Danish blue The war in Iraq has polarised the media in the most surprising quarters

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Just after the second world war, a group of publishers and editors set up a global organisation to work for press freedom. The International Press Institute (IPI) has campaigned for more than 50 years to spread the values of free expression found in western democracies. A typical IPI protest coming across my desk as vice- chairman of the organisation is an appeal to a government in the developing world to stop harassing journalists whose "crime" is to publish something the regime finds embarrassing.

So it was something of a shock last weekend as IPI delegates met for their annual congress in Warsaw to see that one of the hottest freedom of expression issues right now is in Denmark, which usually comes top of the polls for the world's most liberal country in terms of press freedom.

The case which has provoked the concern is further evidence of the extraordinary pressures which the Iraq war, its causes and its aftermath are putting on the relations between the state and the media in a number of democracies.

The Danish case has some eerie resonances for British readers familiar with the Andrew Gilligan/David Kelly affair. The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, had told his parliament that government intelligence suggested Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that this justified Danish involvement in the war. Two Danish journalists, Jesper Larsen and Michael Bjerre, then ran a story in Berlingske Tidende, one of Denmark's largest newspapers, that there had, in fact, been no credible evidence that Iraq had possessed such weapons.

The journalists' source turned out to be a Danish military intelligence officer, Major Frank Grevil, who said he had written some of the intelligence assessments himself. He was fired for passing secret documents to the media; the prime minister denies misleading parliament and the people; the journalists have been charged under the criminal code with publishing illegally obtained information. If prosecuted and convicted, they face six months in prison. As in the UK, the issue has divided media as well as political opinion - where in some of the British press, David Kelly was branded as a "Walter Mitty" figure, in Denmark details have surfaced of Major Grevil's chequered past.

But the starkest example of how the war has polarised the media is surely the US. The horrors of 9/11 and the subsequent "war on terror" have been the first big test of an American media industry which has been transformed by more than a decade of consolidation. A very small number of giant corporations now control the main broadcasting and newspaper groups across the country

In the past, although US television does not have the same statutory impartiality rules as British broadcasting, the networks were seen by most Americans as fair and independent. That is no longer so much the case. And the changes in the structure of the US media have also seen the rise of openly partisan broadcasters supporting the Republicans such as Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh.

Americans seem split over whether this matters. On one side of the argument is Al Gore, who blames his presidential election defeat four years ago on what he has called a "kind of weird" media with major institutions now effectively part of the Republican party. On the other hand, the Republicans argue they are simply restoring balance after years of liberal bias.

Greg Dyke and others might express shock at what they saw as the one-sided coverage of the Iraq war on US television screens - the monitoring organisation FAIR found that the percentage of Americans opposing the war was about 10 times higher than appeared as interviewees in the nightly news (27 per cent of people polled were against the war, compared with 3 per cent of the interviewees on network broadcast news bulletins). But a Gallup poll in October last year found that 45 per cent of viewers thought the US media was still too liberal.

In this highly politicised environment, any move by a media organisation can be represented as evidence of partisan bias. It is not helped by a culture where virtually every media mogul gives money to, or pledges to raise funds for, the Republican or Democratic campaigns. The mirror image of Gore's attack on pro- Republican bias can be found in the current controversy over Viacom, the world's biggest media company.

A number of the books which are currently causing George Bush embarrassment are published by Simon & Schuster, a Viacom company. The shocking images of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison were first broadcast by CBS, another Viacom company. To supporters of Viacom, this is simply good journalism. To the Republicans, it is perhaps no coincidence that Viacom's chairman, Sumner Redstone, and chief executive, Mel Karmazin, are Democrat supporters.

In this atmosphere, the wonder is not that trust in the media is slumping - down from about three- quarters at the time of the Vietnam war and Watergate to just about half today - but that it has not dropped even further. The broadcasting regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, has no role in enforcing or even encouraging impartiality. Its most significant programme intervention in recent years has been over how much of Janet Jackson's breast was on view during the Super Bowl - ironically also on CBS.

The unprecedented media consolidation in the US has brought cost savings, scale and vertical integration - but at a high price in terms of lost credibility. Consolidation is still very much the name of the game in the UK media industry. In just the last few days GMTV has disappeared into ITV and C4 has been discussing a possible merger with Five. But perhaps there are some lessons to be learned from the US about what happens when media pluralism is consigned to the dustbin of history.

Richard Tait is director, Centre for Journalism Studies, Cardiff University. He was editor-in-chief of ITN from 1995 to 2002

richard@tait167.freeserve.co.uk

By RICHARD TAIT