Journalism in an Age of Terror: Covering and Uncovering the Secret State
by John Lloyd
(IB Tauris, £11.99)

IN THE wake of Snowden and WikiLeaks, John Lloyd’s book examines the relationship between secret agents and journalists. Both, as he puts it, “are intent on discovering the truth, often hidden, behind events” and, to substantiate that claim, he scrutinises the secret agencies of Britain, the US and France.

Lloyd portrays journalists as the media’s medical doctors who’ve sworn some kind of Hippocratic oath and his review is undertaken solely within the parameters of the mainstream narrative. Thus, there is hardly any questioning of the raison d’etre of secret services or of media collusion with them.

He takes no account of the radical changes that have taken place in the print media — the concentration of ownership in the hands of a few wealthy individuals and organisations, the decimation of journalists or the blatantly undemocratic structure of news organisations.

In accepting at face value that the secret services are “defending democracy,” he ignores the intimate relationship between them and the right-wing political elite and their role in upholding not so much democracy as the status quo.

In this context, Lloyd ignores recent revelations about the infiltration by undercover police officers of legitimate civic organisations like trade unions and those involved in environmental and peace campaigning. 

As the work offers ideal cover, secret services have always used journalists and writers as agents — from Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham Greene and Kim Philby to unnamed writers in the papers today.

In the US it is little different. There has been an increasing tendency of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to disregard previous prohibitions against the use of journalists as agents. When President Ronald Reagan helped reignite the cold war, the CIA again began using journalists as agents, a practice that put them in jeopardy.

Despite the end of the cold war, the secret services in all leading Western countries have expanded inexorably. Today in the US some 1,271 government organisations and 1,931 private companies work on programmes related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and intelligence.

An estimated 854,000 people hold top secret security clearance, while 33 complexes for top secret intelligence work have been built or are under construction since 2001. In other countries, similar expansion has taken place.

The fact that only a tiny number of journalists and newspapers can afford to undertake in-depth investigations reveals the general impotence of the media vis a vis the secret services and it’s not accidental that in Britain it is The Guardian, independent of wealthy conservative owners, that is virtually the only paper to undertake such reporting. 

In ignoring such issues, this book is hardly revelatory.

It’s simply a reiteration of the Establishment’s line and no surprise there — Lloyd is, after all, contributing editor to the Financial Times.

John Green