Observations on media by David Edwards and David Cromwell

In our society, choices decrease to the extent that they matter. When it comes to chocolate bars, the options are impressive indeed - supermarket shelves are packed with them. When it comes to political parties, foreign policy and the media, choices merge, narrow and disappear altogether. In 2001, the BBC's director of news, Richard Sambrook, told the Royal Television Society: "News viewing across all channels is now down 25 per cent for the under 45s . . . some 40 per cent of the audience feel they are outside looking in, offered few real choices."

For some, this lack of choice feels like freedom - we just all happen to want the same thing. Rod Liddle, former editor of the Today programme, wrote in the Guardian: "Why are people not interested [in politics]? Because there is no great ideological dispute."

But Sambrook himself has recently had first-hand experience of the pressures that smother dispute and sterilise debate. Lance Price, the government's former deputy director of communications, explains: "From the moment I entered Downing Street, part of my job was to monitor the corporation's output minutely, find out what it was going to broadcast before it broadcast it, and complain mightily when we didn't like it." Price adds: "The BBC was vulnerable to pressure of this kind." And as BBC executives have found, no level of servility is sufficient for the totalitarian mindset - even one or two instances of dissent are to be hammered down.

So it is odd that mainstream journalists so vigorously try to rubbish the work of the tiny number of dissidents exposing the machinations of US-UK foreign policy. For example, in the Spectator last month, John Sweeney, who often reports for the BBC, describes John Pilger's reporting on "coalition" use of depleted uranium in Iraq as "a disgrace to journalism".

Sweeney claims that the epidemic of cancers in Iraq reported from 1992 onwards may in part have been caused by Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, and not just by the US-UK use of depleted uranium in the first Gulf war. Because cancer has a latency period of at least four years, Sweeney argues (without citing any scientific studies), any increase in cancers appearing in 1992 could not have been caused by use of depleted uranium in the Gulf war. For failing to take this possibility into account, Pilger is guilty "of cheating the public and favouring a dictator".

This is a harsh judgement when Sweeney's key point - that cancer takes at least four years to develop - is hotly disputed. We asked Chris Busby, scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, who also sits on the government's Depleted Uranium Oversight Board, for his view. Busby responded: "Cancer can begin to develop immediately. This can be shown theoretically on the basis of the well-accepted theory of somatic genetic damage . . . If you need five genetic mistakes on the genome for a cell to run out of control, clearly there will be a few people who already carry four of the five errors. The exposure [to radiation] then provides the fifth and away you go."

Sweeney's attempt to smear a critic of state power comes at a time when that power has never been more obviously in need of criticism.

The writers are editors of MediaLens (www.medialens.org)

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