The day of the Churnalist and the Belly dancer

The question that came up over and over again at the conference( The First Casualty-War Truth and the media today)was why journalists in the run up to the Iraq war choose to ignore the evidence that the war was unjustified.


Blame "CHURNALISM" Guardian writer Nick Davies at the conference as he tried to identify a systematic weakness in journalism today.

So what is churnalism? Davies will publish a book next year which he kindly previewed for the audience.It is called "Flat earth news" and the title is a reflection on the way that journalism works today.

For Davies journalism changed in Jan 1986 when Rupert Murdoch broke the resistance of fleet street to commercialism.From Wapping onwards,his research has shown that the average journalist is filling three times more space today.Staffing levels have been cut but output has increased.The journalist has been turned into a "passive processor".

The consequence of this-there is no time for fact checking and news is now created by the PR machine.This can take many forms from the spin department of Alistair Campbell to the corporate generated press release.

Davies cites the systematic manipulation of the Observer in the run up to the Iraq war,a paper that you would have expected would have campaigned against the war was fed constant information by the security services.It is read by Labour backbenchers,those same backbenchers who choose to support the vote on the War

Sharing the stand with Davies was Andrew Gilligan who has first hand experience of the mechanisms of war reporting.He gave the humorous example of the Telegraph which published a report in 2001 about Iraqi belly dances infiltrating Britain with the intent to assassinate opponents of the Saddam regime.A story that was blatant rubbish especially when a journalist on the paper checked to see how many visas the immigration department had issued for belly dancers,the answer being none.

Wars for Gilligan,create a sellers market with greater demand for news and space that has to be filled.Perversely the supply can collapse often due to logistical reasons and therefore the media has to publish rumours and spin