There are stenographers, and then there are UK defence correspondents, writes Des Freedman

An analysis of broadcasters’ online coverage of defence spending and strategy since Keir Starmer won the election shows that reporting is virtually 100% in line with the government’s own priorities. 

Critical voices, where they are included, are entirely from the right.

All 20 articles posted under ‘defence’ since 4 July – 14 from Sky, 5 from the BBC and 1 from ITV – faithfully reproduce the government’s agenda. 

These include its proposals for a defence review, its promise to increase military spending to 2.5% of GDP, its commitment to Ukraine and NATO (described on the BBC by foreign secretary David Lammy as ‘part of Britain’s DNA’).

Its notion that there is a need to restore confidence in the military in order to face up to “rapidly increasing global threats” (as Sky quoted defence secretary John Healey) also features.

The only critical voices that appear are Conservative shadow ministers, hawkish think tank spokespeople and military ‘experts’, all speaking about how vital it is to boost defence spending, which currently stands at £64.6bn a year (2.32% of GDP).

Such spending is apparently necessary to confront what the army’s chief Sir Roland Walker has described as an “axis of upheaval” composed of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. 

Sky quoted Walker without comment on 23 July as saying that “there was an ‘urgent need’ for the British Army to rebuild its ability to deter future wars with credible fighting power”.

Churnalism

Much of the coverage feels like a press release from the Ministry of Defence, which is hardly surprising given that MoD statements are liberally incorporated – without challenge – into news reports.

For example, ITV News’ report of 16 July on Labour’s “root and branch” review of defence draws heavily on the MoD’s release earlier that day. Its only deviation from government spin is that it also quotes the shadow armed forces minister Andrew Bowie saying that “the country didn’t need another review, and instead ‘we just need to get on and spend more money on defence’.”

Both the BBC and Sky ran lengthy, gushing reports on the speeches given by the defence secretary and General Walker at the Royal United Services Institute’s ‘Land Warfare’ conference on 22/23 July, unambiguously pushing the line that increasing defence spending was crucial to securing peace.

None of these pieces featured comments about the huge political and economic risks of increasing defence spending and a possible acceleration, not reduction, of instability. 

Guns not butter

This isn’t just a matter of excluding voices from the left arguing for a completely different set of priorities. There isn’t even room for mainstream economists like Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, criticising the way recent governments have presented the proposed hike and making the obvious, if important, point that “[m]ore money for defence means less for everything else”.

Remember that public service broadcasters are required to respect “due impartiality”. This involves, as the BBC’s editorial guidelines put it, “ensuring that the existence of a range of views is appropriately reflected”. 

True, this is formally applicable only to their broadcast coverage but when was the last time you heard someone on TV challenge the idea that we need to spend more on defence when our schools, hospitals and mental health services are suffering?

Instead, security minister Dan Jarvis went totally unchallenged on GMTV on 11 July selling Labour’s defence review and further insisting that it is “absolutely fundamental that we stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies in NATO to support Ukraine”. 

The BBC’s political editor Chris Mason quizzed Starmer on the BBC’s main bulletin later that day not on the wider issues around defence spending but simply whether his promise to increase funds was “ironclad” or not. 

His defence secretary appeared on ITV’s News at Ten at the same time, where he agreed with a question that “the world is in the most dangerous place it has been since before 1945”. Healey made clear the problem is Russia, and the only solution is to spend more money on defence.

‘Pre-war world’

The tone of recent coverage is, however, entirely in line with what has gone on before where news broadcasters have acted more as cheerleaders of the UK government’s strategic defence priorities than impartial journalists.

For example, following a widely reported speech in January by then defence secretary Grant Shapps, committing the UK to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence, Sky News launched a series called “Prepared for War?” in April. 

This examined whether the UK was ready for the “possibility of armed conflict” and was based on interviews with defence specialists, former military officers and academics, all of whom were singing to the same pro-war hymn sheet. 

It reported on the emergence of a “national defence plan” to deal with “mounting concerns about Russia, China and Iran” and uncritically embraced the idea that we are now in a “pre-war world”.

This has all the trappings of a drive to war.

Seduced

Broadcasters’ favourite defence-related stories appear to be ones where they can show dazzling images of the latest military hardware. 

As Richard Norton-Taylor, former defence correspondent for the Guardian and now contributor to Declassified UK, has noted: “The MoD knows how to seduce journalists, especially those writing for specialist defence publications – often used as primary sources by mainstream journalists – by showing off new weapons.”

So in January, Sky News ran a puff piece on a new laser system, DragonFire, developed by the MoD to the tune of around £100m, that spoke of its “pinpoint accuracy” taken straight from the MoD’s own press release. 

They followed this up with a further story in April with the reporter’s enthusiasm for the deadly technology that “could be used in Ukraine to shoot down Russian drones” shining through.

There was no attempt to scrutinise the cost and effectiveness of the technology nor even a reference to the potential impact of British hardware being used to attack Russian equipment (just as there is still very little debate on why British weapons are still being sold to an Israeli army carrying out a genocide).

Crossways

It’s not as if there aren’t defence-related stories to tell that provide a very different perspective from the usual gung-ho view of military hardware and uniformly positive accounts of the need to spend more on defence.

For example, back in 2017, the Mail on Sunday – in a very rare piece of critical reporting – revealed the existence of Operation Crossways, a secret deployment of up to 50 British soldiers to train Saudi troops in what even the Mail called Saudi’s “dirty war” on Yemen.

Seven years later, on 13 February 2024, the Mirror followed up this story (in an article which has strangely disappeared from its website) by reporting that Crossways was now providing the Saudis with 24-hour ground-to-air cover against Houthi forces attacking shipping in the Red Sea in solidarity with Palestinians.

While noting that this was a “highly sensitive” mission, it nevertheless quoted a “senior military source” making the highly contentious claim that this was necessary to “reduce the chance of the war escalating further across the Middle East”. 

The Daily Express ran a very similar story the same day though, just as curiously, while its Facebook post is still up, the story itself is no longer available.

On 26 February, in response to Parliamentary questions tabled by Alba MP Kenny MacAskill, the government confirmed the continuing operation of Crossways but stressed that it was “defensive in nature and deployed to help Saudi Arabia defend itself from aerial threats to her territorial integrity”.

Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no British TV news channel has reported on Operation Crossways. 

Despite their statutory responsibility to inform the public, broadcasters have failed to highlight the fact that British troops are operating secretly in the Middle East and are protecting the Saudis’ disastrous war on Yemen which, according to the BBC, has resulted in over 377,000 deaths (although this story obviously makes no mention of UK military involvement).

Deference

On the other hand, Sky News – as part of its “Prepared for War?” series – did run a lengthy piece in May about the vulnerability of the UK’s air defence systems following “decades of cost-savings cuts”. 

As usual, only military personnel, the MoD and the on-message think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, were quoted. The piece reads like a funding bid to the government to shore up spending on air defence without any commentary expressing a different view.

This includes omitting what you might think is a relevant fact: the British army has enough air-defence systems to deploy some as far away as Saudi Arabia.

As always, an uncritical embrace of the UK’s strategic geopolitical interests comes before any commitment to transparency and even to exploring the claim that increasing military spending might not be the best way of de-escalating rising tensions across the globe.

How do we account for this deference on the part of defence correspondents? 

Declassified UK has run several stories examining this question and revealing the preferential treatment of favoured journalists, sanctions against those who ask tough questions, the close contacts between correspondents and defence and security-related officials and indeed the existence of a revolving door between journalism and military PR. 

When it comes to reporting on defence and security, ‘[d]eference, as much as secrecy, remains the English disease’, notes Norton-Taylor.

Indeed, all too often, it’s not a specific strategy so much as ideological congruence between the defence establishment and defence journalists about what is understood to be protecting the “national interest”.

That means that while the UK ramps up its support for Ukraine and continues to stand by Israel in defending it from possible attacks from Iran, British broadcast journalists are operating effectively as part of a coordinated effort to boost defence spending. 

Their silence on stories such as the training of Israeli troops inside the UK or the number of UK military flights from Cyprus to Israel is just as troubling as their more visible and uncritical amplification of successive UK governments’ defence priorities.

This isn’t journalism but public relations.

Reposted from Declassified UK