If there were no public broadcasters in Australia – if only, we hear R Alston mutter – the priorities of the commercial broadcasters would ensure a very different coverage of national wars and of the information given to us.

Kenneth Davidson writes about what is already happening in the United States.

By the time of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11 attacks and an ABC (America) News poll found that 55% of Americans believed Hussein was directly linked to Al Qaeda.

Arundhati Roy commented on these ill informed beliefs: ‘All of it based on insinuation, auto-suggestion and outright lies circulated by the US corporate media, otherwise known as the Free Press, that hollow pill on which American democracy rests. Public support in the US for the war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the US government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.’

The media did the Bush Administration’s dirty work. Why?

According to BBC director, John Willis, who worked for a year as vice president in charge of national programs at WGBH in Boston, the ‘swamp of political cravenness’ which characterised the American coverage of the war was intrinsic to the media’s commercial structure, without the discipline imposed by a strong national public broadcaster. In a speech to the Royal Television Society in June 2003, Willis said: ‘The lesson from America is that, if news and public affairs are left purely to the market, it is most likely to give the government what it wants.’

Willis reported: ‘Chillingly, media consulting firm Frank Magid Associates warned that covering war protests might be harmful to a station’s bottom line. Another consultant urged radio stations to make listeners "cry, salute, get cold chills!" Go for the emotions, and air the national anthem each day.

‘Fox led the way as the military cheerleader, apparently giving both viewers and politicians what they wanted. The success of Fox has pushed other stations to the right. There was little or no debate, America’s leaders remained unchallenged and any lack of patriotism was punished with McCarthyite vigour,’ Willis said.

As Willis implies, the problem of the American broadcasting media’s failure to cover the issues leading up to the invasion of Iraq is far deeper than the bias of the corporate proprietors. It is unlikely they would have run such a one sided coverage of the Administration’s position in the run up to the invasion if the biased coverage had led to falling ratings and advertising revenue.

The commercial broadcasting media’ prime function is not even to entertain. It is to deliver consumers to advertisers in the right frame of mind to spend on the products and services advertised.

This function sits uncomfortably with broadcasting’s social responsibility to inform and educate. But as the media consultants quoted by Willis make clear, the commercial and social responsibilities of the broadcast media are never so far apart as during the build up to war, especially when the government case is built on lies and half truths which should be exposed by responsible reporting.

Unfortunately, the displacement of journalistic values by commercial values in the broadcast media is likely to get worse, not better, because of the push to relax media ownership laws in Australia, Canada and the UK as well as in the US. [The Bush administration’s plans to do so however have met a grass-roots opposition that has led the US Congress to put them on hold.]

From the Spring issue of the Australian journal ‘Dissent’ by one of its editors, economics writer Kenneth Davidson. [edited]