Global Journalism Review

UK media icons back Bush military agenda

Evans attacks 'pro-Arab propaganda'

The enlistment of the venerable and much-respected Alistair Cooke in the Bush battle for European minds has been clear for some time. His weekly Letter from America, on BBC Radio 4, has millions of listeners. On Sunday, June 23, he devoted it to a masterly 15-minute explanation of the reason why Bush should be supported in his plans to attack Iraq, ending with his now familiar dig at dozy Europeans: "Many Democrats, like European governments, hope that the Iraqi problem will just fade away..."

But it was the speech by Harold Evans, once the golden boy of British journalism, the brilliant young editor who made the Sunday Times a model for responsible and public-service journalism, that shocked many of his former colleagues and friends. The curious thing about this, however, for this observer, was that it was a delayed-action shock. The speech was made at a high-profile public event, the Guardian-sponsored literary festival at Hay on Wye, but even the Guardian did not report it, so far as I can discover.

It was not until it was reported in Press Gazette (London) by its editor, Philippa Kennedy (June 14), that many media observers, let alone the general public, knew much about it. This despite the fact that the speech, Truth and Terror, was "delivered to a packed marquee filled with media personalities," and "in a full frontal attack on the world's press for its failure to identify and respond to anti-Semitic writing," and on specifically named Guardian writers for their "anti-US" attitude.

In what Philippa Kennedy described as "an impassioned defence of his adopted country," Harold Evans (once widely known and respected everywhere as Harry), chose the Guardian as his main cause of concern - perhaps, as one American correspondent in London put it to me, because it was the UK paper that most Washington intellectuals respected.

His extended attack on Seamus Milne was one thing; his attack on "his old friend," Hugo Young, whom he said he had always regarded as "the epitome of political wisdom," was quite another. Another target was Madeleine Bunting, who had described the war in Afghanistan as "a crude and clumsy intervention which did little for the wretched Afghans and even less for the struggle against terrorism."

This, the 30th annual Index Lecture, was programmed as an analysis of anti-semitism in world reporting post September 11, and the speaker cited many anti-Israeli rumours and lies. He called for balance and restraint in reporting terrorism, and (as Miss Kennedy reported) proposed that the Guardian should sponsor meetings between editors and writers from the warring ideologies of the Middle East and the Western media.

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