Page 69 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

48 Mapping approaches and themes

By contrast, an analysis of media coverage before and during the Iraq War by
Lewis and Brookes (2003) found important differences in reporting within public
service media. The BBC, while fiercely attacked by Labour government flak, was
broadly supportive towards the government and army sources. Channel Four
news was more sceptical and critical towards official accounts. Propaganda
model analyses focused on evidence of control are also poor at addressing
exceptions and variations in mainstream media output. Freedman (2009) examines
a moment of mainstream media disunity, when a Labour-supporting popular
UK newspaper, The Mirror, came out strongly against the Iraq War in 2002.
Explanations for this stance included a rebranding of the paper to respond to
perceived demands for more serious analytical and international news coverage
after 9/11. The paper signed up the radical former Mirror journalist John Pilger
who described the United States, in a Fourth of July special, as ‘the world’s
leading rogue state … out to control the world’ (The Mirror 4 July 2002), generating
critical ‘flak’ from a leading US investor in the paper, Tweedy Brown, who
phoned to complain. The paper sustained a case against the war as counter-
productive, reckless and likely to increase rather than reduce risks for the UK
from terrorism. In doing so the paper also responded to a shift in popular sentiment
culminating in the two-million-strong anti-war march in February 2003. The
paper’s political editor, David Seymour, said the anti-war position was ‘over-
whelmingly supported by the readers’. The paper’s editorial stance shifted once
the war began, maintaining opposition but focusing on supporting courageous
British soldiers, with a broader retreat from critical, campaigning perspectives
towards a resurgence of entertainment news. Yet Freedman argues that in the
earlier moment of social crisis, with elite disagreement and a strong popular
opposition movement, space for dissenting opinion was opened up in main-
stream media. At the same time pressures to reproduce dominant perspectives
were evident, from investors, shareholders, government and, as public opinion
became more ambivalent, the paper was unwilling to align itself with a ‘minority’
anti-war position. Freedman (2009: 67) concludes ‘Moments of social crisis can
open up spaces for innovative and radical coverage but they sit uneasily with the
market disciplines of a “free press” that privilege, above all, profitability and
competitiveness’.
Edwards and Cromwell’s attitude towards journalists working in the system is
condescending. The understanding that informs these radical critics’ own stance
is variously described as ‘unimaginable’ or ‘unthinkable’ within the confines of
mainstream media. Likewise for Herman and Chomsky (1988: 2) journalists work
under constraints because ‘the operation of these filters occurs so naturally …
that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable’. Such an account
evades important political–economic, and labour, considerations. This tends to
be a world of heroic dissidents, insiders who become enlightened outsiders, with
occasional anomalous good reporting from insiders being acknowledged, but
discounted. As a consequence, key considerations are flattened and ignored: how
are hierarchical controls imposed? How and why do conditions of control differ,