The W Comes to Fleet Street

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As Foot's jingo leftism fades into straight jingoism, many Labour activists are asking: hasn't the time came so cosmona ries top Labour leaders THIS was the week the war in the South Atlantic finally came to Fleet Street:

Tensions between the vying 'patrols' broke out into battle with a ferociousness unequalled in recent press history.

The Sun opened fire with an editorial which named the Guardian ("pygmy circulation") and the Mirror "Pretensions as a mass sale newspaper ... a timorous winging publication" as well as the BBC and Peter Snow as traitors.

The Sun has outpaced the opposition in racism, jingoism, and callousness. When a British submarine sank the General Belgrano, killing 368 people, it reported the news under the exultant headline 'Gotcha' This column has already referred to the Sun reporter who signed a Sidewinder missile "Up Yours Galtieri" on behalf of Sun and News of the World readers and then boasted that 'his' missile had shot down an Argentine plane.

left Dy ratrick spilling If the Sun thought it had hit an easy target it was soon back on the defensive. The Mirror devoted a full page the following day to a counter-attack under the headline The Harlot of Fleet Street' • It began by calling the Sun a "coarse and demented newspaper" and continued:

«There have been lying newspapers before. But in the past month it has broken all records.

"It has long been tawdry newspaper, But since the Falklands crisis began it has fallen from the gutter to the sewer ...

"From behind the safety of its typewriters it has called for battle to commence to satisfy its bloodlust. The Sun today is to journalism what Dr. Josef Goebbels was to truth. Even Pravda would blush to be bracketed with it."

So much on the defensive was the Murdoch group that the News of the World did not come to the Sun's defence - instead calling for DAILY DANIST: WINA Martin a cease fire in Fleet Street.

The Sun had a rather whining column of its own in which it complained that a political furore was being atic posturing by melodram The savagery of this disagreement takes some explanation. The Mirror follows the line of the Labour Party front bench -that it was right to send the fleet and right to indulge in a bit of mild skirmishing, but that this, that and the other would probably turn out to be unwise. In any event it's a bad business alright.

The Sun is slightly to. the right of Winston Churchill. Churchill wants to bomb the Argentine mainland. The Sun doesn't much care who it bombs so long as they are foreign. (Its other contribution to the war effort is to send giant copies of its Page 3 girls out to the fleet where presumably the marines stay in training by masturbating over the 'forces favourites').

However the impetus for the Sun attack did not come from the Tory backbenchers but from Thatcher herself.

It was Thatcher who attacked the BBC for reporting both the British and which was to meaty Argentine claims - and thereby casting doubts over The Sun merely added the rhetoric.

It justified its attack through the simple proposition "A British citizen either on his country's side or he is its enemy."

Does this mean then that it is only sections of the British press that are in the pocket of the government? Is the concept of press • freedom' (within capitalism) being upheld by those branded as traitors?

The answer is yes and no. MICHAEL FOOT will surely never again be able to call himself an 'inveterate peacemonger" without being drowned by jeers. But really he was not as wrong as all that. Only he should have been more precise. Foot is indeed an inveterate supporter of peace... with the Tories and the right wing.

His policy throughout on the Falkland crisis has been guided by the wish to keep his hands clean - short of political war against the Tories!

So when Galtieri invaded, Foot declared that the Tories were at fault for letting matters go so far, but by jingo something should now be done.

Limb

Foot supported sending the fleet. Of course, he added, it would be best if the fleet could avoid any action once it arrived.

The British forces arrived and stormed South Georgia. Again Foot supported what the Tories had done. But -he whined - wouldn't it be nice if everything could proreed through polite negotiations from then on?

The Tones were conemptuous. They, after all. There is certainly more alarm in the newsrooms of the 'serious' press about the role which the government has mapped out for it.

The Sunday Times nearly two weeks ago complained that journalists with the British Fleet were finding out about British attacks by listening to the BBC World Service.

Death

The Observer last Sunday described in more detail how their journalists were being muzzled. News of the "loss' of two Harriers was withheld until the polls had closed and then explained by saying that the multi-million pound aircraft had collided in fog!) Mail THE THE