Hostile BBC Interview of a Saudi
Loyalist Shows Prime Journalistic Duty: Scrutiny of
One's Own Side
By Glenn
Greenwald
September 15,
2015 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Intercept"
- The
ongoing atrocities by Saudi Arabia and its
“coalition partners” in Yemen reflect powerfully – and
horribly – on both the U.S. and UK. That’s true not only
because those two countries in general are among the
closest allies of the Saudi regime, but also because
they are
specifically lavishing Saudi despots with the very
arms and intelligence being used to kill large numbers
of Yemeni civilians.
The American and British governments have
long been overflowing with loyalists to the Saudi regime
(recall how President Obama literally terminated a state
visit to India [where he
ironically spent his time “lecturing India on
religious tolerance and women’s rights”] in order to
fly to Riyadh to pay homage to the Saudi King upon his
death,
along with top officials from both
parties).
One of those many Saudi regime
loyalists, conservative British MP Daniel Kawczynski,
appeared on BBC’s Newsnight program on
Friday night and was mercilessly grilled by host James
O’Brien
about
support for the Saudi war in Yemen by both the
British governments and the country’s private-sector
weapons manufacturers.
The BBC deserves all sorts of
criticisms, but this interview was a masterclass in how
journalists should interview politicians and others who
wield power. The whole interview (video below) is well
worth watching, as O’Brien repeatedly demands that Kawczynski
address the war crimes being committed by the Saudi
regime he supports. But I want to focus on one point in
particular.
Each time he’s confronted with questions
about the war crimes committed by the side his own
government arms and supports, Kawczynski ignores the
topic and instead demands to know why the BBC isn’t
focused instead on the bad acts of the Houthis, the
rebel group the Saudis are fighting and which the Saudis
(dubiously) claim is controlled by Iran. Over and over,
when O’Brien asks about the role the UK Government is
playing in Saudi war crimes, Kawczynski tries to change
the topic by demanding that the BBC instead talk about
Iran and the Houthis: “You have an agenda at Newsnight
and you don’t want anyone to dispute the way in which
you are covering this war. You have an agenda against
the Gulf States coalition. . . . Why haven’t you shown
any coverage of the massacares… by the Houthi tribes?”
After noting that the BBC has reported
on Houthi violence, O’Brien explains this crucial point
about his focus on Saudi crimes:
Because the investigation is into
whether or not weapons sold by British companies
have been used in the commission of war crimes
possibly committed by Saudi Arabia. . . .
The Houthis are not our allies
and are not our customers. Therefore, the public
interest of British journalism is not served at this
point by investigating what they have or have not
been doing. We sell weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Embedded in O’Brien’s explanation is a
vital point: the primary role of journalists is to
expose and thus check abuses committed by their
own nation and its allies. As O’Brien notes, “the public
interest” is served far more by focusing on the bad acts
of one’s own government than on the acts of foreign
governments for which one is not responsible and over
which one has little or no control.
This ought to be so obvious as to be
axiomatic. But the opposite is true: the vast, vast
majority of media coverage in the west – and of foreign
policy discourse generally in the U.S. – is devoted to
some formulation of “hey, look at all the bad things
that our enemy tribe, the one way over there, is doing.” It’s
impossible to quantify with precision, but as someone
who pays a great deal of attention to American media and
“foreign policy expert” discussion in the U.S., I’d
estimate that 95% of that discourse is devoted to the
supposed bad acts of adversaries of the U.S., with maybe
5% devoted to the bad acts of the U.S. itself and its
closest allies. It’s exactly the opposite of the “public
interest” standard O’Brien accurately defends.
I first noticed this on a visceral
level when there was
a huge outpouring of protest and anger from American
journalists over the Iranian government’s three-monthdetention
of the American-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi (until
she was ordered released by an Iranian appellate court).
What was notable wasn’t the anger itself: it’s natural,
and noble, for journalists to defend free press rights
of their fellow journalists. What was so notable was
that their own country’s government – the United States
– had
imprisoned journalists for years without
charges of any kind, including
an Al Jazeera journalist for almost seven years at
Guantanamo, and most of them said absolutely
nothing about this. All of that was
barely reported. How can you be an American
journalist and focus extensively on Iran’s abuse of
journalists while completely ignoring your own
government’s?
That event for me demonstrated a
critical point: it’s so fun – and so easy – to highlight
and protest the bad acts done by the countries declared
to be the Bad Ones by your own government. It’s not
quite as fun or easy to highlight and protest the bad
acts done by your own government itself or its closest
allies. Yet as O’Brien pointed out, journalism is far
more valuable, and the public interest served far more,
by doing the latter rather than the former.
That’s true because journalists can
serve as a watchdog over their government far more
effectively than over the governments of far-away
adversary countries. But even more so, there’s never any
shortage of light being shined on the bad acts of
adversary governments: exploiting the bad acts of
adversary governments in order to disparage, discredit
and thus weaken them is
something virtually all governments do. It’s called
propaganda. Citizens in most countries hear a great deal
about the bad things done by adversary governments. What
they hear far too little of are the bad acts done by
their own government, which is why journalism is most
valuable when it shines light on that. That’s
when journalism is informing rather than amplifying
tribal propaganda.
There are lots of reasons why people
prefer to focus on the bad acts of the Enemy Tribe
rather than one’s own. A big factor is strategic: when
the focus of Americans is on the bad acts of Putin or
North Korea or Iran or whatever Villain of the Moment is
being featured or on the injustice of those places,
their focus is not on the things they can actually do
something about: the bad acts of their own government
and the injustices in their own society. Constantly
directing people’s attention to bad things being done by
other tribes is simultaneously distracting and
distorting: it creates the impression that Bad Things
(imprisoning journalists) are only done by Them, not by
Us.
But at least as big a factor is a
psychological one: humans intrinsically feel better when
we are condemning others rather than ourselves. That’s
why bitter, judgmental gossip has long been a favorite
past time: it’s self-soothing to sit in critical
judgment of others. There’s a reason the Gospels has
to remind
human beings to “first take the plank out of your
own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the
speck from your brother’s eye”: it’s precisely because
the universal temptation is to ignore our own flaws
since that’s so much more self-flattering and pleasing.
None of these are absolute rules; some
caveats are needed. There’s a benefit from knowing about
the acts of adversary governments. We want reporting
on those countries as well, and journalists assigned to
those countries do their job by highlighting the conduct
of those governments. Nor should the bad acts of
adversary governments be expressly denied or actively
minimized, as that becomes its own form of deceit and
propaganda. And then there are times when the bad
conduct of other governments produces such great human
suffering that collective action becomes both possible
and justified, in which case focusing on it can be
justified.
But as a general proposition, the
duties of journalism, and for that matter citizenship,
are fulfilled by having one’s primary focus be on the
bad acts of one’s own side, not those of the Others. As
always, this quote from Noam Chomsky – who has spent
decades being told that he spends too much time talking
about the bad acts of his own government and society –
most concisely explains the point:
“My own concern is primarily the
terror and violence carried out by my own state, for
two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be
the larger component of international violence.
“But also for a much more
important reason than that; namely, I can do
something about it. So even if the U.S. was
responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the
world instead of the majority of it, it would be
that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for.
And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the
ethical value of one’s actions depends on their
anticipated and predictable consequences. It is
very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone
else. That has about as much ethical value as
denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th
century.”
It’s not only “easy” to “denounce the
atrocities of someone else.” It’s also profitable:
strategically, propagandistically, psychologically and
emotionally. That’s why it’s such a popular thing to do.
It’s been true for decades in the U.S. and still is:
write or talk about the invasions, bombings,
tyrant-support and torture by your own government and
you’ll immediately face demands from nationalists that
you focus instead on Russia, upon pain of being accused
of being a secret Kremlin agent if you don’t. That is
what also explains the
obsession among some westerners to depict Islam,
rather than their own governments, as the Prime Force of
Violence and Aggression. It’s also what drives the
tactic of minimizing your own country’s sins by pointing
to someone that is doing worse.
It’s just pure tribalism in its most
classic and primitive form: it’s the Other Side that is
always the Bad One. Journalistically, that behavior
is as cowardly as it is inconsequential: Americans and
other westerners have been inundated for decades with
demonizing language about U.S. adversaries from Russia
to China to Iran to Muslim extremists. There’s very
little valuable, and nothing particularly courageous or
interesting, about sitting in the U.S. echoing those
self-serving, self-pleasing and already widely accepted
narratives. What Americans have lacked, woefully, is a
journalistic focus on the bad acts done by their own
government, a direct challenge to the propagnadistic
banalities they’ve been fed to glorify their own side.
This superb interview by this BBC host
is an excellent illustration of the virtues of
adversarial journalism. Even more significantly, it
demonstrates why journalism is most valuable when it is
devoted to what is most difficult: namely, focusing on
the bad acts of one’s own side, holding
accountable those who wield power in one’s own country
and those of its closest allies, challenging the
orthodoxies most cherished and venerated by one’s own
society.
The British MP who was interviewed by
Newsnight, Daniel Kawczynski, is
now threatening to sue the BBC and its producer, Ian
Katz, over the interview. He’s particularly upset that
after the interview, Katz posted
the documents showing that Kawczynski received a
“donation” from the Saudi Foreign Ministry to visit. As
is so often the case, the most vocal tough-guy-warriors
are such delicate flowers.
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