How I came to write this blog
(updated August 2024)
Hello, I am Jonathan Coulter, now aged 76. My studies were largely in economics and international relations, and my career was in overseas development. I am now retired and “in my prime”.
A twenty-one-year “journey” led me to creating this website. My employment took me to Nairobi in 1998, just after Al Qaeda bombed the American Embassy, killing around 250 people, mainly Africans. It got me asking all sorts of questions and trying to understand what was going on in the Middle East, through reading, meetings and travel. I soon realised the problem was large and complex, but that much of it arose from things that my own country had got wrong, particularly when Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. This had many consequences with which we are living today, just one of which is a running sore with indigenous Arabic-speaking people resulting from the creation of the state of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
I found most British people reluctant to deal with this past. Indeed the subject had become so sensitive that it was becoming increasingly difficult to debate it within political parties and the country as a whole, without suffering abuse and defamation in the media, on grounds of alleged “antisemitism”. That is where I got seriously concerned about the preservation of freedom of expression.
Challenging the mainstream media
In October 2016, I attended a House of Lords meeting about a campaign to get the British Government to apologise for the impact of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 on the Palestinians. Unfortunately, the Times and Sunday Times grossly misreported the event, portraying it as a sort of Nazi hate-fest, and that led 30 of us to complain about the inaccuracy to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). But IPSO is the creature of the press barons, and we could not get any more justice than a slight amendment in the newspapers’ buried in their inside pages.
That is where I teamed up with the Hacked-Off Campaign which considers IPSO a sham, and seeks radical reform in the way the press is regulated, to prevent abusive practices like phone-hacking, and inaccurate and mendacious reporting of the kind I had just witnessed. I launched a judicial review of IPSO and started this website to communicate with people who were generously crowd-funding my case. The case came to court on 17th April 2018, but despite my starting with a favourable legal opinion, the judge who heard the case did not agree, and I lost.
My obvious disappointment and financial loss were tinged with some positive achievement. I had managed to establish that IPSO was justiciable, and my time with Hacked Off taught me how misreporting on Israel and Palestine was just an extreme case of much wider failings in the British press and broadcast media – admirably described by Nick Davies in his book Flat-Earth News.
The press barons have argued that external regulation will erode freedom of speech, but I started to see quite the opposite was possible: that an effective regulatory regime, as recommended by Justice Leveson, could force newspapers to stick more closely to the facts, while reducing the editors’ and reporters’ scope for pushing particular narratives that crowded out alternative views.
Working against misreporting
From 2016 to 2018, I was Newsletter Editor for ‘Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine’, and I informed Lib Dem party members both about the situation in the Middle East, and about how it was being misrepresented in the UK. I particularly drew their attention to the Lobby, an Al Jazeera documentary that showed widespread Israeli meddling in British politics – worse than anything that has been proved against Russia, the most frequent butt of such allegations.
From 2018 onwards, I worked with Jewish groups and others to pull together and publish objective material on the incidence of antisemitism in the UK, and with fellow Lib Dems to persuade our leaders to heed that evidence and tell the truth. It is a long struggle, but I was up to it, and have been honoured to work with so many others who, like me, long for more honest reporting and the expression of a greater range of views in the media – on all topics, not just the Middle East and alleged antisemitism.
In December 2019, I saw the BBC Panorama documentary called How to Brainwash a Million People. It told how China was running re-education camps where it had locked up more than a million Uighurs. I couldn’t resist a wry smile, having observed how the BBC along with most of our mainstream media had, during the previous four years, successfully brainwashed tens of millions of British people about the existence of rampant antisemitism in the Labour Party.
Western news media use much more subtle methods than the Chinese Communist Party. They do not incarcerate people who challenge official narratives, but they frequently misrepresent and smear them. However, their main form of censorship is simply to filter the news in favour of a standard narrative, omitting hard evidence that fails to match that narrative.
I have sought to better understand what lies behind this. What drives our society, political parties and news media to behave in such an outrageously dishonest way? To do this, I have been studying other nefarious developments in Western society, like the use of ‘dark money’ in politics and the proliferation of partisan “think tanks” and tried to join up the dots.
Formation of CAMPAIN (without a ‘G’)
In March 2021, I was one of six people of differing political backgrounds who came together to form a membership organisation called the Campaign against Misrepresentation in Public Affairs, Information and the News (CAMPAIN for short). Our initiative arose from the conviction that we could not leave the fight against misrepresentation misinformation to party or factional politics, but should build a cross-party consensus. More than that, we needed to draw upon the British people's ethical impulses and diverse faith backgrounds.
At the time of writing (August 2024) CAMPAIN is nearly three and a half years old. To find out more about it and what we have achieved, I refer you to our website www.campain.org.