18 February 1999 Edition
The propaganda war goes on
By Sean Marlow
In Britton's Parade, West Belfast, a young man was set upon by a republican gang who gave him a terrible beating and then jumped up and down on his leg until they broke it.
This is the ``important news story'' that was churned out by UTV, BBC and RTE last weekend. The truth was slightly different.
It turned out that the poor victim was actually a joyrider who injured himself when he crashed a stolen car into the wall of the City Cemetery.
I am not clear if the joyrider spun this yarn to the RUC or if they made it up, but in either case the RUC were only too eager to use it to attack republicans. They fed it to a pliant media who gave it the full works, including the obligatory interview with a Top
Trevor who condemned the ``dastardly attack'' and was ``confident that the IRA was responsible''.
On the same day the media reported, with much less prominence, a (real) grenade attack on a house in Greymount, North Belfast. This time the RUC was not so sure. They were keeping an ``open mind'' on the attack and anyway the grenade was ``an extremely primitive device''. They didn't actually say it out loud but the victims were only Fenians.
These two incidents are only minor salvoes in a vicious propaganda war being waged by the RUC and its allies in the media which has been going on for years. I remember how I first heard of the death of Peter McBride when RTE radio news reported that there had been a gun battle in the New Lodge Road area and one gunman was hit in the exchange of fire! Again the British Army had invented a pack of lies to cover a blatant murder and a gullible (or eager?) RTE newsroom had lapped it up without checking with local people.
It's not just some jumped-up RUC or British Army Press Officer getting carried away that leads to such misinformation. No, it goes right to the top. Who can forget the deliberate lies about a gun battle and a car bomb in Gibraltar after three republicans were shot down and finished off in cold blood by the heroes of the SAS? Or the RUC Assistant Chief Constable saying that Sean Downes had been hit by a ricochet only for TV pictures to prove that Sean was killed by a fat RUC man who shot him with a plastic bullet directly in the chest from a distance of two metres. (Of course, this fine upstanding officer didn't serve a day in jail and no doubt is still carrying his lethal weapon on the streets of the north - so much for the hypocritical debate on the early release of prisoners and decommissioning of weapons.)
The propaganda war has been equally intense in the south where it was facilitated by over 20 years of censorship on RTE and a plethora of right-wing anti-republican pundits in the press.
The disinformation campaign went into overdrive after the McCabe trial last week. Firstly there was the ``outrage'' that the murder charges were dropped when it was clear that there was no evidence to support them and when evidence of severe beating of suspects was beginning to emerge in the trial. Then there was a media feeding frenzy on Garda complaints about the ``leniency'' of the sentences. In fact all the sentences were longer than any jail term served by any of the four British soldiers convicted of murder in the north. And I don't recall any of the Garda spokesmen ever commenting on the fact that not one of their colleagues was even charged with the killing of Hugh Hehir in Limerick or Ronan McLaughlin in Wicklow.
The more overt political line pushed by anti-republican commentators was that people in the south should now understand the dilemma of Unionist politicians at the early release of prisoners under the Good Friday Agreement - the not so subtle implication being that they should get further concessions outside the Agreement. If these lazy journalists had been doing their job of informing the public, then people in the south would surely understand the dismay and trauma of relatives of the RUC, not one of whom has ever served a single day for killing dozens of unarmed people including children like Patrick Rooney, Julie Livingstone and Seamus Duffy.
In Britton's Parade, West Belfast, a young man was set upon by a republican gang who gave him a terrible beating and then jumped up and down on his leg until they broke it.
This is the ``important news story'' that was churned out by UTV, BBC and RTE last weekend. The truth was slightly different.
It turned out that the poor victim was actually a joyrider who injured himself when he crashed a stolen car into the wall of the City Cemetery.
I am not clear if the joyrider spun this yarn to the RUC or if they made it up, but in either case the RUC were only too eager to use it to attack republicans. They fed it to a pliant media who gave it the full works, including the obligatory interview with a Top
Trevor who condemned the ``dastardly attack'' and was ``confident that the IRA was responsible''.
On the same day the media reported, with much less prominence, a (real) grenade attack on a house in Greymount, North Belfast. This time the RUC was not so sure. They were keeping an ``open mind'' on the attack and anyway the grenade was ``an extremely primitive device''. They didn't actually say it out loud but the victims were only Fenians.
These two incidents are only minor salvoes in a vicious propaganda war being waged by the RUC and its allies in the media which has been going on for years. I remember how I first heard of the death of Peter McBride when RTE radio news reported that there had been a gun battle in the New Lodge Road area and one gunman was hit in the exchange of fire! Again the British Army had invented a pack of lies to cover a blatant murder and a gullible (or eager?) RTE newsroom had lapped it up without checking with local people.
It's not just some jumped-up RUC or British Army Press Officer getting carried away that leads to such misinformation. No, it goes right to the top. Who can forget the deliberate lies about a gun battle and a car bomb in Gibraltar after three republicans were shot down and finished off in cold blood by the heroes of the SAS? Or the RUC Assistant Chief Constable saying that Sean Downes had been hit by a ricochet only for TV pictures to prove that Sean was killed by a fat RUC man who shot him with a plastic bullet directly in the chest from a distance of two metres. (Of course, this fine upstanding officer didn't serve a day in jail and no doubt is still carrying his lethal weapon on the streets of the north - so much for the hypocritical debate on the early release of prisoners and decommissioning of weapons.)
The propaganda war has been equally intense in the south where it was facilitated by over 20 years of censorship on RTE and a plethora of right-wing anti-republican pundits in the press.
The disinformation campaign went into overdrive after the McCabe trial last week. Firstly there was the ``outrage'' that the murder charges were dropped when it was clear that there was no evidence to support them and when evidence of severe beating of suspects was beginning to emerge in the trial. Then there was a media feeding frenzy on Garda complaints about the ``leniency'' of the sentences. In fact all the sentences were longer than any jail term served by any of the four British soldiers convicted of murder in the north. And I don't recall any of the Garda spokesmen ever commenting on the fact that not one of their colleagues was even charged with the killing of Hugh Hehir in Limerick or Ronan McLaughlin in Wicklow.
The more overt political line pushed by anti-republican commentators was that people in the south should now understand the dilemma of Unionist politicians at the early release of prisoners under the Good Friday Agreement - the not so subtle implication being that they should get further concessions outside the Agreement. If these lazy journalists had been doing their job of informing the public, then people in the south would surely understand the dismay and trauma of relatives of the RUC, not one of whom has ever served a single day for killing dozens of unarmed people including children like Patrick Rooney, Julie Livingstone and Seamus Duffy.