http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=2687How to Silence an Awkward Newspaper
by John Pilger
The editor of the Daily Mirror, Britain’s most famous mass-circulation newspaper, was sacked because he ran the only English-language popular paper to expose the "war on terror" as a fraud and the invasion of Iraq as a crime. He was marked long before the Mirror published the notorious, apparently faked pictures of British troops torturing Iraqi prisoners.
On 4 July 2002, American Independence Day, the Mirror published a report of mine, displayed on the front page under the headline "Mourn on the Fourth of July" and showing Bush flanked by the Stars and Stripes. Above him were the words: "George W Bush’s policy of bomb first and find out later has killed double the number of civilians who died on 11 September. The USA is now the world’s leading rogue state."It was the Mirror at its most potent; not since it distinguished itself as the first mass-circulation paper in the western world to oppose the US invasion of Vietnam and, before that, the British invasion of Suez, had it confronted the rapacious policies of a British government and its principal ally. Most of the Western media were then consumed and manipulated by the fake issue of Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction: "45 minutes from attack," said the London Evening Standard front page; "He’s got ‘em... let’s get him," said the London Sun.
In contrast, the Mirror reported that Bush and Blair were lying, that the "liberation" of Afghanistan had installed warlords as barbaric as the Taliban, that US forces had killed almost double the number of civilians killed in the twin towers on 11 September 2001, and that the coming invasion of Iraq had been long planned. It was certainly not the first to say this, but it made sense of it for a popular readership.
The day after the "mourn on the Fourth of July" piece was published, a senior executive of the New York investment company Tweedy Browne, major shareholders in the Trinity Mirror newspaper group, called the Mirror and shouted down the phone at senior management, demanding Morgan’s head and mine. This pressure continued as the Murdoch press in the United States and other lunar right-wing papers and broadcasters railed against the "treacherous" Mirror. When, on 1 May last, the Mirror published its "torture" photographs, Tweedy Browne again led the charge of powerful shareholders, notably Fidelity Asset Management, the biggest mutual company in America, run by the billionaire Edward C Johnson III, a donor to the Bush re-election campaign. "We will have to look very carefully," said an executive of Deutsche Asset Management, another shareholder, "at what Trinity Mirror does next in order to protect the value of the Mirror brand." Was corporate influence on the press, and its right to be wrong, ever more eloquently expressed? Morgan had only just survived a year earlier when a new Trinity Mirror senior management under the chief executive, Sly Bailey, ordered him to "tone down" the anti-war coverage and return the paper to celebrities and faithless royal butlers (who had never departed). In the following months, the Mirror, along with the other anti-war daily newspaper in Britain, the Independent, was vindicated. Today, Bush and Blair are universally distrusted and reviled, and the defeat of their atrocious enterprise seems assured.
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