Timothy Garton Ash: Fight the Matrix
Distorted intelligence on Iraq is part of an Orwellian world of fabricated reality
What can we do against this real-life Matrix? Find the facts, and report them. "Facts are subversive," said the great American journalist IF Stone. A friend and I have long had a fantasy of starting a newspaper called, simply, The Facts. Not The Truth: that is so difficult to find, and so much a matter of interpretation. Just the facts. For those of us who believe this, the American quality press remains a beacon in the darkness. That is why the revelations of reporters inventing stories on the New York Times - for my money, still the best newspaper in the world - have been so shocking.
Anyone who heard the BBC's John Humphrys on yesterday's Today programme facing up to the wildly spinning chairman of the Labour party, John Reid, on the subject of the intelligence reports, knows that the BBC generally stands up for the facts too. Against Newspeak and Newscorp, we still have Newsnight. Across the world, there are quality papers - including, one hopes, the Guardian and its much-visited website - and individual journalists that hold out.
Yet the trend, in journalism as in politics, and probably now in the political use of intelligence, is away from the facts and towards a neo-Orwellian world of manufactured reality. This is something slightly different from (though close to) straight lies.
At the Evian summit, for example, Chancellor Schröder came out on to the terrace of the hotel as Bush and Chirac were chatting awkwardly. Schröder was talking on his mobile phone. Schröder thrust the mobile phone into Chirac's hand, indicating this was an important call; Chirac stepped aside to take it. Bush was left with no alternative but to be seen chatting amicably with Schröder, whose forced guffaw could be heard many metres away. Schröder had his "Germany and the US kiss and make up" photo for the next day's German papers. Later it emerged that the caller with a message of world political urgency for Chirac was ... Schröder's wife Doris. Entirely stage-managed. Meanwhile, according to those in a position to know, the truth behind the picture is that Bush will never forgive Schröder for what he sees as his flagrant breach of a private promise over Iraq.
"Two million jobs in peril", trumpeted the Sun on Tuesday May 27. "EU to hijack our economy." This "news" story began: "Two million jobs will be lost if Tony Blair signs the new EU treaty, it was feared last night." On an inside page it emerged that this 2 million figure was just a guess of one Eurosceptic economist, Patrick Minford. Welcome to another corner of the Matrix.
And so it goes on. The best place to start combating neo-Orwellianism is at the end of the food chain, in the media. So if you want to fight the Matrix, become a journalist. Find the facts and report them. Like Orwell.
9:31:21 AM 
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