I’ve written before about the Féile an Phobail’s ability to produce speakers and catch public interest, not just through focusing on Irish matters, but on matters well beyond our shores. I was at one of them last week.
A wet coming we had of it. I had a passenger who was in a wheel-chair, and as we transferred from car to chair, in the car park at the back of St Mary’s University College, the heavens tipped five tons of rain on top of us. Gasping and wet we made our way into the College, only to find the lift wasn’t working. A college attendant who is being paid half of what he deserves, judging by his efforts with us, found a way which included journeying down long corridors, navigating half a dozen steps, taking a chair-lift, taking (another) regular lift, and finally arriving at the talk some twenty minutes after it began. Not a good start.
But the talk was brilliant. It was given by Jonathan Steele, an Englishman in his mid-70s. Google him and you’ll find he went to Oxbridge and Yale universities, was involved in the civil rights registration of Mississipee voters in the 1960s, and has reported as a journalist for the Guardian newspaper, among others, on events all over the world . His talk was on Putin’s Russia.
His central point was that the mainstream media, including The Guardian, produce a one-sided picture of the world and particularly Russia. For example, the appearance in the Ukraine of Russian troops has generally been presented to us as Putin attempting to re-assemble in part the old USSR – straight-forward aggression. Steele made the point that the US and the West had announced that the Ukraine would be joining Nato, thus allying that country with the West. Putin’s actions in the Ukraine were a response to that. If Putin could be sure that the Ukraine would be left independent, he’d very likely move his troops out in a matter of days.
Similarly with the presentation of Russia’s role in bombing Syria. We’ve had that presented to us as ruthless and involving the loss of hundreds of innocent lives. Steele doesn’t deny this, but points out that the US-led ‘coalition’ forces were at least as ruthless in their bombing: when they spotted a sniper on the roof of a tower block, for example, into the basement of which maybe hundreds of people had crowded for protection, they bombed it, killing the sniper and everyone else. In addition, it was a question of either Assad winning or ISIS winning, and unpalatable as Assad may be, ISIS are markedly worse. A conflict that had dragged on for months and longer has now effectively been turned around, with ISIS on the retreat.
Steele is a tall, gently-spoken figure, self-deprecating but obviously a man of enormous journalistic experience. He says that his insistence on telling the full story in, for example, Syria, has meant that colleagues have started to look at him and ask if he’s all right, has he been brain-washed, etc. In other words, for the journalist who tells the full story, that might not reflect quite so well on his own country or the Western powers, a kind of limbo is created. Worse still, newspapers and the BBC stop inviting them to express their views on various situations.
Maybe it’s because we here in the North-East Nest know only too well how the media can become the tool of the state that his words resonated with me. We form our view of the world, home or away, on the back of what is reported to us through the media. How else can we know what’s going on? Steele suggested that reading material on The Nation and on VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) might help to some degree to right the balance.
I’m full of admiration for Steele. It is always so much easier to go with the flow. But then, as Roy Keane famously pointed out, that’s what dead fish do.
THE NATION: https://www.thenation.com/politics/
VIPS: https://www.antiwar.com/blog/author/veteran-intelligence-professionals-for-sanity/
For the truth of Jonathan Steele’s opinion, one only has to compare the media coverage of the Syrian/Russian actions in clearing ISIS out of Aleppo, and the US/Iraqi actions in clearing ISIS out of Mosul.
Western media were scathing, on a daily basis, of every bombing by Russian aircraft and ground action by Assad’s troops. They used mobile phone coverage from unverified sources to show damage done, and especially children’s deaths and injuries. They also took evidence from the ‘White Helmets’ despite the fact that it was proved they acted in co-operation with ISIS.
War is horrible and everything horrible was shown, genuine or otherwise. But never did they point out what would have happened to Aleppo had the military action not been carried out.
On the other hand, when the same action was taken by the US/Iraqi military, the media were embedded, which means they were told which direction to point their cameras and what stories to cover.
Going solo to do your own investigative reporting was not an option – any such attempt will have you frozen out of any stories by the US military.
The result is that Mosul reporting was heavily sanitised, with the public only seeing what the powers-that-be thought was good for them.
Beware of managed news – it is only managed to keep the actual truth from you!
Perhaps it was a fluke, Esteemed Blogmeister, but one had an ear cocked to the wireless while running the eye over your post of today.
And the contrast between the broadcaster to whom one was listening and the journalist one was reading about could hardly be more stark.
One is not too sure what the opposite to ‘embedded’ is but Jonathan Steele would certainly seem to fit the bill. The same could hardly be said about the broadcaster. Indeed, to describe Pat Kenny (for it was he!) as ‘embedded’ is to do an injustice to the deep warm nether world of the duck-feather duvet which is Denis O’Brien’s Newstalk fm.
You mentioned the Mississippi and Jonathan Steele’s time there during the Civil Rights struggle during the 60s: Pat Kenny was up to 90 as he warmed to the Deep South and the happenings in Charlotteville, NC over the weekend.
PK, of course, was famously wooed from one wireless station (RTE) to another (Newstalk fm) because, as the contemptuous, oops, contemporary phrase has it, ‘he was worth it’. Translated into Doubloons this comes out as ‘PK’s internal revenoo taking its periodic vow of renoowal’.
Meaning, he’s Forth Worth the top two of RTE moola makers , the Skeletal Tubs and the Arse-faced Darcy, even when one Fort Knox these two airheads together, thus making PK, a wizard of the wireless, a Millionaire of the Mike.
Re-spect.
So, does this mean that to ‘earn’ this moola by listening to PK we get to rendezvoo with the PC point of view in the Free Southern Stateen? Read the following, reader dear, and make a judicial revoo of your own:
-When I heard the name of David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK, being marked present at Charlottville, NC I immediately thought of Gerry Adams.
Pause.
Followed by a guffaw.
-He hasn’t gone away, you know.
Neither had the IRA in PK’s Mulligan Stew of a world view.
-The White Supremacists were excercised by the removal of a statue.
Pause.
Followed by a somewhat illogical guffaw, perhaps:
-That’s what the IRA used to do when I was growing up, before they started killing people. They killed statues, like the one of Lord Gough in the Phoenix Park (in 1957).
Eh?
One of Winston Churchill’s earliest memories of his shy boyhood in the Chief Secretary’s Lodge in the Phoenix Park was on his grandpop’s unveiling the same equestrian statue in 1880.
Back in the Fabulous Fifites, the big bone of contention among snotty school boys in short pants on the 23 Bus passing the Clearwater Park at the time of the Lord Gough removal ( despite the lack of a statutory instrument ordering same ) was the pronunciation, (as it was later to be, of Van Gogh).
-You say Gock, I say Goff, let’s call the old Lord off.
There was a tinge of regret in PK’s modulated tone with all the Christian Brother-bothered broadvowels bowdlerised out of it. This is understandable.
For Pat Kenny too had a Churchillian upbringing, having been raised contagious to the same Phoenix Park where Kenny Major was famously the Elephant Keeper for more years than he cared to remember (No, not the Elephant).
The bronze from which the statue was cast consisted of fifteen tons of gun-metal from cannon confiscated by Lord Gough in China and in India. To allege that the Raj view of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies was the bench mark of the KKK is unworthy of consideration: comparable to comparing, say, injuns and Indians.
Lord Gough was born in St. Helen’s in Booterstown, Dublin 4 and during the course of his long and distinguished career won fame and flaming crosses as a KKK ( King’s Kontinental Kelptomaniac). He breathed his last in St. Helen’s in 1869 and his still organs were laid to rest in Stillorgan, Dublin 6.
St. Helen’s now houses the Radisson Hotel and had been previously in the ownership of (gulp) the Chrisitan Brothers. (see above). This noble pile displays the motto which marries Lord Gough and, erm, Kenneth Williams:
-Mors Potior Macula. (Death rather than Infamy).
-Infamy ! Infamy ! The IRA have it Infamy.
INFAMY rather than DEBT
Raised in the perfume of Raj Elephant gock
Lumps of which big as India’s biggest rock
Pat Koh-i-noor
No longer poor
Moola en bloc safe behind a combination lock.