The line which is slowly crystallising in sections of the media is that the Mirror pictures may have been staged, but were representations of something that probably really happened, so that’s okay really. Take this report in the Observer today:
The Ministry of Defence believes that controversial pictures purporting to show British soldiers beating up an Iraqi detainee were ‘reconstructed’ but revealed an actual event that took place.
In the latest twist to the furore over pictures published by the Daily Mirror last weekend, military sources have told The Observer that it would be difficult to prove how and where the photographs were staged.‘We believe the pictures are reconstructions but cannot prove it, and so we are concentrating on whether the allegations … are true or not,’ said one official close to the investigation. ‘And on that issue there is a disturbing pattern emerging.’
In an interview with The Observer Piers Morgan, the editor of the Daily Mirror, insisted that the pictures showed a genuine event and that evidence from a third soldier, Soldier C, revealed in the paper last week, showed that abuse had taken place.
‘I, as I sit here, have not been presented with any evidence that contradicts either the testimony of the soldiers or their claim that these pictures are genuine,’ he said.
‘The government and the British army have had a week to verify or knock down these photographs and they have been unable to do either.
‘Even if we had gone to the army, as some have suggested, and given them a week’s notice they still would not have been in a position to say yes or no.’
Morgan said the public was now more interested in the allegations of abuse than about the provenance of the photographs.
Morgan, of course, would say that. He is clearly manoeuvering himself into a position where he can claim that he acted in good faith when it turns out, as even he now seems prepared to admit, that the photos are fakes. The Observer seems very happy to help him in this, and is remarkably unconcerned at the possibility that another newspaper printed fabricated photographs of our troops brutalising Iraqis, pictures which have clearly inflamed Arab opinion and will make the jobs of our troops that much harder and that much more dangerous. Could this be just possibly because they would like to believe, with Morgan, that it’s true, and in the absence of evidence will gladly accept fakes? Isn’t there something about journalistic integrity being lost in all this?
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