"Para imprensa ocidental, há vidas que são preciosas e outras vidas são não-preciosas".
John Pilger, author, journalist and filmmaker, talks to Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi about western media spin. He says that western media portrays the Israel-Palestine conflict as a war between two equal sides, and one of them, Palestine is attacking the other. Whilst there have been attacks from Gaza, they are up against the fourth biggest military in the world and under siege from illegal occupiers, yet from the reporting in our media we are supposed to be sympathetic towards the illegal occupiers of Palestine. He also says that Britain has supplied munitions to Israel, and has done nothing to improve the situation. With the reporting of Ukraine, it has a cold war anti-Russian sentiment running through it, and there is a suppression of assaults by an illegitimate government which came to power in elections that only happened in the west of the country. Tragedies like the deaths in Odessa are repressed and the victims blamed, because there are worthy victims, and unworthy victims, and the people of eastern Ukraine are unworthy victims, because they are associated with the most unworthy place of all – Russia.
He thinks that that the problems with journalism are based on systems that trainee journalists are not equipped to navigate – ‘once they become a BBC trainee they’re lost’. Young people are not interested in the ‘unwatchable’ 10 o’clock news, ‘to be informed by it is impossible’. He believes that people are not swallowing BBC speak any more, but there is still a certain credibility given to the BBC. He points out the difference between this and totalitarian countries, such as the Soviet Union, was that people in those countries knew they were being lied to, and they laughed at the news. And whilst people in this country may suspect what they read in the press, there is not the overall cynicism existed in the old Stalinist world or the recognition of censorship that exists in western media.
