http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/story.jsp?story=538383
Why the truth must be told
Broadcasters are cheating the public by denying them the chance to see
hard-hitting documentaries, argues John Pilger
06 July 2004
Britain remains one of the few countries where documentaries are still
shown on mainstream television in the hours when most people are awake.
But documentaries that go against the received wisdom and inform are
becoming an endangered species, at the very time we need them most. That
will be a tragedy; for viewers in this country are not only used to but
supportive of an eclectic range of programmes, unlike in the US, where
people expect television to be little more than a shopping mall with
buskers. Rupert Murdoch's Fox Channel, a parody of journalism, fits this
perfectly; and he wants us to have the same.
In survey after survey, when people are asked what they would like more
of on television, they say documentaries. I don't believe they mean cod-
documentaries about airports and estate agents. Nor do they mean a type
of "current affairs'' that is a platform for politicians and
establishment "experts'' and merely gestures at the truth, striking a
specious balance between great power and its victims, between oppressors
and the oppressed. They mean what James Cameron called "truth-telling
journalism captured on film'': documentaries that are the antithesis of
news; that strip away the facades of "official truth'' and rescue
unpalatable facts and historical context from the memory hole to which
"impartial'' news has consigned them.
The Indian writer Vandana Shiva had this in mind when she described,
"the insurrection of subjugated knowledge'' against the "dominant
knowledge'' of rapacious power. Had it not been for Death on the Rock
and John Ware's A Licence to Murder, many of us would not have known the
secret criminal role of the British state in the war in Northern Ireland.
The opponents of this kind of truly independent television journalism
have never been better organised or more vocal. My last two
documentaries for ITV, Breaking the Silence and Palestine is Still the
Issue, were subjected to orchestrated, political, often vicious
campaigns of complaint, originating mainly in the US, where neither film
was shown. The Independent Television Commission investigated
nevertheless, and my producer and I had to explain and justify almost
every sequence, fact and source. The process took six months, at the end
of which the ITC concluded that both films were balanced, fair and
accurate. The Palestine film was praised for "the thoroughness of its
research and its integrity''.
The would-be censors are not only the frenetic e-mailers of the American
Zionist groups, but also those liberal Establishment journalists in this
country campaigning to rescue a discredited Prime Minister. These
tribunes have been in print lately bemoaning the media's influence over
"politics'' (they mean Blair's lies over Iraq) and demanding that
journalists return to "basic values'' (self-censorship). Ron Nail's
report for the BBC, a reaction to the Hutton whitewash, is part of this;
BBC journalists who offend the Government had better watch out.
The looking-glass aspect of all this is that the great majority of the
British media, especially the BBC, dutifully channelled and echoed the
Government's pre-invasion lies, instead of challenging and exposing them
as journalists in a real democracy should do. According to Charles
Lewis, the former star American television journalist who now runs the
Center for Public Integrity, an independent investigative unit in
Washington, Iraq would not have been attacked had US journalists done
their job and alerted the public to the fakery of Bush and Blair.
Can that be said of British journalism? Not quite. The Independent and
the Daily Mirror broke ranks and, now and then, The Guardian. However,
of all the world's major broadcasters, according to a Media Tenor study,
the BBC gave the least coverage to anti-war dissent, less than even the
US networks. In other words, the views of the majority of Britons were
ignored. All that stuff about impartiality is, of course, stuff. The
BBC, in its language, emphasis and omissions, has supported every war in
memory. Post-Hutton, even its honourable exceptions are silent.
As I see it, only documentaries can make sense of the impositions of
rampant power that now touch all our lives. And yet within the industry
there is a resistance to documentaries that has a familiar echo: "They
don't rate''. As Channel 4 has found, they have often rated better than
certain game shows and "reality'' programmes. But that is not the point.
Documentaries do rate in a way that cries out for recognition. Death of
a Nation: the Timor Conspiracy, which I made in 1994 with David Munro,
was followed by phone calls from the public at the rate of 4,000 calls a
minute according to BT, and this continued well after midnight. When an
updated version was shown four years later, more than 150,000 calls were
registered within 25 seconds of the credits. This grew to half a million
within the hour. And this was a film about a tiny country few knew existed.
My point is that the quality of the public's response to powerful
documentaries is at least as important a measure of popularity, of
public interest, as the ratings. This does not mean that documentary
makers can rest their case on the worthiness of "public service
broadcasting''. Viewers nowadays are not prepared to accept a
paternalistic notion that harks back to Lord Reith, the BBC's founder
and author of inspired forms of establishment propaganda. That endures,
alongside a corporatism exemplified by the values of Murdoch, which
Blair promised to uphold long before he came to power. In recently
announcing "less intrusion'', the Government's new regulator, Ofcom, is
making good on that promise.
Viewers deserve better; and true documentary makers, indeed all
broadcasters, have a special responsibility to fight their corner as
never before.
The ITV News Channel will begin a season of weekly John Pilger
documentaries on Sunday at 9pm. John Pilger's new book, 'Tell Me No
Lies: Investigative journalism and its triumphs' will be published by
Jonathan Cape in the autumn.
--
Jez
"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious,
of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society
highly values its normal man.It educates children to lose themselves
and to become absurd,and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed
perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years."
R.D. Laing
.
|
