How the Spooks Took over the News

Editor's note: This is an edited excerpt from Nick Davies' book, Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media (Chatto & Windus). Davies' book has created enormous controversy in the UK, where many of the newsmakers Davies discusses in the book have fired back with op-eds accusing Davies of relying on the same anonymous sourcing that he condemns the commercial press for using in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

It’s not surprising that the book strikes a tender spot in many a news-maker. It is the deepest examination of the links between the "public diplomacy" -- sometimes known as propaganda -- pushed by the Bush administration and its allies, and the media’s uncritical repetition of the claims made to justify the invasion.

It's easy to forget just how easy it was to sell an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state. It was the media, after all, that promulgated the novel idea that if Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction," that was in and of itself a justification to go to war. How did the issue of "WMD" become a proxy for the more important question of whether Iraq was a credible threat to the United States and its allies. At the time of the invasion, there were close to 40 countries suspected of having an illicit weapons program. Twelve of them were considered "hostile" to the United States and its allies. Yet, the administration claimed that possession of old chemical or biological munitions was a de facto justification for attacking the only country among the twelve that was well-contained; a country whose air-space and imports and exports were under international control. The media embraced the idea uncritically, never mind that Saddam Hussein had not been rattling his saber or threatening any offensive action against another state.

Hussein was in a great position for a tin-pot dictator -- he and his cronies had extracted over $10 billion in corporate kick-backs and bribes which the Right spun as a UN scandal rather that what it was: the largest corporate bribery scandal in history -- and he was able to blame all of his country’s domestic woes on the U.S./British sanctions program that strangled the country.

It’s always been a curiosity that public opinion could be manipulated so comprehensively, and Davies provides one more piece of the puzzle explaining where our media culture is today.

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How the Spooks Took Over the News

by Nick Davies

On the morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.

The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."

Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about the New York Times report: "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously… It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world.

There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake -- and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.