Media professor Julian Petley has written a lengthy assessment of the way in which The Guardian's revelations NSA and GCHQ surveillance were covered by the rest of the press.

"The State journalism is in: Edward Snowden and the British press" was published first in the journal Ethical Space*. Now it has been serialised in the Inforrm blog (here and here and here).

Here's a brief look at the third extract by Petley, professor of screen media at Brunel university and chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, in which he argues that the overarching theme in the press campaign against The Guardian was national security.

He begins by considering an article in the Daily Mail last October, headed "The Guardian has produced a 'handbook' that will help fanatics strike at will", with sub-decks saying: "Security officials say there was no public interest in Guardian's exposé" and "They also claim terrorists now know where and where not to communicate."

He notes that the piece "is dependent entirely upon anonymous 'security officials' and 'Whitehall insiders'" and continues:

"[They] claim variously that 'the publication of the documents stolen by Edward Snowden is considered to have done more damage to the security services than any other event in history', that 'there was no public interest in publishing top-secret information which details the precise methods used by agents to track terrorist plots', that 'fanatics were signposted to the places they should avoid when communicating', and that 'The Guardian had helped to produce a "handbook" for terrorists'."

These anonymous quotes are highly contentious, writes Petley, "yet there is not the slightest attempt to quote opposing or even merely sceptical viewpoints."

He goes on to list other examples in the Mail and The Sun. He then points to a Sunday Telegraph column by Tory MP, and former defence secretary, Liam Fox, in which he called for legal action against The Guardian.

He is also quoted in a Telegraph news story in the same issue suggesting that The Guardian may have breached the Terrorism Act 2000. Petley comments:

"In any other democratic country, such threats to journalists would immediately be the subject of stories and indignant comment in most newspapers, but in Britain the threats are made in and, effectively, by, newspapers themselves. There is, unfortunately, absolutely nothing new about this – the majority of Britain's national press has a long and deeply dishonourable history when it comes to attacking those few journalists brave enough not to be cowed the moment 'national security' or the 'national interest' are mentioned, and fortunate enough to work for those few media organisations which will facilitate their work. Most newspapers are far more likely to endorse attempts by the state to censor such journalism than they are to condemn them."

He points out that "public debate about Snowden... turned as much, if not more, upon the behaviour of a newspaper as opposed to that of GCHQ and the NSA."

To endorse his point, Petley approvingly quotes The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland: "Americans genuinely believe their government is meant to work for them, that it should be their servant, not their master... That is why the NSA revelations are so shocking to Americans... they expose an arm of government acting without the permission, or indeed the knowledge, of the American people and their representatives in Congress."

"In Britain, by contrast, the people are not sovereign... We are used to power flowing from the top down, from the centre outward, and most of the time we accept it...

"If an arm of the state insists on total secrecy, that seems reasonable to Brits in a way few Americans would ever accept. It's not a natural instinct for Britons to see, say, GCHQ as their employees."

*Ethical Space, Vol 11/1-2, 2014