Radio Review/Harry Browne: With customary timing, in the midst of a global crisis, RTÉ Radio 1's new radio campaign for itself assures would-be advertisers that it's the home on the dial for abusive, idiotic, content-free argument.
Montrose programmers have always had an oversized soft spot for "the row", a bias that has persisted despite the example to the contrary posed by The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday); now that bias extends to a jokey boast about airing the conversational equivalent of white noise, at a time when we could seriously do with more explanation and analysis, some context, care and consideration to counter television's hysterical war pornography.
Of course, Radio 1's coverage of the invasion of Iraq hasn't relied on rows - how could it, when so few anti-war voices have been heard in the last 10 days? To a large extent, RTÉ has depended upon something even less helpful than a shouting match: journalists. It's understandable, when the broadcaster has invested heavily in having its own people in Baghdad, Kuwait, Kurdistan and Washington. Unfortunately, among its key correspondents only Richard Downes seems able to offer a useful perspective. The rest of them seem content to repeat the same confused gabble of fact, rumour, half-truth, outdated information and propaganda that's scrolling non-stop across our Sky News screens.
Downes found his voice covering the midweek Baghdad bombing, though he seemed intent on focusing on its PR impact.
On Tuesday's Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) he chose to frame his coverage of Iraqi civilian casualties with a discussion about propaganda: "On crackling radios all over Iraq, the propaganda is being pumped out . . . attacks on schools, public buildings, even residential areas. Here at Al-Kindi hospital, they're working overtime to try to cope with the increased workload."
Unless that workload consisted of ambulances "pumped" full of propaganda, it was something of a non-sequitur.
Having established the genuine medical situation, Downes cut to a shouting Iraqi-radio voice, then his own commentary: "In war the propaganda effort is a vital element, and the Iraqis have realised this, pounced on it. The injuries in the hospital are real - this is no computer game. But their exploitation of the facts has given the Iraqi government an edge among their population. And their message is clear and simple: 'We are being invaded by foreigners, who are attacking and killing our people.' It's a message that the Iraqi population, by and large, are believing." Perhaps someone living in Baghdad should be forgiven some sleep-deprived waffle (though Lara Marlowe and Robert Fisk seem immune), but this is silly stuff, both in its claim to know what Iraqis, "by and large", believe, and in its implied characterisation of a government "message" that is clear, simple and self-evidently true as some sort of worrying propaganda.
At least Downes and other western journalists are in Baghdad. God help the forgotten tomahawked people of Mosul, or the cluster-bombed of Nassiriya, or those under artillery fire in Basra. The "second city" has been abused by Yanks, Brits and media alike: the Red Cross's makeshift struggle over last weekend to get water supply back to a miserable 40 per cent, after the "allied" war effort cut it off with the power, was turned by the utterly sincere but pathologically dishonest Tony Blair and compliant hacks into a days-later triumph of British humanitarianism.
The truth was heard on Democracy Now! (www.democracynow.org) as early as Monday. Basra's "uprising" was on the list of Anglo-American mis/disinformation cited by US media analyst Steve Rendell on The Right Hook (NewsTalk 106, Monday to Friday). Rendell pointed out that, like discredited stories about the discovery of a chemical weapons factory and Iraq's use of Scud missiles, it had the effect of justifying the war. But it did more than that; the story of the Basra revolt came from a British unit that was using it as a pretext for shelling the city centre.
NewsTalk has not been hampered, à la RTÉ, by excessive resources. Its capacity, then, to choose its experts from a wider pool has helped, even if its hesitation about abandoning non-war features has been occasionally off-putting. On Tuesday The Right Hook featured a rather overheated discussion about the dangers of radon gas, even while depleted-uranium weapons were being fired into a city. Wartime Breakfast with David McWilliams (Monday to Friday) finds its host as cackly and manic as ever, presenting, for example, a tasteless item on how to bet on the war.
That was radio that made me feel like the 10-year-old English boy interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live about how he felt watching the war on TV: "I get a cold feeling. Like ice."