CJA E-letter   

from the Commonwealth Journalists Association

Headquarters: Frank Stockdale Building, UWI, St Augustine, Trinidad

 

Issue No 6                                                          November 2004

 

 

Page 2 Maldives rearrests cyberdissidents: Pakistani sub-editor freed 

Page 3 Repression continues in Zimbabwe: Fiji sets up CJA branch

Page 4 Bangladeshi writer wins Thomson award

Page 5-6   CJA training courses: Saving Sarawak’s mangroves

  Election reporting in Cameroon

Page 7-8   News from round the world

Page 9-12 Books: Meldrum’s Zimbabwe: Campbell’s news management

 

 

Four journalists murdered

 

Three journalists have been murdered in Bangladesh and one in India in the past three months.

 

Shahid Anwar of the Daily Asian Express was shot in the head in his Dhaka office on October 24. Dipankar Chakrabarty, 59-year-old executive editor of the daily Durjoy Bangla, was decapitated with axes by scooter-riding assailants on October 2. He was vice-president of the Bangladesh Federal Union of Journalists’ Bogra branch. He had written about gangsters at Sherpur who enjoyed politicians’ protection.

 

Armed men burst into the home of Kamal Hossain of the daily Ajker Kagoj on the night of August 21. He hid but gave himself up after they threatened to kill his two-year-old son. Police found his body two kilometres away. A few days earlier he had helped police identify members of criminal gangs.

 

In India, 45-year-old Dilip Mohapatra, editor of Aji Kagaj, Orissa, was found on a highway on November 9, bound hand and foot with his skull smashed. He had written about the timber and drugs mafia in the region. One suspect has been detained.

 

Bangladeshi journalists are concerned about extremist violence. Five journalists were among those injured by grenades thrown at an opposition rally in Dhaka in August. Eight were attacked by young government supporters while covering a student protest against the grenade-throwing. Azaharul Islam Montu, of the Grammer Kagoj, was beaten unconscious by drug traffickers in September.

Maldives rearrests cyberdissidents

 

Three journalists, freed from long prison terms imposed after they published an e-mailed newsletter in the Maldives, were re-arrested in August after attending a pro-democracy rally. One of them, Fathimath Nisreen, has since been freed but is banished to an outlying island. A fourth ‘cyberdissident’ has escaped to Switzerland.

 

Malaysia’s prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has hinted at using the draconian Internal Security Act against webmasters who allow ‘irresponsible’ comments to be posted on their sites.

 

In Britain, the International Press Institute has protested against court action which removed from the worldwide web two servers used by Indymedia, an international “truth-telling” network. Indymedia was told neither who instigated the action (apparently an Italian judge, using a US-Italian treaty) nor why.

 

PAKISTAN

Sub-editor jailed for life wins freedom

 

A Pakistani sub-editor serving a life sentence for blasphemy was acquitted in November by the High Court in Peshawar. Munawar Mohsin Ali had been imprisoned since January 2001 when The Frontier Post published a letter deemed blasphemous. The High Court found he was unaware of its contents. After the letter was published, a mob set fire to the newspaper office and a cinema.

 

Asim Ghafoor, wanted for kidnapping and murdering Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was shot dead by police in Karachi on November 17. In a court case, another accused has been sentenced to death and three to 25 years. Besides the Pearl case, Ghafoor was wanted for attempting to murder President Musharraf and for murdering 11 Frenchmen with a bomb outside the Karachi Sheraton.

 

Police closed one of Pakistan’s few privately-run radios, FM Radio 103, Lahore, in November and arrested three of its journalists, including Urdu poet Farhat Abbas Shah. The station had given offence by its reporting of a scandal at the Punjab cardiology institute and by accusing government hospitals of failing their patients. In September, a new daily, The Islamabad Times, was banned before its first issue could appear. Its printer and three other people were arrested.

 

Khyber tribesman in November kidnapped, beat up and chained a journalist whom they accused of misreporting their dispute with an Islamic organisation.

 

Ghulam Shehzad Agha, editor of a banned magazine, was arrested on November 4. Sarwar Mujahid, a correspondent for a leading paper Nawa-e-Waqt, was freed on October 16 after being detained for ten weeks. The government lifted its advertising ban on Nawa-I-Waqt and sister papers in September.

 

Universities in the Punjab are to set up radios and TV studios.

 

 

Repression continues in Zimbabwe

 

Zimbabwe’s parliament has made the Information Act even more repressive, increasing the maximum penalty for unaccredited journalists to two years in jail. The Act allows accredited journalists to write for only one outlet, thus discouraging them from writing for foreign media.

 

Richard Musazulwa of The Standard was charged in October with false reporting in a story published in January about recruits fleeing military training. Earlier, the Media Commission demanded from The Standard’s editor the negative of a photograph showing President Mugabe hitching up his trousers.

 

Three photographers were held for a day in Harare in October when they covered a women’s protest against a Bill requiring voluntary organisations to register.

 

A magistrate in September cleared four directors of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe of publishing The Daily News on October 24, 2003, without a licence. ANZ published the issue after a court decision in its favour the previous day. ANZ has been in dispute over severance pay with journalists and other workers at the banned News.

 

The High Court in September quashed a three-month sentence on Tawanda Majoni for taking a job with The Daily Mirror while still employed by the police.

 

Fiji sets up a CJA branch

 

The latest branch of the CJA was set up in Fiji on August 6. Over 20

journalists attended the meeting in the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation (FBCL) cafeteria in Suva. Ricardo Morris (The Review) was in the chair. The instigator of the branch, Vasemaca Rarabici (The Fiji Times), gave the opening address. She was recently with the Commonwealth Secretariat in London.

 

She was elected president, with Ricardo Morris as vice-president, Vasiti Ritova (The Fiji Times) secretary and Ofa Kaukimoce  (FBCL) treasurer. Francis Herman of FBCL treated the journalists to a barbecue and yaqona – a traditional drink.

 

Subsequent meetings have elected a representative committee and adopted a constitution . The branch is already proposing its first training course and planning meetings to discuss issues of importance to Pacific journalists. It is establishing a web site. Its e-mail address is cjafiji@yahoo.com. 

 

Our thanks

 

We would like to thank the International Freedom of Expression Exchange and the Media Institute of Southern Africa for news in this newsletter. We would also like to say thank you for the backing of the Commonwealth Foundation and the Commonwealth Media Development Fund       

 

A chance for Africa

 

The standard of government in Africa is improving, in the view of Myles Wickstead, director of the Commission for Africa, and there is an opportunity to stop the continent falling behind in a globalising world. Wickstead was speaking to members of the re-formed CJA UK branch in November.

 

The task of the 17 members of the commission, nine of them from Africa, is to produce early next year a report outlining coherent policies to inspire action and an increase in aid. Myles Wickstead says that Africa is vibrant and could absorb twice as much aid as now. He also says that the present trade and export subsidies, as they affect Africa, are unacceptable, and the sale of small arms to Africa is a serious problem. The commission was proposed by the British prime minister, Tony Blair, to take advantage of the British presidency of the European Union and of the group of eight industrialised countries next year.

 

CJA UK has also heard Maleeha Lodhi, a former editor who is Pakistan’s High Commissioner in London. She made it clear that Pakistan would decide its own policies and not have these decided by outsiders. The law making defamation a crime was a law which parliament wanted to pass, she said. Satellite TV has mobilised support for peace with India. Indians are now seen on Pakistani TV screens.

 

Dhaka writer wins a Thomson award

 

Monjur Mahmud, an experienced economics and business writer with the Daily Star in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was the first journalist to be nominated by the CJA to attend the Thomson Foundation print summer course in Cardiff (Wales) during 2004. Monjur distinguished himself by winning the award for most helpful participant. He says that his time in Cardiff was of great value to him, although towards the end he was keenly aware that his young family in Dhaka were contending with the worst floods in half a century.

The next Thomson Foundation international print summer course will run from June 27 to September 16 next year. Participants will enjoy free tuition and accommodation worth £7,000,  the CJA providing the airfare. The CJA is seeking applicants. Fuller details can be found on the international print journalism section of the Thomson Foundation website. www.thomsonfoundation.org.uk/

 

Editors and the CPU head for Sydney

 

In February, the Commonwealth publishers’ organisation, the Commonwealth Press Union, will hold its biennial conference in Australia for the first time in a quarter of a century, in Sydney. It will be opened by Prime Minister John Howard. About 100 editors will attend the editors forum associated with the conference and will discuss such matters as press freedom, the marketing of small papers, problems posed by international terrorism and how all papers can get their archives on-line and available to the public. The agenda for the forum is always left until the last minute to ensure that the editors can talk about their most immediate worries. See www.cpu.org.uk.

TRAINING

Saving Sarawak’s mangroves

 

Florence Yii of CJA Sarawak and the Journalists Association of Kuching Division organised a four-day workshop in feature writing and analytical skills at Kuching in October. It attracted 40 people, about half of them journalists, the rest government and social services staff. It was backed by Azam, a state-fund development organisation.

 

CJA vice-president Martin Mulligan led sessions on development, wider effects of analytical and feature writing, and elements of a successful feature. Barry Lowe led sessions on environmental accounting, ethnic diversity, eco-friendly tourism and fair trade and globalisation. Toman Mamora, group editor of Sarawak Press, led a session on analytical writing from the local perspective.

 

After two days in the classroom, the 40 visited a UNDP-backed project at Kampung Trusan Jaya, about 100km from Kuching. The project aims to control aggressive logging in the local mangroves by conducting research, making people aware of the damage and promoting other ways of making a living, principally crab farming. The journalists had to find out about the project’s findings and fortunes and about the implications for similar projects.

 

The best of the stories they wrote, an outstanding piece headlined: “A success story”, was published on October 22 in the Sarawak Tribune. Peter Sibon, Albert Mentri Tudin, Caroline Jackson, Roland Duncan Klabu, Dayang Fatimah Awang Lai, Edwin Tawie and Dawit Akin all had a hand in it.

 

Hassan Shahriar, CJA president, signed a Memorandum of Understanding between Azam and the CJA, with the hope that a further course will be held within the next year. Hassan also gave a public lecture entitled: “Rural development in Bangladesh: the journalist’s role”.

 

Election reporting restricted in Cameroon

 

The CJA joined with the Commonwealth Press Union and the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association to run an election reporting workshop at Limbe in Cameroon in September. It was funded by the political affairs department of the Commonwealth Secretariat.  Two trainers were engaged, Barry Lowe for the CJA and Colin Chapman for the CPU and the CBA.

 

There was an earlier CJA visit to Cameroon in April, to conduct a workshop for journalists in Yaounde.  Cameroonian journalists, asked at that time about their training needs, requested a workshop on election reporting.

 

September’s workshop was planned to coincide with campaigning for Cameroon’s presidential election (in which the country’s ruler for 21 years, Paul Biya, was re-elected).  Three local organisations were asked to nominate participants: the Cameroon Association of Commonwealth Journalists, the Cameroon Journalists Union and the Cameroon Association of English Speaking Journalists. The president of the first of these, Ndifor Asong, was engaged as local coordinator.

 

The small city of Limbe, on Cameroon’s Atlantic coast, was chosen to avoid unwanted attention from the authorities at a politically sensitive time and to distance the participants from their normal work.

 

Fourteen journalists attended, mainly experienced and mid-career journalists working for independent outlets.  Two were from the state-owned Cameroon Radio and Television. The workshop featured Western models of election reporting but was tailored to fit the Cameroonian context.  The content included:

  • The role of the media in elections
  • Editorial news values and how they respond to election campaigns
  • Reporting the facts versus stating an opinion
  • Avoiding unfairness and lack of balance
  • Providing equal opportunities for candidates
  • The election rules and the voter registration process
  • Party financing
  • Profiling party leaders and main candidates
  • Contacting civil society organisations that specialise in democracy, media monitoring and other related issues
  • Creating an election campaign monitoring group
  • Clarifying manifestos – what are the issues for the politicians? What are the issues for the voters/core groups of voters?
  • Exposing vote-buying, intimidation, unfair attempts to influence voters, disenfranchisement of voters, various methods of ballot fraud
  • Voter education
  • Practical advice for journalists in the field
  • Staying out of trouble.

 

Participants engaged enthusiastically with this but complained that government restrictions on reporting election campaigns would prevent them from practising most of the skills they had learnt.  They asked for further training.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

News from round the world

 

AUSTRALIA

 

Police raided the National Indigenous Times in November and seized documents about government plans to promote ‘good behaviour’ in aboriginal communities.

 

BOTSWANA

 

Methaetsile Leepile has won the Media Institute of Southern Africa’s press freedom award for establishing Mokgosi, the first newspaper in the Setswana language.

 

CANADA

 

Ken Peters of the Hamilton Spectator was convicted of contempt of court in November for refusing to name a third person present when a confidential source gave him documents about a retirement home in 1995. The home is suing for libel.

 

THE GAMBIA

 

The Gambia’s Cabinet decided in October to revoke the 2002 Act which required journalists and media organisations to register with the National Media Commission. Many refused to register. Revocation now depends on the National Assembly.

 

GRENADA

 

The Grenadian Voice, Grenada Informer and Grenada Today all had equipment damaged and offices waterlogged by Hurrican Ivan in September.

 

INDIA

 

Sanjay Arya, a freelance who has inspired campaigns for better local government in Madhya Pradesh, was imprisoned in October, allegedly because of pressure on the police from local politicians.

 

Fifteen journalists were injured by a minister’s supporters at Karipur airport, Kerala, on November 1. The minister is among VIPs accused of sexually abusing young girls, in the Kozhikode Ice Cream Parlour Scandal of 1997. Two journalists were also attacked the previous day when a TV channel’s offices were stoned.

 

MALAWI

 

Tea workers rescued two journalists from The Nation when police attacked them as they covered unrest over dismissals at a privatised tea estate.

 

NAMIBIA

 

The government’s bi-weekly, New Era, became a daily in August.

 

NIGERIA

 

About 100 supporters of a local politician set fire to two public radio stations in Enugu and Onitsha, Eastern Nigeria, in November and attacked staff. The politician had been refused major public contracts. In Port Harcourt in October, Owei Sikpi of the Weekly Star was kidnapped and beaten nearly unconscious. He had accused a local politician of fraud. At the High Court in Ikeja, a photographer for The Vanguard was assaulted when he tried to photograph the security chief of the late Nigerian dictator General Sani Abacha. In Northern Nigeria, the Borno state government banned the BBC Hausa Service’s correspondent from reporting on its affairs.

 

SIERRA LEONE

 

Mohamed Amara Josiah, a correspondent for the Standard Times, was beaten unconscious at Kenema in the east of Sierra Leone on November 13. Three of his assailants are said to have been hospital workers. The paper had published an article headed ‘Tribalism and nepotism rocks Kenema Government Hospital’.

 

Human rights organisations have appealed for a pardon for Paul Kamara, combative editor of For Di People, who was jailed in October for two years for seditious libel. Kamara has also appealed. The case relates to allegations about President Kabbah’s work at a marketing board, back in the 1960s. Two years ago, Kamara served four months for accusing a judge of being a criminal.

 

SRI LANKA

 

The family, now in exile, of Sri Lankan journalist Mayilvaganam Nimalarajan has appealed for the inquiry into his murder four years ago to be revived. Nimalarajan, a BBC correspondent, was killed at his Jaffna home. Tamil politicians are accused of involvement. A key witness, Napoleon Ramesh, has yet to be questioned.

 

Three journalists were assaulted by soldiers in November when they covered a demonstration near Jaffna against the killing of a Hindu priest by an army vehicle.

In Colombo a motorcyclist lobbed a hand grenade at the Swarnavahini TV station.

 

TONGA

 

Chief Justice Webster has struck down two Acts which enabled the government to ban the import of the independent, New Zealand-printed Times of Tonga.

 

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

 

Trinidad comes 11th in Reporters Sans Frontieres press freedom ranking, behind New Zealand (9th) and ahead of Canada (18th). All others in the top 20 are in Europe.

 

Well-known Trinidad journalist Therese Mills spoke on BBC radio in Britain in November about a teacup-throwing incident which has convulsed the Trinidad parliament.  She was introduced as from the Commonwealth Journalists Association. 

 

ZANZIBAR

 

The independent newspaper Dira, banned last year, remains banned after a High Court decision on November 24. The judge decided that both the paper and the government, which accused it of violating ethics, were in the wrong. For several years, the government has been clinging to power in Zanzibar in the face of strong opposition.

Book reviews by David Spark

Saved by a ride in a lift

 

When Andrew Meldrum of The Guardian (London) was waiting to appear in a court in Zimbabwe, he asked the muscular prisoner handcuffed to him what he was accused of. “The police are waiting for the post mortem,” came the reply. Even Zimbabwe, it seems, has a breath of gallows humour.

 

In his memoir Where We Have Hope, Meldrum also tells the story of a man who admitted being hired by Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation to kill Geoff Nyarota, then editor of The Daily News. The man decided not to go through with it because Nyarota was kind to him in the elevator.

 

Meldrum, an American, went to Zimbabwe as a freelance soon after independence in 1980, eager to chronicle the early years of a new democratic nation. Three years later, he was disillusioned by a ruthless army sweep through restive Matabeleland. However, he clung on in Zimbabwe until last year, when he was the last foreign journalist to be expelled. He survived so long because he had secured permanent residence and could not legally be thrown out. In the face of a court decision that he had the right to stay, only the state airline, Air Zimbabwe, was ready to deport him.

 

Among his eye-opening experiences in Zimbabwe were two visits to the remote constituency of Mataga at the time of the 2000 parliamentary election. There he found young toughs led by one of President Mugabe’s more exotic followers, Biggie Chitoro, menacing the voters. In a black cowboy hat, black leather waistcoat, black cowboy boots and jeans held up by a studded belt carrying two daggers, Chitoro swaggered in and out of the polling.He saw to it that the Mugabe candidate won.

 

Smoke drifted from looted and burned-out shops, when Meldrum first visited Mataga. A police officer commented: “This is election time and those young boys are just campaigning.”

 

In a hospital in a town near by, Meldrum was taken to see James Zhou. He writes: “His backless hospital gown revealed two gaping bloody craters where his buttocks should have been. He had burns, cuts and bruises everywhere on his body.”

James explained that his brother Finos had been an opposition election candidate. Chitoro had taken them both to his base at Texas Ranch. They were beaten for two nights. Hot plastic from flaming bags was dripped on James’s body. Finos died.

 

After the presidential election of 2002, Meldrum was arrested and imprisoned barefoot in a freezing and stinking cell. His offence was to pick up from the Daily News a story about a man alleging his wife had been beheaded in the election’s aftermath. The Daily News withdrew the story two days later. After being released, Meldrum said he was lucky to be thrown in jail with Collin Chiwanza and Lloyd Mudiwa of the News. They helped to make the ordeal bearable.

 

In court, Meldrum was cleared on the ground that he had tried to check his report with the police but they had refused any information. The sister of the dead woman told the magistrate that she did not blame Meldrum for her family’s ordeal. She blamed her brother-in-law who told the lie in the first place.

 

One night last year, government agents arrived at Meldrum’s gate. He slipped away but later answered a summons to the immigration department where he was told he was being deported. Despite a high court order to stop this, he was bundled on an Air Zimbabwe plane.     

 

Where We Have Hope, by Andrew Meldrum (John Murray: contact lucy.dixon@johnmurrays.co.uk)

 

 

Alastair Campbell, manager of news

 

Truth is something that the party ruling a country owns, controls and uses as a weapon. That sounds like a quote from Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe or his information minister, Jonathan Moyo. But it was also the guiding principle of Alastair Campbell who, as Tony Blair’s press secretary at 10 Downing Street, was arguably the second most powerful man in Britain until he resigned last year. He led a single-minded and imaginative but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to enlist the normally critical media into Blair’s New Labour enterprise.

            Campbell (who coined the name New Labour) and his colleague Peter Mandelson, now a commissioner of the European Union, are often described as spin-doctors. However, Campbell’s biographers, political editors Peter Oborne and Simon Walters, show that his attempts to influence the reporting of embarrassing political stories were not all that successful.

People could be awkward. Blair’s wife Cherie did not give Campbell a full account of her purchase of two flats with the help of an ex-conman. Sir Michael Willcocks insisted on telling the truth about Downing Street’s efforts to win Blair some limelight at the Queen Mother’s funeral.

But spin was only a part of the Campbell enterprise. His aim was not so much to put a slant on individual stories as to get the whole of British public life, including the media, behind the government. It took the wide divisions over Iraq to defeat him.

Alastair, son of a vet, is a genuine member of the Campbell clan, his family coming from the Campbell island of Tiree, off Scotland’s west coast. He plays the bagpipes well enough to raise money as a busker in the street. From childhood, he acquired an abiding enthusiasm for Burnley Football Club. At Cambridge University, he spent rather too long drowning his resentments in the college bar.

His first professional writing was for a semi-pornographic magazine. It is not clear whether what he wrote was fiction or a true account of his erotic adventures as a teaching assistant in France. He joined mainstream journalism on the Tavistock Times in Devon, a training ground for The Daily Mirror. Eventually he became the Mirror’s political editor and memorably accused the Conservative prime minister, John Major, of tucking his shirt in his underpants. Disrespect and bad language were important weapons in Campbell’s armoury. People in high office and well-paid jobs expect civility and are nonplussed when they don’t get it. But Campbell brought to British politics a passion and frenetic energy they were not used to. He once had a nervous breakdown.

He was not outstanding as a news-breaking journalist. He did, however, have a knack for striking up personal friendships with important people: the Labour leaders, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, the Mirror’s dodgy proprietor, Robert Maxwell, the manager of Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson.

He also recognised that the British media had stumbled into a position of political power. They had largely given up reporting parliamentary debates, just as they had given up treating politicians as statesmen. Instead, they trawled for exclusive political stories and scandals, which could put a government out of its stride. They controlled how a prime minister was seen by the public.

Campbell used this media power against the vulnerable and accident-prone John Major. Other political writers joined him in making Major into a joke.

From 1994 when Campbell became Tony Blair’s press spokesman, he and Mandelson led a relentless campaign to ensure that political news favoured New Labour. Campbell had the press scoured for any minor inaccuracy and used this to rubbish a whole report, making the writer think twice before offending again. At the same time, he made sure that no Labour speaker strayed from the New Labour line. When election day came in May 1997, Major’s defeat was a foregone conclusion.

Next day, Campbell arrived in Downing Street as press secretary, resolved that the media would not do to Tony Blair what they had done to John Major. On the contrary, they and all the other powers in the land must join in building Blair’s new, cool Britannia.

Blair made it clear to ministers that they were to say nothing to a journalist without Downing Street approval. Campbell organised which senior ministers would appear on television. Blair made him a civil servant, with power to order government information officers, who were also civil servants, about. They either followed Downing Street’s line on the news or they went. Within two years, 17 out of 19 directors of information at government ministries went.

Campbell’s approach to the media was two-pronged. First, he sought the backing of newspaper owners, particularly Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-American owner of the biggest-selling tabloid, The Sun, to whose journalists he showed a courtesy he showed to few others. His efforts to win favour with The Sun went to bizarre lengths. Kevin Maguire, political editor of its rival, the Mirror, had the idea of getting President Clinton to appeal for peace in Ireland. He sought Campbell’s advice - and saw Clinton’s appeal, which he had largely written, appear in The Sun. Campbell and Blair also sought favour, unsuccessfully, with the bible of Middle England, the Daily Mail.

Campbell used the other prong of his media policy in his treatment of individual political journalists. He knew the weakness which underlay their power. In the competitive media world, they had to have exclusives, and he was the best source of exclusive information they were ever likely to find.

Campbell did not believe that government information should be free to all. He believed it commanded a price. If you wanted it, you paid for it by toeing his line. In this way he won the allegiance of particular journalists and even of whole political staffs. But his triumph was not complete. He might tame the political staff of The Times but he could not control the columnists back at the office. And journalists outside the fold could still file awkward stories.

One of these outsiders was Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist who set off the Iraq dossier affair and brought about Campbell’s resignation. Gilligan broadcast several scoops on the BBC’s early-morning Today radio programme (which sets the daily agenda for the British media). His stories about faulty and missing equipment embarrassed the Ministry of Defence.

At 6.07 am on May 29 last year, Gilligan told his listeners that Downing Street had sexed up an intelligence dossier about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and that the government knew its claim about these weapons being deployable in 45 minutes was probably false. This second allegation, which accused the government of bad faith, was dropped from later bulletins. But, writing in The Mail on Sunday, Gilligan accused Campbell personally of sexing up the dossier.

This had been published the previous September to support the case for war. Although it inspired the Sun headline ‘Brits 45 minutes from doom’, it in fact made the case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein less wholeheartedly than Campbell wished. In February he put out a second dossier, about the evils of Saddam’s regime. Much of this turned out to have been culled from a student’s thesis written 12 years before. Government dossiers began to look unreliable.

Gilligan’s May broadcast came just as the failure to find unorthodox weapons in Iraq became embarrassing. Yet Campbell’s initial letters to the BBC were mild and did not mention Gilligan’s allegation of bad faith. Then Campbell appeared at a House of Commons inquiry about the Iraq war. After admitting the February dossier was a mistake, he launched a tirade against the BBC, accusing it of lying.

            Whatever the reason for this sudden outburst, it seemed to release all Campbell’s resentment over the media’s attacks on the government and on his own news management. He wanted an apology and he wanted it now. BBC executives, who felt that Campbell had subjected them to incessant whingeing over their Iraq war coverage, stood by Gilligan. A furious Campbell appeared on Channel 4 TV News, wagging his finger and jabbing with a pencil.

A serious situation became critical with the suicide of Gilligan’s source, the government scientist, Dr David Kelly. After admitting talking to Gilligan, Kelly could have left his job and given his point of view. Instead he played down what he had said. But his words about the dossier were on record, in Gilligan’s sketchy notes and also on another journalist’s tape. Kelly found his position impossible.

His death made Alastair Campbell’s position impossible, too, because the government information machine had leaked the shy and religious Kelly’s name to the newspapers and the controversy threatened damage to the government. Nevertheless, an inquiry by a judge, Lord Hutton, vindicated the government and Campbell while castigating Gilligan for reporting Kelly poorly and BBC executives for supporting Gilligan uncritically. Campbell called for resignations. The BBC’s chairman and director-general resigned.

The trouble was that Gilligan was wrong but also right. Knowingly or unknowingly, the government had indeed taken the nation into an unpopular war on the basis of inadequate and misleading intelligence. That at any rate was how most of the media saw it. And, in a democracy with independent media, it is the ever-carping, ever-critical media that have the last word.

A report has recommended that government information should be for all, not just a select few, and a senior civil servant has been appointed to implement the report. However, Campbell’s techniques if not Campbell himself live on. In political London, the peddling of unattributed “exclusives” seems to suit both intriguers and journalists very well.

 

Alastair Campbell by Peter Oborne and Simon Walters (Aurum Press: contact nathalie.villemur@aurumpress.co.uk)