by Paul Lashmar
The news media’s framing of the Snowden revelations makes for a
useful case study to locate political positions and even disguised agendas. The
Guardian journalist who wrote some of
the Snowden stories, Ewen MacAskill, has observed that ‘there was no real
debate’ on surveillance in the UK compared to other countries such as Germany
or the US, where Snowden’s documents had much greater coverage and continue to
be debated by the legislature. In the US all major media outlets repeated the
Snowden revelations for months and the debate in the US and Germany has
continued vigorously through 2015. MacAskill pointed out that the BBC decided
not to report in depth about the leaks, something the journalist said suggested
that the BBC was ‘being too close to the establishment’ (2014). The British
establishment united in a hard line. When The
Guardian ran the Snowden documents it
got very little support from other newspapers.
The British press have a
tendency to put aside objectivity in times of international stress and replace
it with ‘patriotic journalism’, falling in behind the government. Loch K.
Johnson put forward forty propositions to frame his ideas on a theory of
strategic intelligence. One is of particular relevance here:
“In
times of military crisis, a nation tends to rally behind its leader in favour
of an efficient intelligence and military response to the threat, placing at a
lower level of concern questions of civil liberties and intelligence
accountability,” (Johnson 2009, 50-51).
Whether readers consider
the editorial positions of newspapers including the Daily Mail, the Sun, and
the Daily Telegraph to be acting
correctly in their patriotic, misguided revenge for phone hacking or in
conforming to Hillebrand’s concept of ‘lapdogs’ is a matter of personal
opinion. I suggest the counter-attack demonstrates that Hillebrand is correct
in her conclusion that the media’s scrutiny over intelligence functions is practised
in an infrequent, ad hoc and informal manner:
The media, thus, provide an uneven
quality of intelligence oversight and, while contributing to the scrutiny of
intelligence, do not easily fit into existing conceptual frameworks of
intelligence oversight. This is partly the case due to external factors, such
as government secrecy and the intelligence services' own media strategies,
which severely restrict the work of journalists covering intelligence topics.
Yet the pre-war coverage by American media outlets concerning Iraq also showed
that the media can easily turn into a ‘lapdog’ which insufficiently challenges
official policies and information (2012, 704).
At the time of the Snowden
revelations The Guardian had only just been responsible for revealing corruption in
Rupert Murdoch’s News International and the closure of the News of the World. In the trial of two of the paper’s former
editors the shape, power and relationships of the modern UK establishment had
become clear — that the political elite, the major newspapers, the civil
service, the police and even hints of intelligence agency collusion, had all
refused to act over phone hacking until the evidence of corruption was
overwhelming to the point of embarrassment. Some feel the attacks on The Guardian had more to do with phone
hacking than the rights or wrongs of running Snowden’s material.
In
three decades the intelligence community have gone from public silence to
developing an efficient intelligence lobby. We now witness a succession of current
and senior intelligence chiefs seeking to influence public opinion. In a public
speech two months after retiring, Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6 until
November 2014, was the latest intelligence chief to argue for the
Communications Data Bill and claimed that intelligence will not be able to
prevent terrorism unless they monitor the internet traffic of innocent people
(for more on the intelligence lobby see Lashmar 2015).
The former editor of The Times, Simon Jenkins, said the idea that
the assurances of a policeman or spy are ‘good enough for me’ has been shown as
deluded, and that no group should be trusted with such unconstrained leverage
over others:
The press, showered
with leaks, must resort to its own educated judgment in deciding where the
public interest lies. Everyone knows secrets must be kept, but keeping them
needs a framework built on public trust. That framework must be informed and
argued. It can no longer rely on the bark of command and a cringing deference
to the gods of security (2013).
Counter insurgency theorist Paul Wilkinson defined the problems
facing the liberal democratic state in confronting terrorism:
The primary objective of
counter-terrorist strategy must be the protection and maintenance of liberal
democracy and the rule of law. It cannot be sufficiently stressed that this aim
overrides in importance even the objective of eliminating terrorism and
political violence as such. Any bloody tyrant can “solve” the problem of political
violence if he is prepared to sacrifice all considerations of humanity, and to
trample down all constitutional and judicial rights. (1986, 125)
References
Hillebrand, C. (2012) ‘The role of news media in Intelligence
oversight’, Intelligence and National
Security, 27:5, 689-706.
Jenkins, S. (2013) “The days of believing spy chiefs who say 'Trust
us' are over”, The Guardian, 20
November.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/20/days-believing-spy-chiefs-over
Johnson, L.K. (2009) ‘A Theory of Strategic Intelligence’, in Gill,
P., Marrin, S. and Phythian, M. (eds) Intelligence
Theory: key questions and debates. Abingdon: Routledge.
Lashmar, P. (2015) “The rise of an intelligence lobby threatens therights of lawyers, journalists – and all of us”, The Conversation. 27 Jan.
MacAskill, E. (2014) Snowden and the debate on surveillance versus
privacy, Reuters Institute Seminar,
16 Dec 2015.
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/snowden-and-debate-surveillance-versus-privacy
Wilkinson, P. (1986) Terrorism
and the liberal state, (2nd ed). New York, NY: New York University Press.
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