New Labour's Buddies on The Observer

Nick Davies has recently thrown the whole New Labour-'liberal' - worth apostrophising that word, as the government and the paper concerned are anything but - press hegemony open with the publication of his Flat Earth News. Amongst many startling and not so startling revelations about how journalism works, the genuinely shocking one is the complicity that existed between The Observer's Editor and Political Editor - respectively Roger Alton and Kamal Ahmed - and the Government in the run-up to the Iraq war. Davies says that not only was The Observer broadly supportive of the Government's line - Saddam was a danger, WMD etc - but that it suppressed - seven times - reports from its American correspondent stating that a CIA report had found that Saddam had no WMD, that Ahmed had a sneak preview of the 'dodgy dossier' courtesy of Alistair Campbell, and that Alton lifted parts of Campbell's e-mails to incorporate into The Observer's leader columns (Campbell having identified the paper as 'key', in order to get the lefty-liberals onside, and an ally in softening up opinion). Davies suggests that the Observer effectively became a Government mouthpiece.

The Guardian - The Observer's sister paper - have dropped plans to serialise the book - although Private Eye haved picked up the mantle - and one can only speculate the high dudgeon that that paper would effect were similar claims made against, say, The Sun and John Major's government. (It should be said that The Observer - now under new editorship - has published a review of the book by somebody who was on its editorial board at the time refuting some of Davies' assertions, but she specifically fails to deal with the allegations outlined above.)

As the commentator Stephen Glover says, 'there is no greater disgrace for a newspaper than to collaborate with a government in the propagation of a lie that leads to the deaths of many people'. Quite right, and I'd add that 'many people' should actually read 'tens of thousands of people and the destruction of a country', and that The Guardian should be ashamed of itself for failing to report such an important story, particularly as it has always haughtily railed against the invidiousness of cross-media ownership; seems like it's only a bad thing if used by the Right.