Since 11 September the Sun has become the
official organ of British and American power
STEPHEN GLOVER
The Sun has gone mad — there is no other word for it. Day after day it tells us how lucky were are to have the heroic Tony Blair as our war leader. Day after day it assures us that Islam preaches peace, and that all Muslims, with the exception of Osama bin Laden and the Taleban, are our brothers. On Wednesday the paper lashed out at poor Hugo Young, the Guardian columnist, for daring to suggest that there may be inherent flaws in both Islam and America. Lucky for Hugo that he did not throw the blessed Tony Blair into the pot, or the Sun would have sent round some special forces to flush him out.
When the Sun first reminded us on 13 September that 'Islam is not an evil religion', I thought to myself that this was a civilised and proper thing to say when some of the paper's wilder readers might possibly have been winding up to embark on a little jihad of their own. But it began to bang on about the perfect nature of Islam a little too often. On 17 September we were told that 'this is not a war on Islam', and a week later urged us to smile at every Muslim. I have lost count of the number of times it has repeated that Islam is a peaceful religion. It was at it on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, when it got heavy with poor Hugo for suggesting that not every single Muslim in the world was necessarily peace-loving.
Does this remind you of anything? What the Sun says about Islam could come from the mouth of Tony Blair. I am sure that it does — at any rate via the mouth of his press secretary, Alastair Campbell. Since 11 September the paper has become an organ of government. Even the normally scabrous Richard Littlejohn has become soft on our Prime Minister. Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun's acerbic political editor, gazes in wonder on Mr Blair. The editorials have to be read to be believed. On the same day that the paper had a go at Hugo Young, on its front page it also called for the sacking of Kate Adie, the BBC's chief news correspondent. Ms Adie had inadvertently let slip that Our Great Leader was on his way to Oman, thus supposedly putting him in peril. This was nonsense, of course. Mr Blair is probably a lot safer in and around Oman, which is bristling with British warships, tanks, aircraft and artillery, than he is in London.
Mr Blair is doing all right, and he needs our support, but it is barmy after only four weeks to compare him with Churchill, as did Irwin Stelzer in Tuesday's Sun. Mr Stelzer is usually described as a 'close confidant' of the paper's proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, whose own views must be largely driving the Sun. Mr Murdoch is, after all, an American, and America is the centre of his business empire. New York, as it happens, is the city where he has lived much of his adult life. David Yelland, the paper's editor, is also an extreme Americophile, and has in print described the United States as a freer country than Britain. Since 11 September the Sun has become an essentially American paper, which is to say that it is incapable of foreseeing any conceivable divergence between American and British interests. Alastair Campbell could see that he was pushing on an open door, and that the paper would eagerly lap up all of Mr Blair's questionable generalisations about the uniformly peaceful nature of Islam.
The Sun is not alone, and its sister paper, the Times, follows close behind. So does the Daily Telegraph, which last week celebrated Tony Blair's Labour party conference speech in terms Pravda might have once employed to extol the proceedings of the Politburo. It smiled benevolently on the Prime Minister's ravings about re-ordering the world and sorting out the problems of Rwanda and the Congo. But the Sun, perhaps because its tone is so raucous, is the egregious one. It is also the most worrying because it is Britain's best selling daily newspaper.
I know the press is supposed to close ranks in time of war. But, as I write, the sole British contribution to the assault on Afghanistan has been to fire a few cruise missiles at the country. We are not yet at war in the proper sense of the word, any more than Tony Blair is Winston Churchill, and discussions about the nature of Islam. as well as consideration of war aims, are surely desirable, if not essential. In the liberal press, notably the Guardian and the Observer, there are plenty of such pieces, though admittedly a few stinkers too. But not in the Sun. Surely news papers are not doing their job — and this applies not only to the Sun — when they declare that everything the government does is perfect, and insist that any critics be immediately silenced.
The war in Kosovo was the first to see the widespread use of satellite dishes. This time we have videophones as well. In theory this brings correspondents much closer to us. They speak live to us in our sitting-rooms. But on the whole I don't feel much closer. They may give us the latest news — or more often their latest opinions — but they rarely succeed in making us understand what it is really like out there in the Hindu Kush.
So I generally prefer reading newspapers, which provide more detail and more explanation. But even here there can be a problem. Some correspondents do not write in context. Like their colleagues in radio and television, they are reluctant to describe things, and might as well be filing from the Mile End Road. There is also some 'Here I am dodging bullets' stuff — perfectly natural when a journalist is dodging bullets, but sometimes a bit wearing for the reader safely at home.
There has been much brave and outstanding war-reporting over the past few weeks. But the pieces I have most enjoyed have not been about derring-do or the geopolitical situation in central Asia. I followed with particular fascination the combined progress of the Mirror's Gary Jones and the Daily Mail's Ross Benson. They abjured the convention, particularly observed by stiff-necked broadsheet journalists, that you do not describe how you feel, or reflect how awful things are.
When Jones and Benson ended up in a god-forsaken hut in the middle of nowhere, they reached their lowest point. Benson was particularly frank. and perhaps unintentionally hilarious. 'I have no idea where I am,' he wrote. 'or when 1 shall be able to leave.' He complained about his supper — a 'bowl of rice covered in mutton dripping' — and (Jones excepted) the company, which was definitely on the unfriendly side. The thing that depressed him most was being forced to drink tea from 'a chipped cup'. He was, in fact, a completely normal person in a hellhole (the hut) in a wider hell-hole (Afghanistan) who was honest enough to tell us what it was like. 'This country is purgatory,' he ended. 'And I am here.'
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