THE IMPERIAL MEDIA
This story about the BBC was enough to give me nightmares. The BBC persuaded the country

that a man who had been valiantly trying to expose government wrongdoing and had been unmasked for his efforts had taken his own life.

when in fact

We now know, however, thanks to Lord Hutton's inquiry, that (a) Kelly did not tell Gilligan the government deliberately conveyed false information about Iraq; (b) the intelligence service chiefs had themselves inserted the 45-minute claim, not Downing Street; (c) Kelly, though a genuine expert on Iraq's weapons, had no connection with the compiling of the WMD document; and (d) Kelly, far from being an opponent of the war, as was commonly inferred, was actually a fervent supporter of getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

It would be only, perhaps, slightly unfair to put it this way: the BBC precipitated a man's death and then tried to frame the prime minister for it, in order to discredit him in the eyes of the public, because it opposed one of his policies.

What's interesting is that this has happened in American history, too: Watergate. Historian Paul Johnson, in his A History of the American People makes it clear that Nixon was no more a crook than his predecessors. But

Until the Nixon era, the media was extremely selective in the publicity it gave to presidential wrongdoing. Working journalists protected Rossevelt on a large mumber of occasions, over his love affairs and many other matters. They did the same-- and more-- for Kennedy. The fact that Kennedy shared a mistress, while he was president, with a notorious gangster, though known to several Washingtonian journalists, was never published in his lifetime. In Johnson's struggle to extricate himself from the Bobby Baker mess, the Washington Post actually helped him to blacken his chief accuser, Senator Williams. Nixon enjoyed no such forbearance. On the contrary. The anti-Nixon campaign, especially in the Washington Post and the New York Times, was continual, venomous, unscrupulous, inventive, and sometimes unlawful. This was to be expected, and though it lowered the standard of US journalism, it was something Nixon was prepared to put up with. What was more serious, and a matter which could not be ignored, was the theft, purchase, or leaking of secret material to these two papers (and others) and its subsequent appearance in print. Under the First Amendment, legislation designed to protect military security, such as the British Official Secrets Act, was generally thought to be unconstitutional. The absence of such an act was deplored by senior American diplomatic and military officials... It is not known how many lives were lost as a result of these leaks, but the damage to US interests was considerable... Nixon himself thought it best to ignore these leaks but Kissinger warned him: 'It shows you're a weakling, Mr. President. The fact that some idiot can publish all the diplomatic secrets of this country on his own is damaging to your image, as far as the Soviets are concerned, and it could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy. If the other powers feel that we can't control internal leaks, they will never agree to secret negotiations.'

Paul Johnson goes on to describe how Nixon developed an anti-leak ("plumber") team, which got over-enthusiastic:

The Plumbers were engaged in a variety of activities of an entirely justifiable nature. But in view of the seriousness of the [Daniel] Ellsberg case [who had published a large compilation derived from top secret documents called 'the Pentagon Papers'], they got from Ehrlichman authorization to engage in a 'covert operation' to obtain the files of Ellsberg from his psychiatrist's office. This break-in was the point at which the Nixon administration, albeit quite unknown to the president, overstepped the bounds of legality. But at least it could be claimed that the infraction was dictated by national security. During the election campaign, however, the Plumbers broke into Democratic Party headquarters, in Washington's Watergate building, on two occasions... The Plumbers seemed to have been engaged in a fishing expedition, or were breaking in just for the hell of it, and no one has ever produced a plausible political justification for the burglary, though many have tried.

Johnson is critical of Nixon's decision to resign, which, like Nixon's decision to concede to Kennedy the stolen election of 1960, and even to beg newspapers which were investigating it to keep quiet, was done in order to prevent a scandal from damaging the public interest, although as it turned out it failed to do so. Ever since George Orwell's terrifying novel 1984, the mind has been haunted by the specter of a totalitarian state which has total power over what we believe. In democracies like Britain and the US, this Orwellian danger comes not from the government, but from the press. Johnson reports that "in due course, Nixon became one of America's most respected elder statesmen since Jefferson." While it is true that among historians Nixon has enjoyed a great deal of favorable revisionist history, I think Johnson's remark is a bit out of touch; to non-specialists in the period, Nixon is still "a crook."

The Hutton report is an inspiring story, another episode in the long and brilliant history of the resilience of British liberty. But it was a close call. The BBC came very close to driving out of office in disgrace the most courageous British leader since Churchill. It is difficult to adequately appreciate how precious and how fragile is free, truthful, and open dialog; and in the court of public opinion, in which we are all jurors, there will always be innocent men found guilty, miscarriages of justice. May the Hutton report inspire in us continued vigilance.