Guardian’s terrible dilemma over Corbyn
In autumn 2002 the Observer newspaper’s correspondent Ed Vulliamy
found confirmation of a terrible truth many of us already suspected. In a
world-exclusive, he persuaded Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA official
who still had security clearance at the Agency, to go on record that
the CIA knew there were no WMD in Iraq. Everything the US and British
governments were telling us to justify the coming attack on Iraq were
lies.
Then something even more extraordinary happened. The
Observer failed to print the story. In his book Flat Earth News, Nick
Davies recounts that Vulliamy, one of the Observer’s most trusted
reporters, submitted the piece another six times in different guises
over the next half year. Each time the Observer spiked the story.
Vulliamy
never went public with this monumental crime against real journalism
(should there not be a media trials section at the Hague?). And the
supposedly liberal-left Observer was never held accountable for
its grave betrayal of its readership and the world community.
But
at the weekend maybe the tables turned a little. The Observer gave
Vulliamy a platform in its comment pages to take issue with its
editorial the previous week savaging Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour
Party leader.
