GUEST BLOG: Mick Hall – THE DANGER OF TELLING THE TRUTH

This time last year I was picking up the pieces of a career shattered by accusations by my employer, public broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ), that I’d been spreading ‘Russian war propaganda’.

The June 2023 incident made international headlines and resulted in an inquiry into my editing of dozens of international news wire stories.

Since then, what I’ve lost in income and reputation within an industry I’d worked in for over 20 years, I’ve gained in perspective and clarity.

One year later, I’m more convinced than ever that legacy media have played and continue to play a complicit role in a war that could have been avoided.

 

Unacceptable facts

The Australian and New Zealand governments have been playing direct roles in the Ukraine-Russia war, both in taxpayer support to the war but also in narrative support to the campaign to sell the war to the world’s publics.

Australia has provided over $1.1 billion dollars in ammunition, drones, artillery, vehicles, and other military aid, while also providing intelligence and logistical support. New Zealand’s contribution of military and humanitarian aid so far totals NZ$130 million.

However, the establishment narrative of dogged little Ukraine teaching the lumbering Russian bear a lesson in war-fighting, may be reaching its use-by date.

Western military analysts and media now acknowledge Ukraine is staring at military defeat, a fate any thinking person recognised as inevitable before the US and its NATO allies began financing their proxy war with Russia.

With Russia several times bigger, it was only a matter of time before its superiority in manpower and artillery saw this grinding war of attrition reach a grim, predictable conclusion. It was immoral for the US to provoke a conflict, particularly a war that could never be won.

With its eastern frontlines now collapsing, Ukraine faces losing land it could have conceivably kept when negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022, just weeks after the Russian invasion had commenced, arrived at a tentative peace agreement.

Those talks, scuppered at the behest of then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in April 2022, are now largely ignored by the main media in Australia and New Zealand.

 

They would have kept Ukraine outside of NATO. The deal reportedly envisaged Ukrainian Russian-speakers exercising regional power similar to what was planned under the unimplemented Minsk I and II peace accords, signed in 2014 and 2015.

Instead, the West remains on the escalation ladder. After Ukraine’s August 6 incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he was no longer holding out for peace talks.

With US-made F-16 fighter jets now entering the fray and fears of Western-made and operated long range missiles soon being fired deep into Russian territory, the chances of nuclear war grow daily.

The social costs have been immense and not just for Ukraine, with its economy in ruins and predatorial Western financial institutions like BlackRock and JP Morgan moving in to oversee ‘land rights reform’ and the establishment of a private investment bank.

Western sanctions and higher-cost US LNG imports replacing cheap Russian gas have compromised much of Germany’s industrial base. Europe’s economy has consequently suffered and while Europeans’ energy bills have skyrocketed, spending on defence across European nations continues to climb amid evidence-free claims of an imminent Russian threat.

Censorship, austerity, criminalisation of protest and an increasing lurch towards what political theorist Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism” have been hallmarks of European Union (EU) and British politics over the past number of years.

The battering metered out to antiwar protesters at a weapons exhibition in Melbourne last week by a militarised police force, shows that the costs of the wars extend more deeply into society than just lost taxpayers’ dollars.

 

Bias in the newsroom

It remains of huge concern that audiences know little of the historical antecedents to the February 24, 2022 invasion and that Putin had earlier sought, for example, to negotiate a revised European security architecture that addressed Russia’s concerns over NATO expansion and Ukrainian membership.

Offering such context has been dangerous. NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg let slip at a joint meeting of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE) in September last year that the issue of NATO’s expansion had indeed been a major driver of Putin’s decision to invade.

Yet before then, media outlets like the BBC characterised the suggestion that NATO expansion helped provoke the war as “a Russian narrative”, like so many other inconvenient facts relating to the conflict.

Lack of public understanding can be attributed partly to many journalists’ inability or reluctance to interpret geopolitical events and machinations of hegemonic power. It is also due to pro-establishment bias evident in newsroom practices that determine what is considered newsworthy, which facts to include and omit, and which news angles and voices are considered most salient.

While news leaders profess principles of due impartiality, they direct journalists to frame stories in a way that presents a Western perspective supporting, or at least not contradicting, assumptions and distortions of current US foreign policy.

To this end, context about the Russian invasion has been suppressed and with it the informational needs of democratic citizenship in the West, making it infinitely more difficult to hold politicians to account for giving material support to a provoked conflict designed to contain a US competitor.

Instead, Western citizens are being ideologically prepared for war in the interests of a debt-laden, dominant world power pursuing a doctrine of full-spectrum dominance in an attempt to maintain its primacy.

 

Correcting the record

As Ukraine launched a much anticipated but ultimately disastrous counter-offensive against Russian forces in June last year, a skirmish in this informational battle was underway in the relative obscurity of the South Pacific.

As a Radio New Zealand (RNZ) digital journalist, I had processed wire service stories for several years, always mindful that professional, well-resourced news outlets like Reuters and the BBC couldn’t automatically be relied on to deliver bias-free reports.

I had added context to the news copy and reframed a paragraph here and there when needed. After the Ukraine invasion I also removed pro-Western war bias, not because I was a friend of Russia, as some would later claim, but because I found it a fundamental journalistic duty.

On June 7, I sub-edited a story on the Russian-Ukraine conflict, that had originally stated:

“The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces fighting Ukraine’s armed forces.”

I revised the contextual paragraph referencing the Maidan 2014 ‘revolution’ to read:

“The conflict in Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian elected government was toppled during Ukraine’s violent Maidan colour revolution. Russia annexed Crimea after a referendum, as the new pro-Western government suppressed ethnic Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine, sending in its armed forces to the Donbass.”

A New York lawyer and writer on the US Democratic Party, Luppe B. Luppen, tweeted disdain for what he called was an “utterly false Russian propaganda” story and approached Reuters. The news wire agency emailed RNZ pointing to what it said was a breach of its news-sharing contract as its report had been changed without approval.

Digital staff at RNZ had been accustomed to adding lines from local RNZ reports and merging other news wire copy with Reuters stories regularly. As an inquiry would later find, members of RNZ digital management had not sighted the contract.

 

Narrative controllers strike back

Hours later, in a story announcing I’d been stood down, RNZ said it was investigating how “Russian propaganda” regarding events that “did not happen”, had been inserted into a Reuters story on its website.

Right-wing blog sites and activists picked up on it and before long politicians demanded a government inquiry.

At a time when legacy media characterised Russia’s invasion as imperialist and unprovoked, to state that the Maidan was a US-backed coup, as the available evidence suggests, challenged the West’s dominant narrative.

The same applied when adding nuance to a story by referencing a referendum — albeit one rejected as a legal fiction by the West — that may suggest Crimeans had been more than happy to see Russia annex their territory, least they end up battered by Kyiv like the Russian-speakers of the Donbass, or those 42 anti-Maidan protesters killed after the House of Trade Unions in Odessa was set ablaze by neo-Nazi thugs on May 2, 2014.

 

Instead of provoking debate over the nature of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the edits were presented as the result of slack editorial oversights, a breach of trust between employer and employee, and possibly even foreign interference by the Russian Federation.

‘Disinformation experts’ were also wheeled out, in Orwellian fashion, to raise alarm that someone could use the respectability of RNZ to surreptitiously and unethically alter acceptable narratives.

RNZ launched an audit of over 1,300 international news stories I’d edited and subsequently found 49 of those in breach of “editorial standards”. Of those, 23 stories related to the Ukraine war.

A three-person Independent Review Panel was set up by the RNZ board to look into the editing. By that time, after a week of speculation over whether I was a ‘Russian agent of influence’, online threats and comments by RNZ CEO Paul Thompson that my sub-editing amounted to “pro-Kremlin garbage”, I’d had enough and resigned.

The Review Panel’s report on August 2 last year found most of those stories flagged in the internal audit did not breach any editorial standards, but that breaches had occurred in several stories relating to the Ukraine war and Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.

The three panel members found I’d expressed a pro-Palestinian and pro-Russian “sentiment”, a term implying subjective opinion, which had unbalanced the original stories subedited. I’ve defended my edits elsewhere and I won’t repeat those here.

Needless to say, removing assertions that solely relied on uncorroborated statements by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) or challenging story framing that airbrushed the reasons for Russia’s invasion from history, isn’t what I would call expressing personal bias.

 

Defending the indefensible

Distorted media reporting of what became known as RNZ’s ‘Russian edits scandal’ added to my opprobrium and lasting sense that journalists could simply not be trusted to do their jobs.

Because of its enmeshment with power, mainstream media is ill-equipped to report accurately on the profound shifts now taking place in the world.

 

There is a reluctance or an inability to even publish these events. The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported ABC chair Kim Williams being cognizant of this fact, scathing in his assessment of the ABC digital news operation’s “idiosyncratic selection of story priorities”.

The same is true at other media outlets, including RNZ, where I had pitched a modest business plan in May 2023 to give world news a more structured presence on its website. Initially accepted as editorially worthy, it was abruptly rejected as financially unjustifiable. Effectively covering international news and current affairs as a requisite for democratic accountability remains a marginal view among feckless technocrats obsessed with click metrics.

Events over the past year have helped expose the fact that state broadcasters – in New Zealand, Australia, and Britain – are failing to uphold the public-interest news charters that supposedly govern them.

With the threat of nuclear war on three fronts where the US and its allies defend the “rules-based international order” – with proxy war in Europe, military encirclement of China in the Asia-Pacific region, and even genocide in defence of an apartheid ethno-supremacist state in the Middle East – a need to cover world events in the public interest is unprecedented.

Yet, even if more resources and better planning were brought to international news coverage, what would that look like?

Although there are significant numbers of conscientious journalists, as was evident in an open letter urging critical reporting across Australian media outlets on Gaza last year, the problem also lies with many others.

It is apparent from reporting on the Ukraine war and Israel’s Gaza onslaught that not so many journalists’ stories intersect with objective reality or the common interests of humanity, but instead serve the particular interests of elites ruling their countries and newsrooms.

Serious deficits in knowledge and understanding are apparent in the news copy they submit, and in the editorial decisions they make, evidently because of their cultural and ideological conditioning.

It is apparent they don’t know enough about the subject matter, a lack of scholarly reading making them susceptible to groupthink of their peers and uncritical deference to official sources and opinions of so-called experts, the many think-tank fellows paid by defence bodies, and nefarious powerful interest groups.

They appear incapable of reassessing their initial editorial assumptions or adjudicating contested claims in light of available evidence as they gather facts to stand up a story.

Too many journalists seem unwilling to show fidelity to truth and to stand by their contract with the public when it conflicts with the self-censoring agendas of newsroom leaders.

If they aren’t willing to do these things, chances are that in their jobs as journalists they are merely serving power, not the public, at a time when the public needs them the most.

 

FIRST PUBLISHED ON DECLASSIFIED AUSTRALIA