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Drawing up press battle lines { February 2 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/story/0,12123,887031,00.htmlhttp://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/story/0,12123,887031,00.html
Drawing up press battle lines
When it comes to who says what about war with Iraq, read between the headlines, writes Peter Preston
Sunday February 2, 2003
The Observer
In one newspaper office, a hundred journalists gather to debate Iraq with the chief foreign leader writer. In another, editors and specialists huddle behind closed doors. In yet another, the hotline phone from the proprietor rings. There are so many ways of making up your mind when the press goes to war.
Here's a story to shake the world. It matters what we say about it, surely? We have to have a view; a serious view. It's important to be earnest as the tides of history flow. But what happens when you cross the thin grey line into self-importance? And - worse - if you're still sucking your thumb when the tanks start to roll?
There are now a lot of prematurely wizened thumbs around Fleet Street, many of them belonging to Rupert Murdoch's editors. Take Rebekah Wade, already skirmishing bitterly with David Blunkett over 'Labour's abject failure on asylum cheats'. This is the end of the love-in. 'It'll be the Sun wot wins it,' says her faithful political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, waving a reader petition 370,000 signatures strong.
But does that mean Wade must do what her readers also clearly want and oppose the attack on Saddam unless every UN codicil is bolted into place? No: there, just like David Yelland before her, she's haplessly cast as Blair's redtop cheerleader, praising his courage and clarity (and perhaps, in logic, welcoming many more Iraqi war zone asylum seekers to these shores).
It's a problem. Newspaper editors who want to survive and prosper need to reflect - or at least acknowledge - what their readers think. That's why the Sun can puff New Labour in London at election time and vote SNP in Edinburgh. That's why opinion polls showing antipathy to an attack without UN sanctification running at around 70 per cent are, in turn, one reason the Mirror has been making such anti-war hay for weeks (with its own petition, 160,000 signatures strong).
But Piers Morgan also knows Wade is stuck. If Murdoch has an abiding fear at this stage in his life, it's of America and Britain (in Europe) drifting apart. He doesn't want that. He wants the British bridgehead kept aloft. He approves of Blair and he approves of Bush. He bizarrely welcomes Richard Perle - Ronnie Reagan's old 'Prince of Darkness' - to the opinion columns of the News of the World and smiles when a supporting leader observes how 'Perle's words contain much wisdom'.
A simple song. Yet how on earth do you sell it here? The Times can do the nuanced bit. It can welcome Blair, Berlusconi and six other European leaders sending Washington a message of support which shows there's no need 'to despair of a continent which is always willing to call on the US cavalry to sort out its disasters from Belsen to Bosnia' because there are always countervailing voices somewhere in its pages, such as one ex-editor Simon Jenkins berating the 'sabre-rattling and bombast of the last few weeks'. (Thank heavens for ex-editors).
But how do you start to get nuanced in the dear old Bun? The Mirror, to be fair, is strident enough in its convictions to allow the odd dissenter amongst the salvoes of Pilgers. Christopher Hitchens can duly pronounce Saddam 'puffy-faced ... slurring ...with a definite rug atop his pate' (just as the CIA pronounced him dying of cancer a couple of years back). The Sun, though, can only lie back and think of England.
It's by no means alone in an agony of private doubt. The Mail has been wittering (uncharacteristically) about a 'lack of proof' for months. Its shares have fallen out of bed hard - down over 350 points - like everyone else's. Paul Dacre has a battered, sceptical readership to worry about. Can anything help make up his mind? Only Chirac and Schröder causing trouble, perhaps. Think what the 'glorious afterglow of allied victory' could do to the Franco-German 'ruined ideal of a common European foreign policy', writes Stephen Glover. 'War could change our destiny.'
There's an argument to flop doubters off the fence. No such worries trouble the two Independents with their fusillades of adjectivally-enriched Fisks calling for '500,000 protesters on the streets of London' (and the 'cheeky' bid to nick Observer readers with headlines proclaiming 'Stop, Think, Listen'). They're nay-sayers alongside a Guardian which hates this 'wilful exercise of unrestrained global power, unfazed by considerations of international law, the principles of UN collective security and the consequences for everyman'.
Which column is the Telegraph in? For war, war, war, of course - which ought to make it for Blair, Blair, Blair. But he's left 'a vacuum by refusing to engage in proper argument', according to Janet Daley. And he was horrid to General Sharon, according to a leader writer who knows which side his Jerusalem is posted. There'll be no succour for Number Ten there. (Nor from a muted FT, chewing its nails about an 'uneasy America' in an 'unsettled world' where travel sectors find 'tourists are staying at home').
If it weren't for Mr Murdoch and the Observer, up to a point, then the Government would be truly friendless and beleaguered. But the fat lady on the road from Camp David - never mind that slurring dictator with the funny rug - hasn't started to sing yet. Things could change hugely.
'We have not ruled out our support for the use of force as a means of last resort.' Thus that (Guardian) chief foreign leader writer addressing the 100-strong meeting in Farringdon Road, as reported by the paper's readers' editor. There are many UN caveats to that, naturally - but a second resolution and some decently convincing proof would make a big difference, as it would to his fellow leader writers across Fleet Street. (Too many briefings with MI5 and 6 seems to have made editors less, not more, convinced about firm evidence of Iraqi plotting or links with al-Qaeda). Most newspapers don't relish joining the awkward squad when 'our boys' go into action. They must rally to the flag - or like Wade dispatch toilet rolls to the Gulf with Saddam's mug printed on them.
So look for manoeuvres yet to come. Look for the angst a swift desert triumph might bring. (Could Piers lose both Saddam and Andy Gilchrist and survive?) And look out - most of all - for too much pompous twisting.
It matters what papers report and conclude, of course it does. But the wrath of readers, historically, is much overdone. We've been constantly regaled, these past few days, with the anti-Suez stand The Observer took long ago, which allegedly hastened its decline.
Tosh. The stand was fierce and good and true - but we sold more copies (641,147) in 1957 than we did in 1956 (601,402) or 1955. Virtue was its own reward. And so may it prove again...
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