The Big City

The Mark of Cain is a film made by Channel Four about a group of young British soldiers in Iraq. In it “Iraqi detainees are mistreated at the hands of the soldiers; de-sensitised by violence and encouraged by their mates.” According to the Guardian it is based on more than 100 interviews with soldiers, their families, MPs and others. It also draws heavily on the courts martial of soldiers accused of torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners. It is due to go out on Thursday. A lot of people are saying that it shouldn’t be shown because it might encourage negative feelings towards British troops in the Middle East, in particular those marines and sailors who are currently being held in Iran.

I just finished re-reading The Colditz Story, a documentary account by a former prisoner of war, P.R.Reid, of the lives and antics of British POWs held in Germany during the Second World War. In it he frequently mentioned how grateful he and his fellow prisoners were for the protections they enjoyed under the Geneva conventions. It contrasted pretty starkly with the dismissive and flippant attitude towards those conventions that I’ve been hearing from politicians and commentators recently.

One of the reasons why we need commonly agreed ways of treating prisoners of war is that we want to protect our own service men and women when they are captured. If we choose to disregard or cynically bypass the fragile standards that do exist it is they who will end up paying the price. So I think that this week, when everyone is thinking about the British prisoners in Iran, is the perfect time to show a drama about the mistreatment of prisoners during conflict. Where human rights are concerned you really should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. The contrast between the way Iran has treated their British prisoners and the way the British have treated some of their own prisoners-of-war should be obvious to even the most thick-skulled Daily Mail reader.

So this is the blogosphere’s big chance. Big media has been muzzled by the courts and only the free press, the plucky political bloggers, are free to tell us the whole story. (I’m talking about the Cash for Honours story, but of course you knew that!)
As soon as the BBC was prevented from running last night’s story about an embarrassing email, possibly involving “two members of Tony Blair’s inner circle” I knew that the the baton would be taken up by Media 2.0. Free from the shackles of partisan proprietors and government interference they would be able to tell the story that the mainstream media cannot.
How wrong I was. They have nothing to say at all. It’s not just because they’re too chicken, it’s also because those bloggers who take an interest in this sort of story don’t want to do anything that might weaken any eventual prosecution of a member of the government.
It’s tactical reporting, they only report things that they hope will lead to an outcome that they desire. In other words it’s not journalism at all. Journalists, even quite bad ones, all realise that they have a responsibility to do stories whether or not the reporting of a story will lead to a happy (or a sad) ending. The point is that you just report the facts, you don’t try to decide the outcome.
This is why bloggers will never replace journalists, or at least, I hope they never do.