15 Apr 91 | Magazine Editions, Volume 20.4 April 1991
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By Ronald Dworkin
The Gulf War is already a mythic event. President Bush said that it washed the stain of Vietnam from America’s shield, and America and the other nations that participated, including Britain, are justifiably proud of what their soldiers have done. But there is a great risk that the war’s spectacular military success, and its consequent enormous popularity, will be taken somehow to have vindicated every aspect of it, including the serious and unjustifiable extension of military censorship that this issue of Index explores (Volume 20, Issue 4).
The greatest risk, I believe, is that a particular argument for justifying censorship, which became widely accepted among politicians and the public over the last several months, will now be thought legitimate. I mean the argument that government may properly manipulate public opinion in order to prevent the public from criticising the war or its conduct. Censorship with that aim is defended not of course on the ground that officials are entitled to protect their own political positions, a proposition no one would defend, but on the more insidious ground that a pleased and supportive public is a great military advantage, that a nation can pursue a war more effectively, win it more quickly, and with fewer of its own soldiers dead and wounded, when the public is on its side.
That argument has always been popular, but its premise is now more widely accepted than ever before. As Phillip Knightley reports here, it is now orthodox Pentagon thinking that America lost the Vietnam War because television said that the generals were liars, that the war could not be won, and that American forces burne innocent civilians. In 1984 Caspar Weinberger, then Secretary of Defense, laid down the policy: ‘Before the US commits combat forces abroad, there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their representative in Congress.’
The factual case for that policy is strong. Regional war is not, as Vietnam proved, all or nothing. A divided and shocked public produces a climate of compromise in which military action is not cancelled or abandoned altogether, but is rather pursued half-heartedly, with (as President Bush several times put it) ‘one hand tied behind our back’. The military danger of adverse public opinion was even greater in the Gulf than it had been in Vietnam, moreover, because the generals had to fear the impact of bad news or horrifying images not just in America or Britain but in the streets of Cairo and other cities of the Arab coalition. They might well have thought that protecting their troops meant protecting them from bad notices in the press as well as from Saddam’s guns and poisons.
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But if that understandable view is taken to license censorship of information about troop morale or military mistakes or civilian casualties or, what is equally dangerous, if it is taken to require self censorship of such information by the media themselves — then the range of censorship justified on strictly military grounds is very greatly expanded.
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Of course General Schwartzkopf was right to prevent television crews from filming the swing of his troops far to the left of the Iraqi defences, a manoeuvre the Iraqis, without air power, could not see for themselves. But it became clear, in the course of this war, that the military justification was being used for censorship of much more than operational information.
The nerve of the censorship scheme was the pool system of reporting described in Peter Schmeisser’s article, which gave the army control not only over what was written but of who wrote it, and therefore a crucial way to punish media whose reports it did not like. R.W. Apple, a distinguished journalist “who acted as bureau chief for the New York Times in the desert, was livid at the discrimination against his influential paper. Geoff Meade’s article reports that he was forbidden to film Kuwaiti teenagers playing football because the army feared Americans with relatives fighting in the Gulf might be resentful, and Nan Levinson reports a blanket prohibition against coverage of medical treatment for wounded soldiers after their return to the US. Richard O’Mara’s article puts it well: the purpose of censorship was not just to keep the Iraqis ignorant, but to give the military time and control over unpleasing outcomes to process the information in such a way as to reduce its impact when it becomes known on the home front’.
Substantial sections of the home front were ready, even anxious, to be manipulated. Truth may be the first casualty of war, but some people’s desire to be told the truth is a close second. One of he most depressing of the phenomena described in this issue is the speed with which irresponsible and frightened editors and politicians began to paint honest’ reporting as a kind of treason. Peter Arnett, for instance, reporting as best he could for CNN out of Baghdad, was called a Lord Haw Haw because he passed on Iraqi claims about civilian destruction and indicated how far the evidence he was allowed to see — he scrupulously described the constraints on his own coverage — seemed to support them. In this issue, Matthew d’Ancona and Richard Norton Taylor describe the patterns of media deference and fear that allowed censorship easy victories, and Matthew Hoffman reminds us how quickly the equation of honesty with treason caught on with parts of the public itself.
The military victory was so swift and comprehensive that censorship designed to control public opinion was probably irrelevant in this case. But the precedent is a harmful one, because it expresses the same attitude that also produced the terrible violations of the civil rights of Palestinians and Iraqis living in Britain described by Abbas Shiblak and Ursula Ruston: the attitude that in war even a notional benefit to military efficiency justifies any invasion of traditional freedoms.
When the generals control the press in order to control public opinion, they are by definition cheating on democracy. The people have a right to make up their own minds whether they should be impatient or tired or dissatisfied or frightened or appalled by a war, or whether it is tolerable that their armies should risk bombing innocent civilians in air raid shelters, and that is no less true when part of the public wants to be shot of the responsibility. If the government believes that strategy justifies risking substantial civilian deaths, then it should make its case and take its chances with opinion polls and parliamentary attacks and peace demonstrations and postmortem elections.
No doubt even a just war, and certainly an unjust one, can be prosecuted more efficiently and with fewer losses if government does not have to worry about such opposition while the war is on. But unless survival is at stake, war cannot trump democracy. We are no democrats if we trust the people only when the stakes are sufficiently low.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_column_text]The winter 2017 Index on Censorship magazine explores 1968 – the year the world took to the streets – to discover whether our rights to protest are endangered today.
With: Ariel Dorfman, Anuradha Roy, Micah White
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15 Mar 73 | Magazine Editions, Volume 2.01 Spring 1973
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Turkey on the slippery slope, the Spring 1973 issue of Index on Censorship magazine
The present conflict in Northern Ireland has caused problems for television (and other media) in both the United Kingdom and in the Republic of Ireland. How far is it lawful or legitimate for the media to go in their presentation of all aspects of the Northern Irish question? And in particular, how far may they include the views and opinions, including those derived through interviews, of organisations which are outlawed and unlawful in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland? Clearly, to understand the current campaigns of violence in Northern Ireland and how peace may ultimately be restored, the views of such bodies as the Provisional Irish Republican Army are very relevant. But it was an attempt to find out something about them that led on 24 November 1972 to the dismissal by the Irish Minister for Posts and Telegraphs of the entire nine-man Authority, or board, responsible for the running of the Irish Broadcasting and Television Service, Radio Telefis Eireann, and their replacement by another group of people.
Paradoxically the Irish Prime Minister, Mr Lynch, described the dismissal of the RTE Authority as an ‘exercise in democracy.’ and as an act which was taken because ‘the Government saw the need for protecting our community’. The specific charge on which the RTE Authority were dismissed was that, by interviewing Sean Mac Stiofain, leader of the Provisional IRA, they had disobeyed a Government direction ‘not to project people who put forward violent means for achieving their purpose’.
The law governing the activities of RTE is to be found in the Broadcasting Authority Act of 1960 (amended in 1966). The RTE has the function of maintaining a national television and sound broadcasting service and as such has a monopoly in the state, there being no alternative television or radio channels. Section 18 of the 1960 Act requires the RTE Authority to secure that, when it broadcasts any information, news or feature which relates to matters of public controversy or is the subject of current public debate, the information, news or feature is presented objectively and impartially and without any expression of the Authority’s own views.
This is somewhat similar to the obligation to which the BBC is subjected, not to editorialise on matters of political controversy. Just as in Britain, where the Postmaster General may order either the BBC or the Independent Broadcasting Authority by notice ‘to refrain from’ transmitting ‘any matter or matter of any class specified in such notice’, the RTE Authority is subject to Ministerial control. Section 31 of the Broadcasting Authority Act 1960 provides:
The Minister may direct the Authority in writing to refrain from broadcasting any particular matter or matter of any particular class, and the Authority shall comply with the direction.
As a back-up to his powers the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, under Section 6, ‘may at any time remove a member of the Authority from office’, with no need to give any reason.
In exercise of his power under Section 31 the Minister on 1 October 1971 issued a direction requiring RTE to refrain from broadcasting any matter of the following class, i.e. any matter that could be calculated to promote the aims or activities of any organisation which engages in, promotes, encourages or advocates the attaining of any particular objective by violent means.
The reaction of the RTE Authority to the receipt of this direction was to point out the vagueness of the direction, and the difficulties of interpretation, starting with the phrase ‘ any matter that could be calculated to promote’:
Indeed the Authority thinks that the terms of the direction generally are so imprecise as to be unsatisfactory in principle and to place an unfair burden on the Authority …
There is also the lack of geographical limitation as to the activities to which the direction applies. The Authority assumes that the Government would not intend that RTE should not broadcast, for example, interviews with or statements from members of the various liberation movements
around the world. …
The Authority is also concerned about the selective aspect of the Government’s action. Newspapers on sale here regularly carry material equivalent to what RTE could not now apparently carry in the form of broadcast matter. Furthermore, about half the population of the State is within reach of external broadcasting services to which the direction cannot apply.
Despite the Authority’s concern the Minister did not clarify the difficulties of interpretation posed by his direction. The Authority explained the direction to its own staff, inter alia, in the following terms:
The primary intention of the direction is to prohibit the direct participation in broadcasting of persons who through that participation would succeed in promoting the aims or activities of those organisations described in the direction: the direction does not affect the broadcasting of news material which is reportage and analysis of violent events, even where the event is stated to be the action of an organisation of the type referred to in the direction….
The direction does not prohibit current affairs programmes which feature the activities and policies of the organisations in question, included as being relevant to the scope of such programmes, provided the strictest care is taken to have the matter handled in such a manner that reasonable people would not regard the programmes as promoting the aims or activities of these organisations.
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No unfavourable comment was apparently made at any time by the Minister upon the terms of this interpretation by the RTE Authority of the scope of his direction.
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In November 1972 the British Prime Minister, Mr Heath, visited Northern Ireland and made an important policy statement on the possible developments in Northern Ireland. As part of their coverage of this, RTE conducted interviews with leading political figures in Northern Ireland and in the Republic. In addition, as Mr Donal O Morain, chairman of the dismissed RTE Authority, explained:
In the interests of comprehensive reportage it was thought desirable to ascertain whether Mr Heath’s statements had altered the viewpoint of the Provisional IRA in any way. The method decided upon was to interview Mr Sean Mac Stiofain and to report in the ‘This Week’ programme of 19 November the substance of his replies.
The RTE Authority was apparently unhappy about certain editorial decisions in connexion with the programme concerned, and their displeasure was conveyed to the staff involved, although it is still not clear publicly in what respect the programme was seen as having gone too far. It was this programme on 19 November which led to the dismissal of the RTE Authority.
The only coherent explanation given by the Minister for his action was in the lower house of the Irish Parliament, Dail Eireann, on 14 December 1972, when he explained that he had a personal responsibility to ensure that opportunity was not given to people of violence to use RTE as a recruiting platform and thereby to increase the death toll in Ireland. It was never explained in what sense the broadcasting of the Mac Stiofain interview encouraged recruiting for the IRA. There was widespread condemnation of the Government’s action. The Irish Times editorialised:
If the Government felt that the RTE Authority could not be counted upon to run an impartial service within the bounds which the present regulations set, it is as clear to others that the Government cannot be trusted to use wisdom in its handling of public communications.
The high-handed and arbitrary conduct of the Irish Government did not come as a bolt from the blue. For a long time the Irish Government has adopted a curious view of the function of RTE. In October 1966 the then Irish Prime Minister, Mr Sean Lemass, told the Irish Parliament:
Radio Telefis Eireann was set up by legislation as an instrument of public policy and as such is responsible to the Government The Government has overall responsibility for its conduct, and especially the obligation to ensure that its programmes do not offend against the public interest or conflict with national policy as defined in legislation. To this extent the Government reject the view that RTE should be, either generally or in regard to its current affairs and news programmes, completely independent of Government supervision … It has the duty while maintaining impartiality between political parties … to sustain public respect for the institutions of Government and, where appropriate, to assist public understanding of the policies embodied in legislation enacted. The Government will take such action … as may be necessary to ensure that RTE does not deviate from the due performance of this duty.
The significance of this statement is sharpened when it is remembered that it was made in reaction to criticism of unlawful interference by a Minister in the broadcasting of material by RTE after the Broadcasting Authority Act had made it clear that the only permissible method of interfering with programme content was by the issue of a direction in writing to the Authority.
A footnote to the dismissal of the RTE Authority is to be found in the case of Mr Kevin O’Kelly, the RTE reporter who had conducted the controversial interview with Mac Stiofain. At the trial of Mac Stiofain for belonging to an illegal organisation, Mr O’Kelly refused to identify the man in court as the Mac Stiofain who had given him the interview. For his refusal Mr O’Kelly was sentenced to prison for three months for contempt of court. This in turn led to protests, including stoppages of work, by journalists and members of the staff of RTE.
The RTE affair underlines the need for the mass media to be shielded against direct interference by Government, a problem which in formal terms has not been resolved in either Britain or Ireland. The responsibilities that broadcasting incurs to provide a wide coverage of differing opinions on controversial issues raise special problems when dealing with unlawful organisations within the State. The notion that mere representation of the views of such bodies necessarily provides an opportunity for recruiting new supporters shows a curious lack of faith in the democratic process on the part of those purporting to be its defenders. In any case, what the public interest requires should not be confused at any one moment with what the Government currently in power considers to be in its interest.
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