LONDON: Spring is here and the spirit of protest is in the air. Across the Channel, French students are marching against unpopular employment laws; in London on Saturday, Trafalgar Square hosted a freedom of expression rally and last weekend, thousands marched towards that same spot against the war in Iraq, though you would have had to search hard in The Observer to know that.
The Sunday Times had a photo of a protester on its front page. “Why was there only a slight nod to Saturday’s Stop the War Coalition demonstration in another [Observer] article?” asked one of several readers who wrote or called to complain. “No mention of Tony Benn or Brian Eno or the families of soldiers killed in Iraq, or the soldier who spoke of the horrors he saw in Iraq and refused to go back.
“The march was well attended, with the message, ‘As long as you keep invading, we will keep marching.’ The global anti-war movement is no longer obsessed with Blair and Bush and their oil agenda, but about fighting for peace and justice in the long term.”
The event was mentioned in the sixth paragraph of a story on page three about the (British) attorney-general maintaining that legal advice on future conflicts should stay secret. In later editions, the story was rewritten to take in claims by Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s former interim leader, that the country was in the grip of civil war, and the march relegated to the final paragraph.
“Tens of thousands of intelligent and compassionate people turned out to take part in the march on Saturday, braving the bitterly cold weather to show that they are still strongly opposed to the invasion and occupation and to show their solidarity with the people of Iraq,” wrote another reader.
“Where are the views of those protesting on Saturday? Where are the views of the Iraqi people? Why such contempt for those people determined that their government be brought to account for an illegal war of aggression and that the suffering of the Iraqis be brought to an end?”
I put these points to our news editor, who replied: “There is, unfortunately, a law of diminishing returns on demonstrations that happen annually. Although the issues are no less important, nothing was ever going to have the impact of the original Stop the War march of 2003. The arguments against the war have been strongly made and widely reported and the fact of another march — and there are many — raising the same issues has, of necessity, a lower news value.”
It’s worth noting that the Independent on Sunday also gave the march scant coverage, including it within a story about soldiers’ deaths and using a small photograph of a single protester.
A trawl of other papers showed that the march was ignored by the Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Express, News of the World and the People. However, all those papers, along with The Observer, reported at length on the marches in France. Iraq has just passed its third anniversary, but the unrest in Paris is fresh. And that’s the nature of news.—Dawn/The Observer News Service
