If Watergate happened today, Nixon would get away with it
THE great American writer H.L. Mencken said that the proper relationship between newspapers and government was the same as that between a dog and a lamppost. In fiction, the cinema and (to some extent) in real life, journalists uncover the wrongdoing of authority, and reveal the truth.
Most journalists of my generation take this as a matter of course, and we all remember the great film All The President’s Men for its depiction of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters who exposed the crimes of Richard Nixon after the Watergate break-in. Most of us dreamed of doing something similar.
But in recent years a very strange thing has happened to my trade. More and more journalists seem happy to be the mouthpieces of government, or of political parties. Worse, they attack other journalists for refusing to fall into step with the official line.
A year ago, I was contacted by skilled and experienced weapons inspectors, men completely uninterested in politics, but dedicated to scientific truth. They were worried that Nato nations, including Britain, had gone to war in Syria on the basis of dud information – much as Britain and the US had done in Iraq in 2003.
They told me how key information had been censored from reports on Syria by the UN’s poison gas watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
The late Robert Fisk of The Independent was the only British national newspaper journalist who joined me in this. I feel rather honoured to have had that superb, brave reporter on the same side, on the same story. But the outcome was not the vindication of the truth. It was that the inspectors were smeared or attacked in various ways. This was because these principled whistleblowers were speaking the truth.
Well, that is normal, except that some of those attacking these brave men were journalists, of the new pro-state type.
And these were egged on by an outfit known as Bellingcat, which poses as a romantic, independent band of geeks, but in fact receives some of its money from state-backed organisations. Then Bellingcat attacked me.
In a badly mistaken tweet, they claimed I had either been fooled or had been dishonest. The article on which this claim was based blew up in Bellingcat’s face when it turned out it contained a basic mistake of fact.
I am pleased to say that Bellingcat have now apologised. They said: ‘We accused Mr Hitchens of reporting dishonestly on events regarding the leaking of information from the OPCW. Our accusation of dishonesty on his part was untrue. We unreservedly apologise to Mr Hitchens for this accusation and happily withdraw it.’
I mention this because so many in my trade these days side with state-backed Bellingcat, and against independent journalism.
If such ideas had been around in the days of Watergate, Richard Nixon would have served two full terms as President and retired with honour.
If it had been so in 2003, you wouldn’t know, even now, that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction.