In its coverage of the Algerian war for independence (1954-62), the British liberal press minimised the role that religion played in what was a long and bloody conflict between a resolute Algerian nationalist movement, an insecure European settler community and an unstable French Republic.
Fleet Street supported the National Liberation Front’s (FLN) demands for independence irrespective of the indiscriminate nature of its violence, condemned French counter-insurgency techniques as excessive and inhumane, praised Charles de Gaulle for negotiating an end to the war with the FLN, in 1962, and displayed little sympathy for the million settlers who fled Algeria in the chaos that ensued.
In Rewriting the Troubles, a lengthy discourse analysis covering the period from the outbreak of the Northern Ireland conflict to the collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement, Patrick Anderson highlights the failure of The Guardian and The Observer newspapers to challenge the British government over what it was doing in Northern Ireland.
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He asks us to consider why these papers were critical of counter-insurgency tactics used by the French against the FLN, in the 1950s, and uncritical of the British when they used similar methods to counter IRA violence in the 1970s. His research reveals the extent to which the British liberal press accentuated the sectarian nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland instead of scrutinising the political motivations that lay behind the violence it had unleashed.
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Using Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model to explain these anomalies, it argues that the British public were the victims of a sophisticated misinformation campaign, the aim of which was to manufacture consent for the government’s counter-insurgency policies in Northern Ireland. The complicity of the British liberal press in this conspiracy, it concludes, was cemented by the influence of unionist commentators John Cole and Conor Cruise O’Brien. The editorial control that these two men exercised at The Guardian and The Observer newspapers shored up support for the British government’s political and military strategy in Northern Ireland.
It is here that Anderson’s book overlooks what is, perhaps, the most convincing contribution that manufacturing consent theory makes to the literature on propaganda. It is one that helps explain the prevalence of anti-IRA bias in the British liberal press during the 1970s, and indeed, in the Irish press too. Manufacturing consent theory posits that news media coverage, liberal or otherwise, tends to confirm or accept official government perspectives when the executive is unified in its approach.
Comparing the British Labour government’s Northern Ireland policy in 1998, and its policy towards Iraq in 2003, seems to confirm this hypothesis. With the exception of The Daily Telegraph, which at the time represented outlier anti-agreement British views, the media broadly supported the government’s handling of the peace process and the Belfast Agreement it delivered. In contrast, Labour prime minister Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq led to high-level resignations from his government. Divisions within the executive over the case for war, the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the wisdom of abandoning the UN as a vehicle for intervention polarised British society.
Returning to the period that is this book’s concern, no significant divisions were evident in Edward Heath’s Conservative government (1970-74) concerning how it might confront an IRA insurgency, end unionist rule, develop Anglo-Irish relations, or establish a powersharing government in Northern Ireland. More than that, Heath maintained bipartisan co-operation at Westminster on Northern Ireland policy and this unity of purpose greatly impacted public discourse in the government’s favour.
There are, of course, other explanations as to why the British liberal press were so critical of the IRA’s campaign of violence in Britain and in Northern Ireland during the early 1970s, certainly when compared to its fervent enthusiasm for the FLN’s cause. The most obvious, perhaps, is that the liberal press did not view the IRA as the legitimate representatives of nationalist opinion in Ireland.
In Algeria, the FLN emerged from the war of independence as the undisputed representatives of Algerian nationalist opinion, but in Ireland, notwithstanding the War of Independence, Partition and the Irish Civil War, the IRA did not. They also did not view its political wing, Sinn Féin, as in any way important to the constitutional discussions that were taking place between the British and Irish governments over Northern Ireland’s future. However much the British Government may have neglected Northern Ireland during the years of unionist rule, and however much it may have desired to up sticks and leave at the first sign of trouble in 1969, it understood that withdrawal at the behest of IRA demands would result in civil war in Ireland, a reality which presumably was not lost on the British liberal press either.
Prof Michael Kerr lectures at the Centre for the Study of Divided Societies, Department of War Studies, King’s College London
