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.
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