In the index to Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years, you will find entries for Kosovo and Afghanistan, but not for Iraq. So if you want to search for the inside story of how Campbell spun the war, you will have to plough through the press supremo's staccato prose. You will be disappointed.Campbell tells us little about what was, after all, supposed to be his main job: keeping journalists onside. Even the Sun's Trevor Kavanagh puts in only four appearances, while distinguished commentators such as the Independent's Steve Richards or editors such as the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger don't feature at all.
There are, however, a few revealing passages. One, for September 10 2002, reads: "Alex F called, really worried about Iraq . . . really on the rampage about the press as well, said we had to do something, they were out of control." It took me a while to work out that Alex F was Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager. Somehow, I find his role as a government adviser even more alarming than that of Rupert Murdoch, who also crops up more frequently than almost any working hack.
But what struck me most was the assumption, when the powerful speak to the powerful, that the press should normally be under "control". The extent to which sports pages are controlled - so that football's corruption went unremarked until it was investigated by BBC Panorama - is a subject for another day. What concerns me here is control of political news.
From 2002, New Labour got a hard time from newspapers, particularly over Iraq, and in his diaries Campbell never stops whining. Yet the press largely supported the Iraq invasion, and presented it as a success until growing anarchy made such a panglossian interpretation impossible. Even most of the war's opponents didn't question the main premise: that Saddam possessed WMDs which would soon include nuclear weapons. To this day, it is said experts were unanimous in believing Saddam posed a serious threat.
That simply isn't true. Many well-informed people, including former UN weapons inspectors, were saying WMDs had most likely been destroyed (with only battlefield weapons possibly remaining) and Saddam was nowhere near a nuclear capability. The press mostly ignored them, both here and in the US. Why?
As American academics argue in When the Press Fails, a book published by the University of Chicago Press this year, newspapers favour "simple, dramatic narratives". Governments are best placed to provide these, particularly on foreign policy where secret intelligence material and diplomatic manoeuvring are crucial.
When a body of opinion inside government - or inside the mainstream political process - challenges the official version of events, journalists will present competing analyses. But dissidents from outside the establishment lack the standing and resources to sustain an alternative narrative. Unless they have a leading position in a significant opposition party, anyone who is out of office, even if they were once in office, can be depicted as out-of-touch, deranged and embittered. American journalism's greatest triumph, Watergate, merely proves the point. Deep Throat, without whom the story would have died, turned out to be No 2 at the FBI.
The US press, which critics such as John Lloyd of the Reuters Institute would like our papers to emulate, has the bigger problem. It propagated bigger lies - for example, that Saddam was linked to 9/11 - with greater success and, because it lacks the competitive spur of the UK market, presents a more homogeneous view. To some extent, the US press is a victim of its virtuous insistence on rigour. American journalists have it drummed into them from youth that everything they write must be properly sourced. Whatever the evidence to the contrary, newspapers tend to assume, on most subjects, that official sources are the most "proper" ones.
Even the best British papers have no cause for complacency, however, and unlike the New York Times and Washington Post, they haven't apologised for misleading readers. What was going on at Abu Ghraib, for example? Most Iraqis - and they should know - would call it torture. So would most continental newspapers. But analysis by American academics shows the term was used far less frequently by the British press (including the Guardian) and hardly at all by the US press. In both countries, official sources insisted incidents at Abu Ghraib were "abuses", committed by "rogue elements". None of this would matter so much if the press showed signs of learning lessons. But the official narrative on Iran - that it is striving to acquire nuclear weapons while arming terrorists in Iraq - is as unchallenged now as the narrative about WMDs before the Iraq war. So is the narrative that all violence in Iraq is caused by a combination of al-Qaida, Iranian meddling, sectarian fanaticism and Saddamite fascism. The possibility that much of it involves an authentic nationalist uprising, which just wants a united Iraq with the Americans out, is ruled inadmissible. Seumas Milne's report in the Guardian last week was a rare exception.
I do not know enough about Iraq to be sure the official narratives are untrue, any more than I could be sure the WMD claims were untrue - though, on the latter, my instincts proved correct. What I do know is that I would like to read the rival narratives more often. Whatever Campbell and Ferguson think, the more the press is out of control, the better.
Manipulating content is nothing new
"Never believe what you read in the newspapers" is familiar advice. My neighbours learned years ago that they shouldn't believe what they see on the television either. A TV news crew visited my home in the late 70s during the 11-month lockout of the print unions at Times Newspapers. We hacks were still fully paid but had nothing to do. We must, the TV people insisted, be gardening. I pleaded I had been writing a book and should be filmed at my typewriter (as it then was).
But, no, I was dragged out to prune the roses, to the incredulity of neighbours who had previously seen only unpruned roses and rampant weeds.
So the news that the BBC and other companies have been manipulating the results of gameshows was not, to me, surprising. TV's factual output - and I suppose gameshows count as factual - is almost wholly contrived. It's hard to get concerned about the "noddies" on TV news and documentaries, whereby the interviewer's questions and his or her supposed reactions to the answers are filmed separately after the interview. But many viewers are indignant when told of this device.
More worrying are the TV documentary makers, inspired by John Birt's "mission to explain", who turn up to interviews with a script. They have slotted each interviewee into a defined role, where he or she is expected to express a predetermined opinion, as though it were an episode of Coronation Street.
All the same, there's something indecent about newspapers' glee at what the Sun called "Beeb's shame" and their call to "sack the complacent jobsworths" (the Sun again). Newspapers have a long history of running dodgy games - stories of rigged spot-the-ball contests were once legion - but I do not recall many heads rolling.
