TOP SECRET: The speech Barack Obama won’t deliver
As dictated to Daniel Simpson

EMBARGOED UNTIL DECEMBER 10, 2009

(Check against delivery)

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Dear Friends around the world, My fellow Americans.

I stand here today humbled, more than ever, by the task before us, grateful for the honour you’ve bestowed, and mindful of the sacrifices we must make to do it justice.

Twenty Americans before me have lent their names to this most eminent of prizes, among them three presidents, two sitting. Though challenged by the upheavals of fractious eras, their skill and vision hewed faithfully to the spirit of our forebears, who travelled across an ocean to seek sanctuary, and declared all who made their home there to have been created equal. Where possible, they worked to stem those tides in humankind that would drown us in the storms of violent conflict. And so we recall these efforts, and their fruits, praising Theodore Roosevelt for brokering peace, not chiding him for wielding his trademark stick to subjugate Cuba and the Philippines.

Others were inspired by a higher calling, rising above themselves to speak truths we shirk from hearing. Of these transformative figures, none was more righteous, more perspicacious, than Dr Martin Luther King, who accepted this award 45 years ago. I was surprised to be asked to follow him, and shared with you my doubts that I deserved to be doing so. But I’ve come here on the understanding that this ceremony is a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century, and for America to lead.

Putting America first should not require us to put the lives of other peoples second. When our nation became mired in Vietnam, sacrificing millions to its quest to contain Communism, Dr King called us “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. A year to the day after speaking those words, he was murdered.

As I was raised in his shadow, whirlpools of destructive logic sucked Americans ever deeper into worldwide battles. From Vietnam, the fog of war spread. We laid waste to Cambodia from the skies, before Pol Pot’s brutal forces tilled its killing fields. And for the sake of defeating the Soviet Union, we armed Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, spawning a terrorist menace that defined the first decade of this century.

I do not seek to defend these actions here, or those of an earlier September 11th, when a coup hatched in Washington robbed Chile of its elected president, because he was a Marxist. Thousands “disappeared” under the market-friendly despot we supported, like so many other enemies of freedom, before and since, from the Congo to Cairo, Central Asia to Latin America, always in the name of a greater good. Ours. Whatever thwarts those who might challenge us, we can live with.

We armed Saddam Hussein to fight the Islamic Republic of Iran, ignoring his use of poison gas while it suited us. But once he’d threatened our interests by invading Kuwait, this became grounds for deposing him, though the weapons we claimed to fear no longer existed. As the last head of the Federal Reserve said, “it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Whether we control it, or prevent others from doing so, this is why we care about the Middle East. Since the British Empire fell, we’ve guarded what our State Department called “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” As every Iranian schoolchild knows, but Americans rarely recall, we once overthrew their government, to ensure it kept pumping oil to our satisfaction. So hated was the regime we installed in Tehran, and so vicious its secret police, that we helped to foment an Islamic Revolution. And so we conjured enemies anew.

Rather than remain trapped in the past, I want to move forward. We are not alone to blame for the world’s problems; and for all that’s wrong with America, much is right. But our delusions make us a menace to ourselves, and even the civilised order we say we’re defending. Americans aren’t alone in being hypocrites. Nor are we by any measure the worst. Our reference points for wickedness are the tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler. However, when senior Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, it was the American chief prosecutor who said: “While this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn, aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.”

For much of this past American century, as in others bestridden by Empires that came before ours, the morals guiding relations between states have been those of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. To quote the murderer Raskolnikov: “he who can spit on what is greatest will be their lawgiver, and he who does the most will be rightest of all.” It’s ugly, so we prefer to cover it up and tell ourselves stories, most often about our benevolence, or “the shining city upon a hill” we call our homeland.

When the Spanish-American war brought us to primacy, Mark Twain surveyed our impact on the Pacific. “We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors,” he observed. “And so, by these Providences of God – and the phrase is the government’s, not mine – we are a World Power.”

But without our cherished myths, or the lies that led us into Iraq and Vietnam, there’d be fewer conflicts. No one welcomes war, and Americans aren’t by nature belligerent people. Even our “Greatest Generation”, among them my grandfather, was reluctant to join World War II until Pearl Harbour. And their fight in the name of a larger freedom has served us since as a rallying call.

There’s always an axis of evil that needs vanquishing. And as Hermann Goering chillingly warned: “the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.” It’s easy, he explained: “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

I don’t need to remind you that we were attacked, on American soil, eight years ago. At that moment we faced a fateful choice: whether to seek justice, or debase it. The armchair warriors won. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died, in the name of avenging three thousand of our own. We don’t even count how many we’ve killed.

I’ve said before I don’t oppose all wars. I supported the pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance. But can we do that by killing more innocents? Where would we need to send troops? Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Somalia? And how many corpses might convince a hostile horde to change its thinking? Before we rained destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans firebombed dozens of Japanese cities. Up to half a million were slain, and millions more lost their homes before surrender was so much as discussed.

As I said at the start of the decade, let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and shutting down the financial networks that support terrorism. It’s work for policemen, not soldiers; our armed forces should defend us, not attack. War by the one percent doctrine of pre-emption is aggression.

To repeat, I’m not here to look backwards. We’re here to remember the urgency of now. This is no time to indulge in the narcissism of self-flagellation, or to take the tranquilising drug of mass denial. A nation that believes its hype is heading for disaster. Now is the time to rise from the valley of hubris, to walk the sunlit path of accepting limits. Now is the time to obey the same rules we impose. Now is the time to admit that our actions have consequences, that we’ve been al Qaeda’s top recruiter.

Our pursuit of “full spectrum dominance”, our ambition “to hold unquestioned power”, has not made the world any safer. We started a nuclear arms race, and doused it in gasoline. We helped Pakistan get the bomb, and looked away while it ran a weapons hypermarket. Now we’re helping India break the rules, just as Israel has for decades while it stockpiled warheads. Exactly how many isn’t clear, because Israel denies access to foreign inspectors.

Iran is the only oil-rich state in the Middle East that’s beyond our influence. Together with Israel, we keep threatening to attack it. But while we talk up “the Iranian threat”, our intelligence agencies say Iran halted its weapons programme years ago, and wants nothing more than the option to reactivate it. The idea it could wipe Israel off the map is absurd. The Israeli nuclear arsenal guarantees that. Israel’s prime minister calls Iran an “apocalyptic cult” that “glorifies blood and death, including its own”. But for years the two countries were allies, and Israel accepted the rhetoric was mostly for show. Its priorities only changed when Iran became the region’s number two power. And that only happened when we invaded Iraq, and installed a pro-Iranian government.

So what do we do now to solve these problems? Bombing Iran would not bring us closer to a world without nuclear weapons. It also wouldn’t make Israel more secure. I rule it out categorically, and withdraw all plans for a nuclear first strike on Iranian bunkers. Destructive power can only be tempered by restraint.

There’s no longer a technological difference between the process that generates fuel and the process for building bombs. Once you can enrich uranium for reactors, it just takes time and investment to enrich it for missiles. If we’re serious about disarmament, we also need to restrict enrichment by everyone, outsourcing it to an international agency. This alone makes nuclear power no answer to climate change.

It’s no less misguided to pretend we can clean up coal. Plans to bury carbon dioxide are unproven, and they won’t work any time soon. The global demand for energy will be hard to meet without making radical changes. If we carry on insisting that “the American way of life is not negotiable“, we can hardly expect others to think differently. But we all have to, immediately, or there won’t be a future to get rich in. If everyone consumed like Americans, we’d need another half dozen planets. And if the one we live on heats up as scientists forecast, much of it will be uninhabitable this century. Ice caps and glaciers will melt, seas will rise and crops will fail. Billions of people will struggle to find food and water, and the world will be full of refugees.

We’re almost past the point of no return. Long-term targets are irrelevant. The gases we’ve emitted already will heat up the atmosphere for a century. Unless we stop adding to them quickly, we’re committing ourselves to a runaway warming process, unlike any this Earth has seen for millions of years. Faced with that prospect, and the deadlocked talks on a climate treaty, there’s no alternative left but to act unilaterally.

I’ve signed up to a British initiative called 10:10, and promised to reduce my personal emissions by ten percent in 2010. I’m also committing to bolder executive action. I pledge the United States will cut output of carbon dioxide, and other heat-trapping gases, by a tenth next year from current levels. The year after, we’ll cut another tenth, and again, and again, for ten straight years, until we’re free of fossil fuels by 2020.

To achieve this, we need to transform our economy, on a scale unseen since the start of World War II. Converting our factories to rearmament was what finally dragged us out of the Great Depression. To support our transition to a less destructive paradigm, America will turn itself over to sustainable energy. Trillions of dollars will be spent on a new Manhattan Project; only this one won’t build an atom bomb. Instead it will share clean technology through the United Nations. There can be no solution to climate change that doesn’t include such partners as India and China. Even if they burn coal, we should stop, and help them cut their carbon output however we can.

Domestically, we won’t just scrap subsidies for fossil fuels. We plan to nationalise and liquidate our oil companies, and switch the nation’s cars to electric power. They’ll be charged from a network of wind and solar farms, hooked up to a direct-current smart grid. And we will pay for this by ceasing to arm the world.

America spends almost as much on weapons as every other nation combined. The Pentagon gets more money today than at any time since World War II. And our exports dwarf those of our rivals, creating the opponents of tomorrow. As President Eisenhower warned: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.”

It is time to start changing priorities. Next year, we will cut military spending in half, and shrink it as we scale back our presence. Over the coming decade, this will free up trillions of dollars. So far we’ve been tentative, scrapping a few costly weapons while increasing the total we spend. But an overhaul of energy policy will enable us to shut down bases overseas. No longer will we need hundreds of foreign outposts to protect resources, or the shipping lanes and pipelines that ferry them. We can leave that work to regional powers, and resume our rightful place in our own backyard.

Every last soldier will leave Iraq next year, and our bases there will be bulldozed. We will also withdraw at once from Afghanistan. A generation ago, Mikhail Gorbachev said he wanted to do the same, but he first raised troop levels above 100,000. As a result, 1985 was the deadliest year of the Soviet occupation. We will not repeat the same mistake. I’m reversing last week’s announcement of escalation, and our draw down will begin from tomorrow. We can’t just arm warlords and pay off the Taliban. All the money and blood we spill achieves nothing. We can only destabilise Pakistan, and the government there won’t help us do that. The only constructive way forward is to face our impotence.

We cannot provide security without peace, and we cannot impose that by will, or force of arms.

We cannot build abstractions like good governance. We can only pay reparations and send aid. Afghans have to shape their own future.

We cannot defend against terrorism by bombing civilians. And even the most surgical air strikes can’t stop terrorists plotting in Europe, or training in Florida.

We cannot privatise war by funnelling taxpayer dollars to mercenary contractors.

Our suicide pact with militarism has to end before it bankrupts us, strategically, financially and morally. We cannot keep stalking the world creating new enemies.

No, we cannot.

Half a century ago, Eisenhower warned us what was happening. To win World War II, he said, we created “a permanent arms industry of vast proportions”, and “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals.”

This is a challenge we’ve ducked until today. And make no mistake: it will not be easy. The military-industrial complex has no fixed address. Arms companies spread production nationwide, so Congressmen and women defend their business, for fear lost jobs will cost them votes. Other lobbies complicate things further, like those pressing Israel’s case in Washington. To underline our resolve to curb the arms trade, all military assistance to Israel will be scrapped, and no sales allowed until it retreats within its 1967 borders, and dismantles illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

Capitalism has been at war with democracy, and winning. We’ve blown trillions in the banking casino, privatising its gains and socialising the cost. Not for nothing is Goldman Sachs called “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” For a more sustainable world, we have to dismantle the structures that shape it.

I can’t achieve that alone. We all have obligations to prevent our national priorities being perverted, as Martin Luther King understood. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social uplift,” he said, “is approaching spiritual death.”

The day after Dr King was killed, Robert F. Kennedy spoke of “another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions, indifference and inaction and slow decay.”

In words as relevant now as then, Kennedy said we “tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilisation alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they require.”

Weeks later, he was assassinated too, campaigning for the presidency, and an early retreat from Vietnam. Instead, the war dragged on, and Cambodia was mercilessly bombed. For that, and other crimes, a previous winner of this prize should face prosecution. But if Henry Kissinger stands trial some day, he shouldn’t be alone in the dock. Cases can be made against presidents too, and I plead no special immunity ahead of time. I should be held to account like anyone else.

The press should never become the president’s men, and the public need to organise against him, to force his hand like Martin Luther King, to collectively make change we can believe in. Together we’ll enact these commitments. In themselves, they won’t end violence, they won’t end lawlessness and they won’t end disorder either. But they’d warrant the faith you’ve placed in my work, and they’d leave our children a legacy of justice. And for that small measure alone, we can be thankful.

God bless us all. Thank you.

Sent this morning

To: The Ditchley Foundation
Subject: FAO Jeremy Greenstock

Dear Mr Greenstock,

I note that your review of the new Satow’s Diplomatic Practice claims that separating “duty from stupidity” and “finding the right words when the sword might be the alternative, are all part of the practice of diplomacy at its finest.”

As you concede, with a winsome reference to your part in “anticipating the facts” which weren’t factual about Iraq’s weapons of mass non-existence, this is not always easy.

So, were you just being stupid or doing your duty? The former stretches credulity, since there were no “facts” to be “fixed around the policy” of pushing for war.

Either way, your words served the sword, and neither defence would have saved you at Nuremberg.

Diplomacy at its finest? We’ve been framed.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Simpson

–

Thanks to Steven Poole for alerting me to Greenstock’s article.

Sent to Reuters journalists and editors this morning

To: Wojciech Moskwa, Mark Trevelyan
Cc: Sean Maguire, Matt Spetalnick
Subject: Obama and disarmament

Dear Mark and Wojciech,

I hope future coverage of Barack Obama’s Nobel prize award won’t just source scepticism to Islamic Jihad:

“Why should Obama be given a peace prize while his country owns the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth and his soldiers continue to shed innocent blood in Iraq and Afghanistan?” [asked Khaled Al-Batsh in Gaza, before being edited out of later updates.]

Perhaps Reuters could note high up in the story that for all his talk about disarmament (and media hype about “defence” cuts) Obama has increased American military spending (by four percent for 2010).

To quote a recent commentary, “it is wise to attend to deeds, not rhetoric and pleasant demeanor.”

In which case, how about asking the White House if Obama plans to spend his prize money on buying back some of America’s vast military exports?

It would make a nice kicker.

Best regards,

Daniel

–

UPDATE: For more on the American militarist future, see here:

Eventually, American decline will cut defence spending, but even those who want to see it yesterday can’t picture it happening inside a decade. Instead, the more things “change” under Obama, the more change it seems likely to cost. Some day, surely, those who finance the Empire will pull the plug. Obama seems powerless to do more than steady the ship as it sinks. Turning it round, or evacuating, would take radical shifts in priorities, of which there’ve been few signs. Instead of burning out in End Times, or fading away into autarky, he’s trudging a lonely path towards managed decline. History suggests it’s probably the least worst option, unless America’s suicide pact with militarism beats him to it. “We should take nothing for granted,” President Eisenhower warned in his farewell speech to the nation. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper.” Instead, warns Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, the U.S. remains racked by “a constant struggle between capitalism and democracy,” and “the fundamental reality is that most of the government’s decisions today are substantially dictated by powerful corporate interests.”

As we were then.

Sometimes a story isn’t news. It might be important and insightful, even titillating. But there isn’t the time or space for reporters to tell it. Oddly enough, this often applies when stories revolve around them.

How else to interpret the silence when a former director general of the BBC says journalists are collectively “part of the problem” with how we’re governed?

“The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming,” Greg Dyke told Liberal Democrat conference-goers this weekend, “yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system – the Westminster village, the media and particularly the political parties, including this one – are the groups most in denial about what is really happening.”

They duly proved his point. The host of the meeting where he spoke, Liberal Vision, was a website run by the party’s ex-spokesman. It made no mention of Mr Dyke’s remarks. Neither did a single national newspaper, or broadcaster, with the exception of his old employer, the BBC, which got its retaliation in early by quoting itself as saying “its coverage was taken extremely seriously and was highly regarded by the public” and thus couldn’t possibly be part of Mr Dyke’s “Westminster conspiracy”.

To the corporation’s credit, however, it did at least report a string of quotes. Mr Dyke, who was fired in a fight with the government over its false Iraqi intelligence, said: “I tried and failed to get the problem properly discussed when I was at the BBC and I was stopped, interestingly, by a combination of the politicos on the board of governors,” plus “the Labour cabinet” and “the political journalists at the BBC.”

The former ought to come as little surprise. The BBC’s top executives are appointed by the government of the day. Like his chairman, Gavyn Davies, Mr Dyke used to be a donor to the Labour Party. As the corporation’s founder, Lord Reith, observed of the establishment: “They know they can trust us not to be really impartial.”

This is not the mantra managers usually spout. “The absolute first building block keystone of the BBC,” argues the current director general, Mark Thompson, “is delivering impartial, unbiased news.” In practice something different happens.

When he was political editor, Andrew Marr boasted: “my Organs of Opinion were formally removed.” But he also called the BBC “the child of the British parliament”, and said his role was to relay what politicians said. “If they learn how to use the prime medium of the age,” he wrote in My Trade, an autobiographical history of journalism, “people like me will be out of a job.”

That’s unlikely if they act like Mr Marr, who once told the nation that America’s conquest of Baghdad showed Tony Blair had been right to go to war. “It would be entirely ungracious,” he announced, as tanks rolled in, “even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister.” Was this what his book called “the high civic purpose of informing the voters”?

If so, they’re not impressed. Scandals over parliamentary expenses have only heightened public disaffection with the whole system. It’s certainly not abated in the three years since an inquiry called Power to the People found: “The main political parties are widely held in contempt” because “they are seen as offering no real choice.” More Britons have taken anti-depressants than voted for the government.

Apart from occasional talk about proportional representation, or different ways of paying MPs, there’s been little detailed discussion of what might be done. At the BBC, Mr Dyke said, “A lot of the governors were what I call semi-politicians and they liked the present system.” Moreover, they thought: “it’s not the job of the BBC to change the political system and to start questioning the political system.”

The same is true in most other newsrooms, if the lack of coverage of these comments is any guide. Mr Dyke certainly thinks the problem is systemic. “In the end political journalists live in the same narrow world as politicians do and they don’t see a need to change because they think it’s the world,” he said. “They just don’t understand that out there it’s very different.”

But what the man on the street thinks isn’t newsworthy. If it were, we’d hear more from people like those buried in the Power inquiry. “The media’s agenda is largely directed by the vested interests of political parties and capital,” one interviewee said in an appendix. “Commercial considerations influence too greatly how newspapers and other media gather, edit and represent news,” another carped.

So where will a discussion about alternatives take place, if not in print or on the airwaves? Most political bloggers are allied to parties. Even the self-styled Guido Fawkes, who’s appeared on Newsnight denouncing the cosiness between reporters and ministers, ignored what Dyke said, despite sitting beside him at the meeting. Presumably, it didn’t further his agenda.

Everybody has one, of course, so the notion of objective journalism ought to be bunk. Even where reporters stick to facts, they’re usually telling us what powerful people say and do, and putting it “into context” by repeating their assumptions. Alternative points of view do get aired, here and there, but they don’t get recycled as background. Helped by public relations teams, and the under-resourced newsrooms that dote on their press releases, big business and the government drown them out.

Since most media companies are profit-oriented, and dependent on adverts, they rarely discuss the corporate capture of politics, let alone talk about subverting it. Someone needs to start doing this, by redefining public service journalism. That means figuring out how to fund it, and devising different standards for framing stories.

Otherwise, we’re at the mercy of professional journalists who, to quote Tony Blair’s spin doctor, rely on “the principle that you can report anything that a source says, regardless of its veracity, provided that you report accurately what the source has told you.”

Greg Dyke stood up to that, and so should we.

–

NOTE: Roy Greenslade is confused.

As views that frame stories shape their message, “free market” and “growth” propagandists control the news

[A version of this article appears in the current edition of the British Journalism Review. Owing to an editing error, which I didn't have the opportunity to review, one of the quotations has been misattributed in print. The reference to facts "being fixed around the policy" of invading Iraq was made by the head of MI6, not MI5, as the print edition states. A formal correction is pending.]

By Daniel Simpson

When G20 leaders met in London this spring, it seemed there was only one question to ask: could they save the world? Whether you take your news salmon-tinted from the Financial Times, prefer it balanced by the BBC, or glean the basics by osmosis via The Sun, the story is the same. Understandable, perhaps, given the scale of global crises, and the lack of bright ideas on how to respond, at least among powerful G20 governments.

Their London summit solution, a $1.1 trillion bailout for the moribund financial system, was as preordained as the media chorus that hailed it, give or take the odd caveat. After two days of photo opportunities, the G20 agreed to pump less money into the International Monetary Fund than they spent last year on weapons. But to assuage journalistic doubts, their mantra was simple. The final communiqué made a dozen references to “restoring”, “supporting” or “sustaining” growth, apparently oblivious to the prospects of success, not to mention the hideous consequences. According to the philosopher John Gray: “The project of promoting maximal economic growth is, perhaps, the most vulgar ideal ever put before suffering humankind.” It is also the most suicidal. Because of the way we live, more growth means consuming more oil, coal and gas, and clogging the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which stays there for a century, heating it up. Three days before the summit, an FT headline screamed: “Drive for growth ‘will ruin planet.’” This revelation was buried in the news-in-brief section. And it duly vanished down the memory hole, despite originating from government advisers, whose views are generally used to frame the news.

Other papers reacted similarly to the Sustainable Development Commission’s announcement that economic meltdown, like climate change and resource depletion, is “directly linked” to “our reliance on debt to finance the cycle of growth”, making mass death in our lifetimes ever more likely. Even The Guardian, which touts its eco-credentials in an annual “sustainability report” called Living our Values, tucked its write-up away in the business pages. It did, however, quote the conclusion: “Prosperity without growth is no longer a utopian dream. It is a financial and ecological necessity.” Yet no one put these words on the front page, let alone ran what ought to have been the FT’s banner headline: “Everything we stand for could kill us.”

Some stories scarcely make news because their premises aren’t going to inform policy – and reporters see their role as relaying what influential people say and do. This means they tend to foghorn received wisdom, while narratives that contradict it are rarely aired. Even when they are, they’re barely heard, because they don’t get recycled even as background, unlike the assumptions of big business and government, which routinely reappear to help put comments from officialdom “into context”. As a flunky in the White House once claimed, those in power have a “right, if necessary, to lie”. He clearly believed his hype, because this statement was also a lie, unless the journalists who reported it agreed. Harold Evans, the former Sunday Times editor, was mocked by some for urging staff to ask themselves: “Why is this bastard lying to me?” Unfortunately, many still don’t ask. Instead they churn out reams of propaganda. As newsrooms downsize, and the space they have to fill keeps expanding, this process gets ever more brazen. Reporters lack the time they need to find stories, never mind investigate them, so they rely on pre-packaged content from the PR industry.

Distortions are cunning

Its multi-billion-dollar influence is insidious. Outright falsehoods are rare, if only because they’re too blatant. Most distortions are more cunning, using omissions, seductive narratives and soundbites to inveigle their agendas into print. Whatever the facts reveal, what matters is how they’re presented. PRs control access, monitor interviews and coach clients on tailoring talking-points to journalists, from whose ranks they’re often poached for higher salaries. Every story needs its angle, a hook for readers and lines to keep reeling them in. PR makes these products ready for market, so the media frequently use them as supplied.

That’s not to say professional journalists have no standards. They just rely on what a British government propagandist once called “the principle that you can report anything that a source says, regardless of its veracity, provided that you report accurately what the source has told you”. What’s true is almost irrelevant, provided rivals also run it. The result is mediocrity of the lowest commercial denominator: consensus for fear of losing market share. Meanwhile, the views that frame stories shape their message, and whoever constructs this frame dictates the news.

A Chinese philosopher was once asked what he’d do if he had power. Thinking it over, he said he’d start by changing the names of things. If they’re incorrect, he argued, speech does not sound reasonable, which stops things being done properly. And when things are not done properly, society’s structure is harmed. Punishments don’t fit crimes, and people don’t know what to do. The philosopher’s name was Confucius, and he’d seen how language defines what people can think. “He was talking about Unspeak,” argues a book of the same name by Steven Poole, which defines the phenomenon as “an attempt to say something without saying it” – a phrase or word that contains a whole unspoken political argument. “At the same time,” writes Poole, “it tries to unspeak – in the sense of erasing, or silencing – any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one way of looking at a problem.” Terms like “pro-life” and “tax relief” are especially economical examples, and far less crude than Orwellian “newspeak”, which reduced and simplified the English language in order to make alternative thinking impossible. How do you argue against life, or for imposing unpopular burdens? But the longer-winded tropes of “public diplomacy” carry keys to their own undoing. You just have to pay close attention.

It has not been hard to spot, for example, that “the international community” means America’s cohorts. Other embedded assumptions take more unpacking. The “free market” doesn’t really exist, but because its true terms are unspoken they’re hard to convey. The “protectionist state-backed redistribution of wealth to shareholders at the expense of the wider world’s well-being” wouldn’t fly past sub-editors, regardless of accuracy. Growth, meanwhile, is a means, whether to prosperity or merely expansion. To make it an end in itself defies reason, especially now that the conditions that made this aberration possible are ending. But that’s yet to be accepted by those in power, let alone the average style guide.

Conceptual frames sneak into stories, immune from rules on sourcing or evidence. Much comes down to priorities. Is it more biased to talk of kickback-fuelled arms sales as “Britain’s aerospace industry received a massive boost”, or to throw away the press release and cite “a massive dent to credibility on human rights”? Three guesses which angle won in busy newsrooms, including nominally crusading ones. PR slime has smeared itself everywhere. “When I started on local papers,” The Guardian’s Nick Davies recalled in a speech, “if you wanted to write a story about a hospital you phoned the hospital, you talked to the hospital manager or a doctor. Now you deal with a PR.” Companies hire them, as do charities. Even terrorists have spokespeople these days.

The industry is so powerful that it’s co-opted half its critics. Seduced by “ethical” business talk, young idealists help executives spend small amounts on Good Works to offset the Bad Stuff they do to get rich. Yet corporate law “forbids any motivation for their actions,” notes the lawyer and author, Joel Bakan, “whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help consumers”. There’s “no legal authority to pursue such goals as ends in themselves”, only “to serve the corporation’s own interests, which generally means to maximise the wealth of its shareholders. Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal – at least when it is genuine”. That doesn’t stop its advocates talking it up. They even use exposés as teaching aids.

The stakes get higher by the day

The other speciality is front groups, set up to convince us coal isn’t polluting, or that genetically modified crops could feed the world, as opposed to making money out of poor people. Then there’s technology that’s always round the corner, such as hydrogen cars, which deter Americans from weaning themselves off oil. Like claims denying climate change, these dreams are promoted by fossil fuel companies, which admired how Big Tobacco dealt with passive smoking laws. They even hired the same PR firm.

As our continued dependence on carbon speeds up climate change, the stakes get higher by the day. Since 2000, global emissions of greenhouse gases have been rising more than two per cent a year, or as fast as the UK economy’s average growth rate. To stand a hope of averting cataclysm, however, they have to drop sharply in the next five years. Longer-term targets matter little, because what’s been emitted already remains in the atmosphere. Even if we stopped adding to it tomorrow, there’d still be havoc wreaked by rising temperatures. To peg these back below the United Nations danger marker (at two degrees above pre-industrial levels, a dangerous figure in itself), emissions from energy use need to be cut by 10 per cent a year for the coming decade. That’s twice as sharp a contraction as the current recession that world leaders want to reverse. Promising otherwise doesn’t tend to win elections. Nonetheless, warns Kevin Anderson, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research: “If economic growth is not possible with reduced emissions, then we need a planned economic contraction.”

That’s a tough sell to consumers, to say nothing of governments or their corporate backers. But there won’t be a future to get rich in if warming continues. G20 leaders claimed they would “accelerate the transition to a green economy”. As their summit started, however, BP sacked a quarter of its solar workforce, blaming the recession. Shell has already outdone its rival, pledging never to invest in wind or solar energy again. So much for going “Beyond Petroleum” – originally a BP ad campaign – as was discussed for a generation without governments mandating it, or subsidising any alternatives but nuclear power. Don’t blame us, executives splutter, despite their minimal spending on renewables. As Chris Mottershead, BP’s “global advisor” on energy and climate change, stressed before standing down last year: “It’s not our job to solve the climate problem; it’s merely our job to make sure the options are available.”

If the only corporate imperative is to maximise profits, whose job is it to change the rules? Unless governments cure our addiction to endless growth, we’ll have to force them, which means the media will have to help activists make their case, as clearly and as frequently as possible. For now, we get adverts for airlines and ethical lifestyle porn. Where solutions are offered they’re hopelessly piecemeal, like changing light bulbs. Little wonder, then, that in last year’s Climate Safety report scientists accused journalists of making public action seem “futile and in some cases too late to make a difference”. It isn’t. We just need to lose our illusions.

Fighting back against framing ought to be easy, but the noise machines that skew news are of industrial strength. When PR pioneer Edward Bernays launched the business of conning people 100 years ago, he said his aim was the “engineering of consent” to manage society, using “intelligent minorities to mould the mind of the masses” and keep them docile. Since America and big business had similar interests, he argued, consumerism could marshal the herd. Inspired by his uncle, Sigmund Freud, he sought to stimulate people’s yearnings and sate them with products. But the creed he sold the public differed subtly. Companies met the desires that politicians couldn’t reach, he said, making capitalism the essence of democracy, and PR the machinery of government. Or as one Cold Warrior, one-time U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Lovett, put it: “If we can sell every useless article known to man in large quantities, we should be able to sell our very fine story in larger quantities”, and preserve America’s disproportionate riches. The historian Elizabeth Fones-Wolf blames this post-Second World War “business assault” for “a major political shift that would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan, the subsequent tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, the elimination of regulation, and the severe cutbacks in social services”. And, no doubt, the state we’re in today, with overworked newsrooms dependent on second-hand material from governments, companies and news agencies.

Unless editors intervene, or the powerful object, demonstrable untruths can quickly become “common knowledge”. Like it or not, neutrality is elusive. Either journalists are agents of change, or they’re someone’s useful idiots. The least radical option is to try to be accurate, even if “the truth” is inexpressible. Websites abound with names like Source Watch, PR Watch and Corporate Watch, exposing vested interests and hidden agendas. And old news stories are full of forgotten facts, quotes and context. Searchable archives of these nuggets could help resurrect them as evidence for alternative narratives.

Challenge our programming

Framing the context credibly is as vital as finding things out. But questioning the status quo takes time. Pieties are hard to subvert in one-liners, and changing how we think requires extended breaks from “productivity” to challenge the programming we got at school, from society and from TV. Bloggers are no less constrained, unless they’re financially secure. This in part explains the copy-and-paste nature of most “independent” media. Freedom from corporate culture doesn’t abolish groupthink, nor guarantee insight, entertainment or accuracy. And the internet’s duelling echo chambers can obscure as much as they reveal.

“Being adversarial sounds righteous,” wrote Professor Samuel Freedman, in his inspirational Letters to a Young Journalist, “except when it is a mere reflex, just one more way of imposing black-and-white absolutism on a world washed in greys.” Still, if journalists were truly public servants, they would overthrow the tyranny of novelty, cease doting on powerful sources and set humanitarian news agendas of their own. There might not be magic answers out there, but there’s plenty of marginalised thinking, and it needs more prominence than policymakers and editors grant it. Or do we have to ruin the planet before we rethink priorities?

For journalists, undoing framing has consequences, especially if “success” correlates to expressing the “dominant” framework. It is easier to say what people want to hear, and hard to spot that’s what you’re doing, or whose interests it serves. But how else can public lying be confronted? After Watergate, and a life listening to U.S. presidents spout fiction, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee concluded: “Newspapers generally lie because people lie to them.” This was sometimes accidental, he thought, because so little was ever revealed in its entirety. “The truth emerges, and that’s how it’s supposed to be in a democracy,” he said. “That’s still true, but seizing the pieces is getting to be harder and harder.”

The 2003 invasion of Iraq proved his point. People knew “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” before a leaked memo from Downing Street showed the head of MI6 said so. When Britain published a briefing on Iraqi weapons, Times columnist Simon Jenkins panned the “worse than half-hearted” prose, and historian Correlli Barnett wrote: “Tony Blair’s dossier is larded with the customary weasel words that Saddam ‘may have’ or ‘almost certainly’ does or ‘will have’ this or that”, while offering “no compelling evidence”. But scepticism wasn’t front-page news. Even papers later denounced by Blair as “feral beasts” shied away from saying he’d committed “the supreme international crime” of initiating war of aggression, in the words of Robert H Jackson, chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg. None called for his prosecution or even analysed the obstacles preventing it. These didn’t warrant a mention until actors staged a trial in a London theatre.

That came fours years later, along with Alan Greenspan’s claim to be “saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Whether that meant controlling it, or just helping companies cash in, the press didn’t deign to report until activists scooped them. After all, Blair had declared that: “The oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it.” By the time he stood down, hundreds of thousands were dead, and the war had been rebranded several times. Only press stenography made this possible. When the weapons of mass destruction turned out to be of mass non-existence, stories were framed with claims about democracy, or reconstruction, about anything, in fact, except occupying Iraq. The spin-doctors learned from Napoleon. You don’t have to censor the news for effective PR. You just have to bury the truth until it no longer matters.

● Some of the material in this article has appeared previously in a spoof edition of the Financial Times

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