my relative lack of interest in Media Lens may possibly have been a mistake. The reason is suggested by a former BBC journalist, Dave Fuller, on The Guardian's Comment is Free site:

Most journalists who have been targeted by Media Lens detest them and their tactics. Their more fanatical supporters have a tendency to label those who do not share their views as war criminals. Despite this, they have support among a younger, intelligent, internet-savvy generation who were politicised by the Iraq war and increasingly reject the traditional media.

And, ominously, they seem to have the weight of numbers online. Because of the way a search engine like Google functions, it ranks pages according to the number of times they in turn are linked to. Pieces by Media Lens will be linked to by the passionate people running anti-war or far left sites. For example, despite the hundreds of pieces he has written for the Observer, one of the top results for a search on foreign correspondent Peter Beaumont is a Media Lens piece accusing him of "outrageous" biased reporting over Iraq.

But because the mainstream media generally tends to ignore the anti-media crowd as a lunatic fringe, anti-anti-media pieces do not exist to be linked to in turn. Any searches on the net fail to turn up the necessary context to allow an open-minded person to make up their own minds. The internet is already testimony to the truth of the assertion that those with the shrillest, most extreme voices tend to set the frames of debate. The real danger for the media is that if world events contribute to yet more insecurity, the voices of extremism will get even louder.

Overall, I doubt that the danger is great. Given the opportunity to voice their opinions, the voices of extremism have an unerring capacity to discredit themselves - much as Chomsky himself did in the 1970s and 1980s over his writings on Cambodia and his intervention in the case of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. But I note the point that experienced journalists may become disproportionately known, through the workings of search engines, by personalised campaigns against their integrity rather than for their professional work. I have deliberately not tested this before posting these comments, but I should be surprised if the Google listings for another journalist who knows Iraq well - John Sweeney of the BBC, who is a friend - did not include in a high position the ferocious Internet campaign against his brilliant expose of Saddam Hussein's influence on the anti-sanctions campaign in the 1990s.

That's all I have to say on this subject now; it's worth watching what happens. In the meantime, at a much lower level of importance than the reporting of Beaumont and Sweeney, I'll relate my experience of Media Lens.

On the Media Lens web site there is a message board for its supporters. I looked at it last week, and found one message posted by an Andy Best, which read:

I asked Kamm a couple of weeks back why it was, in his view, legitimate to intervene in Kosovo but not Palestine.

Here is his reply:

"The Israeli-Palestinian issue is a conflict of equally legitimate nationalisms, both of which must be accommodated in any lasting territorial settlement.The Kosovo war was not a clash of competing legitimate nationalisms, but a war of aggression conducted by one party."

So next intervention should be against the UK in Iraq, I assume?

My own thought - I've never read a mainstream piece on the conflict that goes into the fact that Israel could only have been set up in the first place because the land was a colonial possession.

This is the second time I've found my emails reproduced on that site, though there may have been other occasions. I thus sent this (slightly shortened) email to the editors of Media Lens on Wednesday:

I have no objection to my words being posted on your site. It may be a thunderingly banal truism that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is a conflict of equally legitimate nationalisms whereas Kosovo was a war of aggression conducted by one party, but it still ranks among the wisest observations to be available to your readers, and it would be a pity to deprive them of it.

But it is singular, when there are innumerable published articles and a book setting out my views on international politics, that your supporters feel it necessary to publish my private emails. I do my best to respond to inquirers promptly and courteously; the proper course for them, if they intend to publish my replies (or those of other journalists), is either to state this when they write or to seek permission once I have written. This is a standard convention of civilised debate, as Professor Chomsky among others would be able to tell you. Be assured that your protestations of compassion and respectful dialogue are a matter for sufficient derision already without your needing to labour the point in this way.

I should have been amazed to receive an acknowledgement, still less an explanation, from Media Lens's editors, and so it has proved. (I did receive a whiney email from Andy Best complaining about my lack of ethics for having written to the editors of Media Lens with a c.c. to him, rather than writing to him with a c.c. to the editors of Media Lens. Evidently he's a 'Big Picture' man.) How could they possibly distance themselves from a course that is central to the way they campaign and to their anti-democratic politics?

Now, my policy with emails from readers of this blog or of articles elsewhere is that I publish them only with permission of the authors, and to identify the authors by name (which I rarely do, usually where my correspondent has a particular specialist knowledge) only with further permission. The principal exception is with abusive emails, where I reserve the right to publish the message, the author's name and - after Polly Toynbee's precedent last week - the author's email address.

Media Lens's policy is clearly to provide a forum for publication of anything their supporters get from journalists in the print and broadcasting media. The reason I object to this is not merely convention, but the stimulus it gives to campaigns that fall well outside any reasonable criterion of debate. If you're a journalist replying to a critical email, you may find that your response will get posted immediately to the Media Lens site, whereupon you receive several further emails of a similar type, and so it will escalate.

And I use 'critical' here in a euphemistic sense. When the Guardian journalist Emma Brockes was on the receiving end of an email campaign over her interview with Noam Chomsky, the Media Lens supporters' board carried messages referring to her in highly derogatory terms (from memory, things like 'upper-class bitch'; I have never met Emma Brockes, but I believe the 'upper-class' label is an allusion to her having attended Oxford University, where only toffs are allowed in). Media Lens's stated policy (which I refer to in the last sentence of my message to the editors) is cant. It isn't just 'the more fanatical supporters', as Dave Fuller puts it, that are the problem. The problem is the structure of the campaign: urging supporters to write to journalists on the strength of Media Lens's highly unprofessional and often comically inept exegesis, and then publishing - at second hand, through supporters, but with complete acquiescence and support - the replies in order to whip up further indignation. It's inimical to the notion of dialogue; it is, as Andrew Marr said, pernicious. (Some messages on Media Lens's supporters' board have urged emailers not to mention Media Lens when writing, so as to maximise the likelihood of a reply - a course I would call deception.)

I'm no reporter, and I'm slightly surprised that Media Lens supporters would seek my opinion anyway (what published writing I do is entirely the stuff of opinions rather than of impartial journalism, and these are not held back). But let me request any who are reading this, and who may feel like writing to me at some stage about something, to state early in the message an affiliation with Media Lens. I will then know without having to read it what else is in the message, and I'll be able to assign it a priority for reply.