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Ian Taylor takes a look at the British press's coverage of the run-up to the 2005 general election, and asks: how far can we rely on the mainstream media to reinvigorate our democracy?
Mission accomplished? Iraq and the general election coverage
Ian Taylor
April 29: It's less than a week before the General Election, the legality of the Iraq war is looking shakier than ever after the Attorney General's original advice to the Prime Minister has been leaked to the media, so what story does then lead on that day? The news that Tom Cruise's new girlfriend is a virgin, under the lame headline "Missionary Impossible".
For some newspapers it seemed their mission impossible was to tackle complexities about the war at all, so subservient to the government's pro-war line had they become.
Some papers that is, not all.
Once the leaks from Lord Goldsmith's office started pouring forth from 25 April onwards, Iraq shot up the news agenda. Research conducted by Loughborough University's Communications Research Centre found that the controversies surrounding the war were the most discussed issues during the fourth week of the five-week campaign, accounting for a quarter of all election-related news that week. (If this figure seems surprisingly low it is because the electoral process itself took up 44 per cent of all election-related news.)
The lying liar and his lies
The leaks were sensational stuff, highlighting discrepancies between Goldsmith's original doubt-laden 13-page advice that he presented to the Prime Min ister on 7 March 2003 and the one-page summary sheet that had all doubts shorn from it ten days later.
With headlines like "THE BIG LIE: Final proof that Blair deceived the nation over Iraq" (Daily Express, 28 April), "BLAIR LIED AND LIED AGAIN" (Daily Mail, 28 April), and "OUR SONS DIED FOR LIES" (Daily Express, 29 April) following the revelations, some papers were hardly pulling their punches. Likewise, after the minutes of a Downing Street meeting held in July 2002 found their way to the Sunday Times during the campaign, the Mail, the Express, the Guardian, and the Independent all drew the obvious conclusion: that contrary to Blair's assertions thatthe final decision to go to war was not taken until March 2003,he had in fact made his mind up the previous summer.
Diversionary tactics
Partisanship explains why the mid-market tabloids (Daily Express and Daily Mail)--both fully in favour of war at the time but also stridently anti-Blair-- adopted such a scathing tone in their reporting.
To date neither paper has said whether the war was wrong in principle or even a mistake, although surprisingly the Mail has come close. In its editorial on 2 May, it underscored the tragedy of war and pointed out that it has made us more not less vulnerable to terrorism. Tellingly though, the editorial continued, "but the main reason why the conduct of the Iraq conflict must remain a central election issue is what it reveals about Mr Blair himself."
In the opposite corner the Mirror swallowed its opposition to the war to unreservedly support Labour. So much so that it was often hard to distinguish it from its erstwhile rival the Sun. Research shows that between them both papers devoted ten times as much coverage to Posh and Becks's marriage as they did to the sudden appearance of Lord Goldsmith's advice.
Guilty by omission?
It is not just a matter of how much space papers gave to issues or how enraged they managed to sound. The Telegraph (pro-war, anti-Blair) presumably felt it couldn't pull the wool over its readership's eyes by coming out against the war at this late stage, and so devoted most of its coverage to speculation about its impact on the election, not an analysis of the legal issues involved.
Of the national dailies, only the Guardian and the Independent devoted substantial space to the affair and made an effort to explain why it mattered. The Indy peaked on 29 April with eight full A3 size pages of reporting and analysis on the matter. Whilst the Guardian devoted three A2 size pages to the issue then and the previous day.
The manner in which Blair unconstitutionally rode roughshod over the Ministerial Code of Conduct by not sharing the full advice with the Cabinet; speculation about whether this could land the government and Britain's armed forces in the Hague; and second guessing the reasons why Lord Goldsmith changed his mind and whether he was "leant on" all featured prominently in both papers.
Given that it was democratic protocol being undermined here, these matters are too serious to be dismissed as mere technicalities. But perhaps the most important matter of all was how subverting international law and the UN (imperfect as they are) in this way set an unacceptably dangerous precedent. Arguably this last matter was implicit in their coverage, but certainly never explicitly stated or explained.
Role of media in democracy
Meanwhile, other issues related to Iraq and the wider war on terror, such as whether and when we should bring the troops home, the case for a "war-powers" Act, Guantanamo Bay, and the so-called "special relationship" -- to name just a few -- remained almost completely ignored throughout the five weeks.
The Goldsmith affair only got into the media because of a series of leaks from somewhere within the government machine. It was not the result of investigative journalism.
Once it broke, half the papers ignored it. Two more, the Express and the Mail were only interested in it for partisan advantage. Whilst the Guardian and the Independent examined only some of legal issues involved and forgot about the bigger picture. All this just before a general election. So how far can we rely on the mainstream media to reinvigorate our democracy?
Ian Taylor is PhD student examining the media relations of the anti-war movement.
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