Research

Suggested Reading Material:

War on Terror

"Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and It's Triumphs" - Edited by John Pilger

"What I heard about Iraq" - Elliot Weinberger

"Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence" - Mark Juergensmeyer

"Bush's War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age" - Jim A. Kuypers

See also: Media Bias and Bush's War on Terror

Check out this transcript:

Background Breifing

Here are some of the main points of interest to me:

Peter Oborne: If you go back into the early days of New Labour, they start to use the word 'narrative', which they talk about constructing a political narrative. And that is an account of events which kind of goes down well with the electorate. Where that word comes from, 'narrative', comes from the kind of philosophical school called postmodernism, and embedded in this philosophical idea is the notion there really are no ultimate truths, there's just a variety of truths. Truth is really an expression of power. In other words, I think that philosophically liberated people. There's a whole load of very hard-to-read books, and possibly very long words, setting out this notion that there is no such thing as truth. And I think it's seeped out of this philosophical salon and it's entered political debate, and it's sort of liberated politics and liberated politicians from the reliance on boring old facts, because according to the most dominant school of modern philosophical, there are no such things as facts.

John Menadue: What spin does is distorts the truth, and we need in a democratic society, to have a means whereby untruth, error can be corrected. As a result of spin and the inability of under-resourced journalists to combat it, the spinmeisters are able in effect to chloroform the consciences of our community, and that's what they did over children overboard. They're suggesting that in fact they were terrorists, they were such awful people they'd even throw their children overboard, and we've had more recently of course the Iraq War, and there's no more serious issue on which a government can be involved than going to war. And the Howard government deceived us about the reason for going to war. It said it was about weapons of mass destruction, then it changed its mind several times. But the real reason why it went to war was to oblige the Americans, and they claim that it was due to weapons of mass destruction and regime change. But that was all an untruth.

The reason why they want to war, was because they regard Saudi Arabia as an unreliable ally in the Middle East and they needed to find another strategic base in the Middle East in substitute or in replacement of Saudi Arabia; if it had oil, even better.

Graham Freudenberg: I suppose Julius Caesar was the first spin doctor. But what is different today is certainly not the loss of any purity of motives, but the sheer pervasion of the operation and of course that itself is partly a reflection of the massive increase in the means of communication. I mean if we call things by what they really are, and if we acknowledge that this huge effort mounted in Canberra with all these public relations offices, media consultants, if we acknowledge that the operation is a propaganda operation, then we face what it is. It is propaganda. Now propaganda is nothing new. But the means of purveying it are new and revolutionary.

Reporter: In '1984' Orwell writes, 'political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind'.

Wendy Carlisle: The professional communicators tell us we're in the no spin age, that lies can't survive now that we've got Google. Truth, we are told, will be outed. But what if reasoned debate is lost in the information age? It would be a great irony.

USA Media Contracts

Pentagon Rolls Out Stelth PR

Planting News in the Iraq Media